THE ADIRONDACK CLUB--EMERSON AND AGASSIZ
In the main, our occupations were those of a vacation, to kill time
and escape from the daily groove. Some took their guides and made
exploration, by land or water; after breakfast there was firing at a
mark, a few rounds each, for those who were riflemen; then, if venison
was needed, we put the dog out on the hills; one boat went to overhaul
the set lines baited the evening before for the lake trout. When the
hunt was over we generally went out to paddle on the lake, Agassiz and
Wyman to dredge or botanize or dissect the animals caught or killed;
those of us who had interest in natural history watching the
naturalists, the others searching the nooks and corners of the pretty
sheet of water with its inlet brooks and its bays and recesses, or
bathing from the rocks. Lunch was at midday, and then long talks,
discussions _de omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis_; and it was
surprising to find how many subjects we found germane to our
situation.
Emerson has told the daily life in verse in "The Adirondacs," adding
his own impressions of the place and time. It is not generally
considered among the most interesting of his poems, being a narrative
with reflections, and such a subject could hardly rise above the
interest of the subject of the narration, which was only a vacation
study; but there are in it some passages which show the character of
Emerson's intellect better than anything else he has written. His
insight into nature, like that of the primitive mind as we find it in
the Greek poetry, the instinctive investment of the great mother with
the presence and attribute of personality, the re-creation from his
own resources of Pan and the nature-powers, the groping about in that
darkness of the primeval forest for the spiritual causes of the
things he felt,--all this is to me evident in the poem; and it is
the sufficient demonstration of the antique mould of his intellect,
serene, open-eyed to natural phenomena, seeing beyond the veil
they are, to the something beyond, but always questioning, hardly
concluding, and with no theories to limit his thought or bend it to
preconceived solutions. Knowing that all he saw in this undefiled
natural world, this virgin mother of all life (for around Follansbee
Pond, at the time we went, there was the primeval woodland, where
the lumberer had not yet penetrated, and the grove kept still the
immaculacy of the most ancient days), that all this was the mask of
things, he was ever on the watch if perchance he might catch some hint
of the secret,--secret never to be discovered, and therefore more
passionately sought. This seems to me contained in "The Adirondacs" as
in no other work of the philosopher. And to me the study of the great
student was the dominant interest of the occasion. I was Agassiz's
boatman on demand, for while all the others had their personal guides
and attendants, I was his; but often when Emerson wanted a boat I
managed to provide for Agassiz with one of the unoccupied guides, and
take the place of Emerson's own guide. Thus Emerson and I had many
hours alone on the lake and in the wood. He seemed to be a living
question, perpetually interrogating his impressions of all that
there was to be seen. The rest of us were always at the surface of
things,--even the naturalists were only engaged with their anatomy;
but Emerson in the forest, or looking at the sunset from the lake,
seemed to be looking through the phenomena, studying them by their
reflections on an inner speculum.
In such a great solitude, stripped of the social conventions and
seeing men as they are, mind seems open to mind as it is quite
impossible for it to be in society, even the most informal. Agassiz
remarked, one day, when a little personal question had shown the
limitations of character of one of the company, that he had always
found in his Alpine experiences, when the company were living on terms
of compulsory intimacy, that men found each other out quickly. And so
we found it in the Adirondacks: disguises were soon dropped, and one
saw the real characters of his comrades as it was impossible to see
them in society. Conventions faded out, masks became transparent,
and for good or for ill the man stood naked before the questioning
eye,--pure personality. I think I gathered more insight into the
character of my companions in our greener Arden, in the two or three
weeks' meetings of the club, than all our lives in the city could have
given me.
