Emerson was so drawn to the racy and original that it seems as if
original sin had a certain fascination for him. The austere, the
Puritanical Emerson, the heir of eight generations of clergy-men, the
man who did not like to have Frederika Bremer play the piano in his
house on Sunday, seems at times to covet the "swear-words" of the
common people. They itch at his ears, they have flavor and reality. He
sometimes records them in his Journal; for example, this remark of the
Canadian wood-chopper who cut wood for his neighbor--he preferred to
work by the job rather than by the day--the days were "so damned
long!"
The mob, Emerson says, is always interesting: "A blacksmith, a
truckman, a farmer, we follow into the bar-room and watch with
eagerness what they shall say." "Cannot the stinging dialect of the
sailor be domesticated?" "My page about Consistency would be better
written, 'Damn Consistency.'" But try to fancy Emerson swearing like
the men on the street! Once only he swore a sacred oath, and that he
himself records: it was called out by the famous, and infamous,
Fugitive Slave Law which made every Northern man hound and huntsman
for the Southern slave-driver. "This filthy enactment," he says, "was
made in the Nineteenth Century by men who could read and write. I will
not obey it, by God!"
Evidently the best thing the laboring people had to offer Emerson was
their racy and characteristic speech. When one of his former neighbors
said of an eclipse of the sun that it looked as if a "nigger" was
poking his head into the sun, Emerson recorded it in his Journal. His
son reports that Emerson enjoyed the talk of the stable-men and used
to tell their anecdotes and boasts of their horses when he came home;
for example, "In the stable you'd take him for a slouch, but lead him
to the door, and when he lifts up his eyes, and looks abroad,--by
thunder! you'd think the sky was all horse." Such surprises and
exaggerations always attracted him, unless they took a turn that made
him laugh. He loved wit with the laugh taken out of it. The genial
smile and not uproarious laughter suited his mood best.
He was a lover of quiet, twinkling humor. Such humor gleams out often
in his Journal. It gleams in this passage about Dr. Ripley: "Dr.
Ripley prays for rain with great explicitness on Sunday, and on Monday
the showers fell. When I spoke of the speed with which his prayers
were answered, the good man looked modest." There is another
prayer-for-rain story that he enjoys telling: "Dr. Allyne, of Duxbury,
prayed for rain, at church. In the afternoon the boys carried
umbrellas. 'Why?' 'Because you prayed for rain.' 'Pooh! boys! we
always pray for rain: it's customary.'"
At West Point he asked a lieutenant if they had morning prayers at
college. "We have _reveillé_ beat, which is the same thing."
He tells with relish the story of a German who went to hire a horse
and chaise at a stable in Cambridge. "Shall I put in a buffalo?"
inquired the livery-man. "My God! no," cried the astonished German,
"put in a horse."
Emerson, I am sure, takes pleasure in relating a characteristic story
of Dr. Ripley and a thunder-shower: "One August afternoon, when I was
in the hayfield helping him with his man to rake up his hay, I well
remember his pleading, almost reproachful looks at the sky when the
thunder gust was coming up to spoil the hay. He raked very fast, then
looked at the clouds and said, 'We are in the Lord's hands, mind your
rake, George! we are in the Lord's hands,' and seemed to say, 'You
know me, the field is mine--Dr. Ripley's--thine own servant.'"
The stories Emerson delighted in were all rich in this quiet humor. I
heard of one he used to tell about a man who, when he went to his club
at night, often lingered too long over his cups, and came home
befuddled in the small hours, and was frequently hauled over the coals
by his wife. One night he again came home late, and was greeted with
the usual upbraiding in the morning. "It was not late," he said, "it
was only one o'clock." "It was much later than that," said the wife.
"It was one o'clock," repeated the man; "I heard it strike one three
or four times!"
Another good Emersonian story, though I do not know that he ever heard
it, is that of an old woman who had a farm in Indiana near the
Michigan line. The line was resurveyed, and the authorities set her
farm in Michigan. The old lady protested--she said it was all she
could do to stand the winters of Indiana, she could never stand those
of Michigan!
Cannot one see a twinkle in Emerson's eye when he quotes his wife as
saying that "it is wicked to go to church on Sunday"? Emerson's son
records that his father hated to be made to laugh, as he could not
command his face well. Hence he evidently notes with approval another
remark of his wife's: "A human being should beware how he laughs, for
then he shows all his faults." What he thought of the loud, surprising
laugh with which Carlyle often ended his bitter sentences, I do not
know that he records. Its meaning to Carlyle was evidently, "Oh! what
does it all matter?" If Emerson himself did not smile when he wrote
the sentence about "a maiden so pure that she exchanged glances only
with the stars," his reader, I am sure, will.
Emerson evidently enjoyed such a story as this which was told him by a
bishop: There was a dispute in a vestry at Providence between two hot
church-members. One said at last, "I should like to know who you
are"--
"Who I am?" cried the other,--"who I am! I am a humble Christian, you
damned old heathen, you!"
