In Emerson's Journal one sees the Emersonian worlds in their
making--the essays, the addresses, the poems. Here are the nebulæ and
star-dust out of which most of them came, or in which their suggestion
lies. Now and then there is quite as good stuff as is found in his
printed volumes, pages and paragraphs from the same high heaven of
æsthetic emotion. The poetic fragments and wholes are less promising,
I think, than the prose; they are evidently more experimental, and
show the 'prentice hand more.
The themes around which his mind revolved all his life--nature, God,
the soul--and their endless variations and implications, recur again
and again in each of the ten printed volumes of the Journals. He has
new thoughts on Character, Self-Reliance, Heroism, Manners,
Experience, Nature, Immortality, and scores of other related subjects
every day, and he presents them in new connections and with new
images. His mind had marked centrality, and fundamental problems were
always near at hand with him. He could not get away from them. He
renounced the pulpit and the creeds, not because religion meant less
to him, but because it meant more. The religious sentiment, the
feeling of the Infinite, was as the sky over his head, and the earth
under his feet.
The whole stream of Emerson's mental life apparently flowed through
his Journals. They were the repository of all his thoughts, all his
speculations, all his mental and spiritual experiences. What a
_mélange_ they are! Wise sayings from his wide reading, from
intercourse with men, private and public, sayings from his farmer
neighbors, anecdotes, accounts of his travels, or his walks, solitary
or in the company of Channing, Hawthorne, or Thoreau, his gropings
after spiritual truths, and a hundred other things, are always marked
by what he says that Macaulay did not possess--elevation of mind--and
an abiding love for the real values in life and letters.
Here is the prose origin of "Days": "The days come and go like muffled
and veiled figures sent from a distant friendly party, but they say
nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as
silently away." In this brief May entry we probably see the inception
of the "Humble-Bee" poem: "Yesterday in the woods I followed the fine
humble bee with rhymes and fancies free."
Now and then we come upon the germ of other poems in his prose. Here
is a hint of "Each and All" in a page written at the age of
thirty-one: "The shepherd or the beggar in his red cloak little knows
what a charm he gives to the wide landscape that charms you on the
mountain-top and whereof he makes the most agreeable feature, and I no
more the part my individuality plays in the All." The poem, his reader
will remember, begins in this wise:
"Little thinks, in the field, yon red-cloaked clown
Of thee from the hilltop looking down."
In a prose sentence written in 1835 he says: "Nothing is beautiful
alone. Nothing but is beautiful in the whole." In the poem above
referred to this becomes:
"All are needed by each one;
Nothing is fair or good alone."
In 1856 we find the first stanza of his 'beautiful "Two Rivers,"
written in prose form: "Thy voice is sweet, Musketaquid; repeats the
music of the rain; but sweeter rivers silent flit through thee as
those through Concord plain." The substance of the next four stanzas
is in prose form also: "Thou art shut in thy banks; but the stream I
love, flows in thy water, and flows through rocks and through the air,
and through darkness, and through men, and women. I hear and see the
inundation and eternal spending of the stream, in winter and in
summer, in men and animals, in passion and thought. Happy are they who
can hear it"; and so on. In the poem these sentences become:
"Thou in thy narrow banks are pent:
The stream I love unbounded goes
Through flood and sea and firmament;
Through light, through life, it forward flows.
"I see the inundation sweet,
I hear the spending of the stream
Through years, through men, through Nature fleet,
Through love and thought, through power and dream."
It is evident that Emerson was a severe critic of his own work. He
knew when he had struck fire, and he knew when he had failed. He was
as exacting with himself as with others. His conception of the
character and function of the poet was so high that he found the
greatest poets wanting. The poet is one of his three or four
ever-recurring themes. He is the divine man. He is bard and prophet,
seer and savior. He is the acme of human attainment. Verse devoid of
insight into the method of nature, and devoid of religious emotion,
was to him but as sounding brass and tinkling cymbal. He called Poe
"the jingle man" because he was a mere conjurer with words. The
intellectual content of Poe's works _was_ negligible. He was a wizard
with words and measures, but a pauper in ideas. He did not add to our
knowledge, he did not add to our love of anything in nature or in
life, he did not contribute to our contentment in the world--the
bread of life was not in him. What was in him was mastery over the
architectonics of verse. Emerson saw little in Shelley for the same
reason, but much in Herbert and Donne. Religion, in his sense of the
term,--the deep sea into which the streams of all human thought
empty,--was his final test of any man. Unless there was something
fundamental about him, something that savored of the primordial deep
of the universal spirit, he remained unmoved. The elemental azure of
the great bodies of water is suggestive of the tone and hue Emerson
demanded in great poetry. He found but little of it in the men of his
time: practically none in the contemporary poets of New England. It
was probably something of this pristine quality that arrested
Emerson's attention in Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass." He saw in it
"the Appalachian enlargement of outline and treatment for service to
American literature."
Emerson said of himself: "I am a natural reader, and only a writer in
the absence of natural writers. In a true time I should never have
written." We must set this statement down to one of those fits of
dissatisfaction with himself, those negative moods that often came
upon him. What he meant by a true time is very obscure. In an earlier
age he would doubtless have remained a preacher, like his father and
grandfather, but coming under the influence of Goethe, Carlyle, and
Wordsworth, and other liberating influences of the nineteenth century,
he was bound to be a writer. When he was but twenty-one he speaks of
his immoderate fondness for writing. Writing was the passion of his
life, his supreme joy, and he went through the world with the writer's
eye and ear and hand always on duty. And his contribution to the
literature of man's higher moral and æsthetic nature is one of the
most valuable of the age in which he lived.