And Emerson was such a study as can but rarely be given any one. The
crystalline limpidity of his character, free from all conventions,
prejudices, or personal color, gave a facility for study of the man,
limited only by the range of vision of the student. How far my vision
was competent for this study is not for me to decide; so far as it
went I profited, and so far as my experience of men goes he is unique,
not so much from intellectual power, for I should be indisposed to
accept his as the mind of the greatest calibre among those I have
known, but as one of absolute transparency of intellect, perfect
receptivity, and devotion to the truth. In the days of persecution and
martyrdom Emerson would have gone to the stake smiling and undismayed,
but questioning all the time, even as to the nature of his own
emotions. It was this serene impassibility in his study of human
nature which gave the common impression of his coldness,--an
impression which is shown, by the anecdote I have elsewhere recorded
of Longfellow, to have been shared by one who might have been supposed
to know him well for years. But Emerson was not cold or disposed to
make mere subjects of analysis of his friends, as Longfellow thought;
he was an eager student of men as of nature, but superficial men he
tired of and dropped, nothing being to be learned from them, though
where he found what he looked for in a character he never tired of it.
His friendships were of the most constant because of this temper, and
it was only their serenity and almost impersonality that made them
seem frigid to those whose temperament was widely different. Wrong,
injustice to man or beast, roused his warmth in indignation,--he could
be hot enough on occasion; though the quiet warmth of his affection
for his friends was like the sun of May. But undoubtedly his greater
passion was for the truth in whatever form he could find it.
Of all the mental experiences of my past life nothing else survives
with the vividness of my summers in the Adirondacks with Emerson. The
last sight I had of him was when, on his voyage to Egypt, he came to
see me at my home in London, aged and showing the decay of age, but
as alert and interrogative as ever with his insatiate intellectual
activity. And as I look back from the distance of years to the days
when we questioned together, he rises above all his contemporaries as
Mont Blanc does above the intervening peaks when seen from afar, not
the largest in mass, but loftiest in climb, soaring higher if not
occupying the space of some of his companions, even in our little
assemblies. Emerson was the best listener I ever knew, and at the
other meeting-place where I saw him occasionally, the Saturday Club,
his attention to what others were saying was far more notable than his
disposition to enter into the discussions. Now and then he flashed out
with a comment which lit up the subject as an electric spark might,
but in general he shone unconsciously. I remember that one day when,
at the club, we were discussing the nature of genius, some one turned
to Emerson and asked him for a definition of the thing, and he
instantly replied, "The faculty of generalizing from a single
example;" and nobody at the table could give so good and concise a
definition. There is a portrait of him by Rowse, who knew and loved
him well, which renders this side of Emerson in a way that makes
it the most remarkable piece of portraiture I know, the listening
Emerson.
His insatiability in the study of human nature was shown curiously in
our first summer's camp. He had the utmost tenderness of animal life
and had no sympathy with sport in any form,--he "named the birds
without a gun,"--and when we were making up the outfit for the outing
he at first refused to take a rifle; but, as the discussion of make,
calibre, and quality went on, and everybody else was provided, he at
length decided, though no shot, to conform, and purchased a rifle.
And when the routine of camp life brought the day of the hunt, the
eagerness of the hunters and the passion of the chase, the strong
return to our heredity of human primeval occupation gradually involved
him, and made him desire to enter into this experience as well as the
rest of the forest emotions. He must understand this passion to kill.
One Sunday morning, when all the others went out for the drive of
the deer,--necessary for the larder, as the drive the day before had
failed,--Emerson asked me to take him out on the lake to some quiet
place for meditation. We landed in a deep bay, where the seclusion was
most complete, and he went into the woods to meditate. Presently we
heard the baying of the hound as he circled round the lake, on the
hillsides, for the deer at that season were reluctant to take to the
water, and gave a long chase; and, as he listened, he began to take in
the excitement of the hunters, and finally broke out abruptly, "Let us
go after the deer;" and down the lake we went, flying at our best, but
we arrived too late,--Lowell had killed the deer.