The minister whom he heard say that "nobody enjoyed religion less than
ministers, as none enjoyed food so little as cooks," must have
provoked the broadest kind of a smile.
Although one of Emerson's central themes in his Journals was his
thought about God, or his feeling for the Infinite, he never succeeded
in formulating his ideas on the subject and could not say what God is
or is not. At the age of twenty-one he wrote in his Journal, "I know
that I _know_ next to nothing." A very unusual, but a very promising
frame of mind for a young man. "It is not certain that God exists, but
that He does not is a most bewildering and improbable Chimera."
A little later he wrote: "The government of God is not a plan--that
would be Destiny, [or we may say Calvinism,] it is extempore."
He quotes this from Plotinus: "Of the Unity of God, nothing can be
predicated, neither being, nor essence, nor life, for it is above all
these."
It was a bold saying of his that "God builds his temple in the heart
on the ruins of churches and religion."
"A great deal of God in the universe," he says, "but not available to
us until we can make it up into a man."
But if asked, what makes it up into a man? why does it take this form?
he would have been hard put to it for an answer.
Persons who assume to know all about God, as if He lived just around
the corner, as Matthew Arnold said, will not find much comfort in
Emerson's uncertainty and blind groping for adequate expression
concerning Him. How can we put the All, the Eternal, in words? How can
we define the Infinite without self-contradiction? Our minds are cast
in the mould of the finite; our language is fashioned from our
dealings with a world of boundaries and limitations and concrete
objects and forces. How much can it serve us in dealing with a world
of opposite kind--with the Whole, the Immeasurable, the Omnipresent,
and Omnipotent? Of what use are our sounding-lines in a bottomless
sea? How are we to apply our conceptions of personality to the
all-life, to that which transcends all limitations, to that which is
everywhere and yet nowhere? Shall we assign a local habitation and a
name to the universal energy? As the sunlight puts out our lamp or
candle, so our mental lights grow pale in the presence of the Infinite
Light. We can deal with the solid bodies on the surface of the earth,
but the earth as a sphere in the heavens baffles us. All our terms of
over and under, up and down, east and west, and the like, fail us. You
may go westward around the world and return to your own door coming
from the east. The circle is a perpetual contradiction, the sphere a
surface without boundaries, a mass without weight. When we ascribe
weight to the earth, we are trying it by the standards of bodies on
its surface--the pull of the earth is the measure of their weight; but
the earth itself--what pulls that? Only some larger body can pull
that, and the adjustment of the system is such that the centripetal
and centrifugal forces balance each other, and the globes float as
lightly as any feather.
Emerson said he denied personality to God because it is too little,
not too much. If you ascribe personality to God, it is perfectly fair
to pester you with questions about Him. Where is He? How long has He
been there? What does He do? Personality without place, or form, or
substance, or limitation is a contradiction of terms. We are the
victims of words. We get a name for a thing and then invent the thing
that fits it. All our names for the human faculties, as the will, the
reason, the understanding, the imagination, conscience, instincts, and
so on, are arbitrary divisions of a whole, to suit our own
convenience, like the days of the week, or the seasons of the year.
Out of unity we make diversity for purposes of our practical needs.
Thought tends to the one, action to the many. We must have small
change for everything in the universe, because our lives are made up
of small things. We must break wholes up into fractions, and then seek
their common multiple. Only thus can we deal with them. We deal with
God by limiting Him and breaking Him up into his attributes, or by
conceiving Him under the figure of the Trinity. He is thus less
baffling to us. We can handle Him the better. We make a huge man of
Him and then try to dodge the consequences of our own limitations.
All these baffling questions pressed hard upon Emerson. He could not
do without God in nature, and yet, like most of us, he could not
justify himself until he had trimmed and cut away a part of nature.
God is the All, but the All is a hard mass to digest. It means hell as
well as heaven, demon as well as seraph, geology as well as biology,
devolution as well as evolution, earthquake as well as earth
tranquillity, cyclones as well as summer breezes, the jungle as well
as the household, pain as well as pleasure, death as well as life. How
are you to reconcile all these contradictions?
Emerson said that nature was a swamp with flowers and birds on the
borders, and terrible things in the interior. Shall we have one God
for the fair things, and another God for the terrible things?
"Nature is saturated with deity," he says, the terrific things as the
beatific, I suppose. "A great deal of God in the universe," he again
says, "but not valuable to us till we can make it up into a man." And
when we make it up into a man we have got a true compendium of nature;
all the terrific and unholy elements--fangs and poisons and eruptions,
sharks and serpents--have each and all contributed something to the
make-up. Man is nature incarnated, no better, no worse.
But the majority of mankind who take any interest in the God-question
at all will probably always think of the Eternal in terms of man, and
endow Him with personality.
One feels like combating some of Emerson's conclusions, or, at least,
like discounting them. His refusal to see any value in natural science
as such, I think, shows his limitations. "Natural history," he says,
"by itself has no value; it is like a single sex; but marry it to
human history and it is poetry. Whole Floras, all Linnæus', and
Buffon's volumes contain not one line of poetry." Of course he speaks
for himself. Natural facts, scientific truth, as such, had no interest
to him. One almost feels as if this were idealism gone to seed.