He said to me later, and emphatically, "I must kill a deer;" and
one night we went out "jack-hunting" to enable him to realize that
ambition. This kind of hunting, as most people know, is a species
of pot-hunting, much employed by the hunters for the market, and so
destructive to the deer that it is now forbidden by the law in all the
Adirondack country. The deer are stalked by night along the shores,
where they come in to feed, the hunter carrying in his boat a light
so shaded that it illuminates only the space directly in front of the
boat, the glare blinding the animal so that he does not see the boat
or the boatman. In this way the deer may be approached within a few
yards if the paddler is skillful; but as he stands perfectly still,
and is difficult to see in the dim light, the tyro generally misses
him. We paddled up to within twenty yards of a buck, and the guide
gave the signal to shoot; but Emerson could see nothing resembling a
deer, and finally the creature took fright and ran, and all we got
of him was the sound of galloping hoofs as he sped away, stopping a
moment, when at a safe distance, to snort at the intruders, and then
off again. We kept on, and presently came upon another, toward which
we drifted even nearer than to the first one, and still Emerson could
see nothing to distinguish the deer from the boulders among which he
stood; and we were scarcely the boat's length from him, when, Emerson
being still unable to see him, and not caring to run the risk of
losing him, for we had no venison in camp and the luck of the morning
drive was always uncertain, I shot him. We had no other opportunity
for the "jack-hunt," and so Emerson went home unsatisfied in this
ambition,--glad, no doubt, when he recalled the incident, that he had
failed.
The guides--rude men of the woods, rough and illiterate, but with all
their physical faculties at a maximum acuteness, senses on the alert
and keen as no townsman could comprehend them--were Emerson's avid
study. This he had never seen,--the man at his simplest terms,
unsophisticated, and, to him, the nearest approach to the primitive
savage he would ever be able to examine; and he studied every action.
When the dinner was over, and the twilight coming on, he sometimes
asked me to row him out on the lake to see the nightfall and watch the
"procession of the pines," that weird and ghostly phenomenon I have
before alluded to.
More than a generation has passed since then. Twenty-five years
afterward I went back to the scene of the meeting. Except myself, the
whole company are dead, and the very scene of our acting and thinking
has disappeared down to its geological basis, pillaged, burnt, and
become a horror to see; but, among the memories which are the only
realities left to it, this image of Emerson claiming kinship with the
forest stands out alone, and I feel as if I had stood for a moment on
a mount of transfiguration, and seen, as if in a vision, the typical
American, the noblest in the idealization of the American, of all the
race. Lowell was of a more cosmopolitan type, of a wider range of
sympathies and affections, accepted and bestowed, and to me a
friend, loved as Jonathan loved David; but, as a unique, idealized
individuality, Emerson looms up in that Arcadian dream more and
more the dominant personality. It is as character, and not as
accomplishment or education, that he holds his own in all comparisons
with his contemporaries, the fine, crystallized mind, the keen,
clear-faceted thinker and seer. I loved more Agassiz and Lowell, but
we shall have many a Lowell and Agassiz before we see Emerson's like
again. Attainments will be greater, and discovery and accomplishments
will surpass themselves as we go on, but to _be_, as Emerson was, is
absolute and complete existence.
Agassiz was, of all our company, the acknowledged master; loved by
all, even to the unlettered woodsmen, who ran to meet his service as
to no other of the company; by all the members of it reverenced as not
even Emerson was; the largest in personality and in universality of
knowledge of all the men I have ever known. No one who did not know
him personally can conceive the hold he had on everybody who came into
relations with him. His vast command of scientific facts, and his
ready command of them for all educational purposes, his enthusiasm for
science and the diffusion of it, even his fascinating way of imparting
it to others, had even less to do with his popularity than the
magnetism of his presence and the sympathetic faculty which enabled
him to find at once the plane on which he should meet whomever he had
to deal with. Of his scientific position I cannot speak, though I can
see that his was the most powerful of the scientific influences of
that epoch in America. When we were traveling it was always in my
boat, and we moved as his investigations prompted, wherever there
seemed to be a promise of some addition to his collections. We dredged
and netted water and air wherever we went, and of course there arose a
certain kind of intimacy, which was partly that of a _camaraderie_
in which we were approximately equals, that of the backwoods life in
which I was, if a comparison were to be made, the superior, and partly
that of teacher and pupil; for, with trifling attainments, I had the
passion of scientific acquisition, and all that Agassiz needed to open
the store of his knowledge was the willingness of another to learn.
The _odium scientificum_, which I notice is no less bitter than the
variety _theologicum_, has, in these years, poured on Agassiz the
floods of its opprobrium, and even the little dogs of physical science
bark at his name; but his greater contemporaries knew and esteemed him
better. The revival of the evolutionary hypothesis by Darwin, and the
controversies growing out of it, then filled the air, and Agassiz paid
the penalty of his eminence and constancy to the system in which he
had been grounded by his master, Cuvier. He was attacked and insulted
by men who had never made an observation, and, what was more curious,
as a panderer to the theological prejudices of the past. But in
my mind was still the memory of a former outcry and theological
persecution of him, because he had himself laid down what might
be considered the forerunner of the doctrine of evolution,--the
declaration that the human race could not have been the offspring of
one Adam, but must have had a multiple beginning. The result of this
was to bring on his head the execrations of the theological world in a
storm which no one who had witnessed it was likely to forget or take
for other than what it was, the proof of his absolute scientific
honesty,--a proof needed by no one who knew him personally, but which,
in view of the later animosity shown him, requires reaffirmation.
As I was much with him at this time, and perhaps, out of his family,
the one to whom he talked with the greatest freedom and fullness on
the subject, owing to my own intense interest in it, it cannot be
amiss that I state his exact position as far as he let me see it. It
must be remembered that the doctrine of evolution, as he knew it, and
in the only form in which it was then stated, was simply and purely
that of development by natural selection acting on chance variation,
and differing mainly by this from the doctrine of Lamarck, which had
long been rejected by the scientific world at large. We have seen
since then that this primitive doctrine has been largely supplemented
by other theories, and that it no longer stands before the scientific
world in the bare simplicity of Darwin's original statement, though
even he, at a later date, claimed natural selection not as the
only but as the most influential agency of variation of species in
creation; repudiating, however, a plan in the universe, and not
demanding the influence of the conscious mind on creation. Agassiz's
primary objection to the doctrine was that it left the creator out of
creation, for it distinctly repudiated the element of design in it;
and, though he did not recognize the Creator of Genesis, he could not
dispense with the supreme mind.
Myself a convert to the doctrine of evolution, in as absolute a form
as it is held even by the materialists, though differently, I am
persuaded that if Agassiz had lived long enough to see the latest
development of it he would have accepted it, as did Professor Owen,
who was, like Agassiz, and possibly even more literally, a believer
in the designer of the universe. The fundamental ground for Agassiz's
rejection of it is stated by himself in one of the lectures delivered
at Cambridge, as follows: "I believe that all these correspondences
between the different aspects of animal life are the manifestations
of mind acting consciously with intention towards one object from
beginning to end. This view is in accordance with the working of our
minds; it is an instinctive recognition of a mental power with which
our own is akin, manifesting itself in nature. For this reason, more
than any other, perhaps, do I hold that this world of ours was not the
result of the action of unconscious organic forces, but the work of an
intelligent, conscious power." Whatever might have been the process
by which the orderly creation was produced (into which he did not
inquire), it was the result of a definite plan and the work of design.
The immutability of species, _as he defined species_, was the
logical consequence of this theory, and that, it seems to me, is the
substantial difference between him and Darwin.
But Agassiz was no sectarian, and held no other creed than a belief
in the Creator. In the fibre of the man was the consciousness of
the immanent deity, rooted, perhaps, in that influence of his early
theological environage from which no man can ever escape, though
he may rebel against it; and the almost universal deduction by the
scientific world from Darwin's theory then was that there could be no
divine design in creation. It was this negation of the direction of
the great artist in the process of creation against which Agassiz
rebelled; and although, at a later phase of the conflict, Darwin
himself protested against the implication sometimes drawn from his
theory, there can be no question that at that moment the general
evolutionary opinion was that the hypothesis of a divine authorship
of creation was superfluous. Agassiz maintained the presence of
"Conscious Mind in Creation;" Darwin did not deny it explicitly, nor
did he admit it.
As a matter of observation, no case of a development of one species
from another has ever been noted, and the evidence for it is precisely
analogous to that adduced by Agassiz, "that it is in accordance
with the working of our minds," still further illuminated by the
side-lights which science has thrown on it since Agassiz died. The
ultimate decision in the individual mind will be according to the bias
for or against the "conscious mind" or automatic creation; and it must
not be forgotten that one of the most powerful arguments for a large
evolution was the discovery by Agassiz that the embryo of the highest
organizations passes through an evolution similar to that of the
animal creation. Professor Martins--a leading French scientist and an
evolutionist--says of Agassiz: "Another of these precursors of modern
science is Louis Agassiz. The oldest fossil forms have a simpler
organization than the later ones, and represent some stage of the
embryonic development of the latter. This truth, established by
Agassiz, has, more than any other, enlightened the history of
creation, and prepared for the generalization by which the whole may
be comprehended. The oldest fishes known are all more or less related
to the sharks and skates; their teeth and scales only, with small
portions of the skeleton, have been preserved. Their form, widely
different from that of the living species, recalls that of the embryo
of our living fishes. This is a truth which Louis Agassiz was the
first to proclaim to the scientific world."[1]
[Footnote 1: _De l'Origine du Monde organique_.]
But, beyond this question as to the evidence of mutability of species
which Agassiz did not find, he took the position "that the hypothesis
of the method of creation by evolution exceeded physical science and
became theology, which belonged to the province of theology, into
which he had no intention of venturing." That was his statement to me
during the interval between the two attacks of brain trouble from
the latter of which he died. Science, to his understanding, was
observation and classification, arrangement, and it had no function
in investigating the causes or _modus operandi_ through which things
became what they were.
Amongst the evolutionists whom I have known there have been several
who did not accept without modification the theory of natural
selection, and supplemented it by design, amongst whom I may mention
the great American botanist, Asa Gray,--one of the most distinguished
of Darwinians,--who accepted the method of evolution as the _modus
operandi_ of the Supreme Intelligence. Professor Jeffries Wyman, the
associate of Agassiz in the University, who was one of the doctors of
our Adirondack company, accepted in a qualified manner the theory of
evolution, but his premature and lamented death set the seal to his
conclusions before they were complete, though I have always had the
impression that his position was similar to that of Gray. To my
question one day as to his conclusions, he replied, with a caution
characteristic of the man and very unlike the resolute attitude of
Agassiz before the question which the Sphinx proposes still, "An
evolution of some sort there certainly was," but nothing more would he
say. The loss to American science in his death can never be estimated,
for his mind was of that subtle and inductive nature which is needed
for such a study, fine to poetic delicacy, penetrating with all the
acumen of a true scientific imagination, but modest to excess, and
personally so attached to Agassiz that he would with reluctance give
expression to a difference from him, though that he did differ was no
occasion for abatement of their mutual regard. Wyman's was the poetry
of scientific research, Agassiz's its prose, and they offered a
remarkable example of mental antithesis, from which, had Wyman lived,
much might have been expected through their association in study.
Wyman had all the delicacy of a fine feminine organization, wedded
unfortunately to a fragile constitution, but the friendship he held
for the robust and dominating character of the great Switzer was to
the utmost reciprocated.
And Agassiz's disposition was as generous as large. He had absolutely
no scientific jealousy or sectarian feeling. The rancor which was
shown him by some of the Darwinians never disturbed his serenity an
instant; for of the world's opinion of him and his ideas, even when
the "world" was scientific, he never took account other than to regret
that science was the loser, by running off on what he considered side
issues. We had much conversation on the question of evolution and
allied topics, in which my part was naturally that of listener and
only occasional questioner, and I remember the warm appreciation he
always expressed for Darwin and his researches, for his fineness
of observation and scientific honesty. He regarded the widespread
acceptance of the theory of natural selection as one of the epidemics
which have swept the scientific world from time to time, and looked
with absolute serenity to the return of science one day to the
conception of creation by design.
I am neither qualified nor disposed to pass judgment on Agassiz as
a scientist, or institute any kind of comparison of his relative
authority, and probably the time is far away at which his comparative
eminence can be estimated impartially. I have only to do with his
personality as it appeared to me in our relations, and, as the latest
survivor of those who enjoyed that greenwood intimacy, to put on
record my impression of the great, lovable, magnanimous man. Of his
unbounded generosity and indifference to personal advantage, his
freedom from scientific jealousy, everybody who came in contact with
him was witness. He refused all offers of emolument from any quarter,
and spent all his surplus earnings for the aggrandizement of the great
natural-history museum he founded at Cambridge. The propositions of
the Emperor Napoleon III. he had declined with thanks as soon as
made, and without a thought. He had come to America to study natural
history, and did not propose to be diverted from this purpose. To a
lecturing agent who offered him a very large sum for delivering a
course of lectures in the principal cities of the Union, he replied
that he had no time to make money; and he died of overwork, insatiate
in the pursuit of the completion of his museum and the classification
of his observations. I have heard him speak with pain of the animosity
shown him by a Swiss associate in his glacial investigations, who
had once been his warm advocate, but there was no bitterness in his
manner. I am convinced that there was no bitterness in him, and that
all personal feeling was overshadowed and minimized by his absolute
devotion to scientific truth, with his loyalty to which nothing ever
interfered.
His influence even on the business men of the city of Boston and the
legislature of the State of Massachusetts was the most remarkable
phenomenon of the kind ever witnessed in that frugal and
matter-of-fact community, for he had only to announce that he wanted
for his museum or department in the University a donation or an
appropriation, to obtain either, so absolutely recognized was his
unselfish devotion to science by all classes. There are few of us left
who can remember the sudden shadow that fell on our community at his
unexpected death, and the universal grief that told of the hold he had
on the entire nation; and the mourning extended far beyond the circle
of personal acquaintance with Agassiz. Even men who had no interest in
physical science took it into consideration on account of him, carried
away by his enthusiastic advocacy of its advancement. The religious
world forgot the indignation at his repudiation of Adam in the refuge
it found from absolute atheism in his affirmation of a Supreme
Intelligence, as Creator of all things, though to theological
contentions he never gave the slightest consideration.
It is needless to say that this was the effect, not of scientific
education or of the capacity in the great majority of those who
accepted his position to judge of a theory or a scientific line of
demonstration, but of the dominance of personal character in the man,
his inflexible honesty and disinterestedness. The last time I saw
him was when he came to make me a brief visit in a glen of the White
Mountains, where I was encamped near a subject which I was painting,
and which was in part composed of huge boulders, dropped in the
gorge by a primeval glacier, and brought, perhaps, from beyond Lake
Superior. He had then had the first attack of the brain trouble, from
which he was recovering, and was making a mountain trip where he
could, if possible, study and rest at once. But his want of common
prudence in regard to overwork prevented his recovery, and he died
just as he was beginning to elaborate his conclusions on the doctrine
of evolution, for which he had a colossal plan, cut short in its
opening. He was always too hurried in his work, as if he knew that his
life would not suffice for its completion, if indeed completion were
possible in such work, and he persisted in accumulation of material
without pause either to coordinate his ideas or to rest and reflect. I
one day said to him that I was intending to write a little book, and
he exclaimed: "Oh, I wish I had time to write a little book! All my
books come large, and I have not the time to condense them."