"Shall I say that the use of Natural Science seems merely 'ancillary'
to Morals? I would learn the law of the defraction of a ray because
when I understand it, it will illustrate, perhaps suggest, a new truth
in ethics." Is the ethical and poetic value of the natural sciences,
then, their main or only value to the lay mind? Their technical
details, their tables and formulæ and measurements, we may pass by,
but the natural truths they disclose are of interest to the healthy
mind for their own sake. It is not the ethics of chemical reactions
and combinations--if there be ethics in them--that arrests our
attention, but the light they throw on the problem of how the world
was made, and how our own lives go on. The method of Nature in the
physical world no doubt affords clues to the method of Nature in the
non-physical, or supersensuous world. But apart from that, it is
incredible that a mind like Emerson's took no interest in natural
knowledge for its own sake. The fact that two visible and inodorous
gases like hydrogen and oxygen--one combustible and the other the
supporter of combustion--when chemically combined produce water, which
extinguishes fire, is intensely interesting as affording us a glimpse
of the contradictions and paradoxes that abound everywhere in Nature's
methods. If there is any ethics or any poetry in it, let him have it
who can extract it. The great facts of nature, such as the sphericity
of the cosmic bodies, their circular motions, their mutual
interdependence, the unprovable ether in which they float, the blue
dome of the sky, the master currents of the ocean, the primary and the
secondary rocks, have an intellectual value, but how they in any way
illustrate the moral law is hard to see. The ethics, or right and
wrong, of attraction and repulsion, of positive and negative, have no
validity outside the human sphere. Might is right in Nature, or,
rather, we are outside the standards of right and wrong in her sphere.
Scientific knowledge certainly has a poetic side to it, but we do not
go to chemistry or to geology or to botany for rules for the conduct
of life. We go to these things mainly for the satisfaction which the
knowledge of Nature's ways gives us.
So with natural history. For my own part I find the life-histories of
the wild creatures about me, their ways of getting on in the world,
their joys, their fears, their successes, their failures, their
instincts, their intelligence, intensely interesting without any
ulterior considerations. I am not looking for ethical or poetic
values. I am looking for natural truths. I am less interested in the
sermons in stones than I am in the life under the stones. The
significance of the metamorphosis of the grub into the butterfly does
not escape me, but I am more occupied with the way the caterpillar
weaves her cocoon and hangs herself up for the winter than I am in
this lesson. I had rather see a worm cast its skin than see a king
crowned. I had rather see Phoebe building her mud nest than the
preacher writing his sermon. I had rather see the big moth emerge from
her cocoon--fresh and untouched as a coin that moment from the
die--than the most fashionable "coming out" that society ever knew.
The first song sparrow or bluebird or robin in spring, or the first
hepatica or arbutus or violet, or the first clover or pond-lily in
summer--must we demand some mystic password of them? Must we not love
them for their own sake, ere they will seem worthy of our love?
To convert natural facts into metaphysical values, or into moral or
poetic values--in short, to make literature out of science--is a high
achievement, and is worthy of Emerson at his best, but to claim that
this is their sole or main use is to push idealism to the extreme. The
poet, the artist, the nature writer not only mixes his colors with his
brains, he mixes them with his heart's blood. Hence his pictures
attract us without doing violence to nature.
We will not deny Emerson his right to make poetry out of nature; we
bless him for the inspiration he has drawn from this source, for his
"Wood-notes," his "Humble-Bee," his "Titmouse," his "May-Day," his
"Sea-Shore," his "Snow-Storm," and many other poems. But we must
"quarrel" with him a little, to use one of his favorite words, for
seeming to undervalue the facts of natural science, as such, and to
belittle the works of the natural historian because he does not give
us poetry and lessons in morals instead of botany and geology and
ornithology, pure and simple. "Everything," he says, "should be
treated poetically--law, politics, housekeeping, money. A judge and a
banker must drive their craft poetically, as well as a dancer or a
scribe. That is, they must exert that higher vision which causes the
object to become fluid and plastic." "If you would write a code, or
logarithms, or a cook-book, you cannot spare the poetic impulse." "No
one will doubt that battles can be fought poetically who reads
Plutarch or Las Casas."
We are interested in the wild life around us because the lives of the
wild creatures in a measure parallel our own; because they are the
partakers of the same bounty of nature that we are; they are fruit of
the same biological tree. We are interested in knowing how they get on
in the world. Bird and bee, fish and man, are all made of one stuff,
are all akin. The evolutionary impulse that brought man, brought his
dog and horse. Did Emerson, indeed, only go to nature as he went to
the bank, to make a draft upon it? Was his walk barren that brought
him no image, no new idea? Was the day wasted that did not add a new
line to his verse? He appears to have gone up and down the land
seeking images. He was so firmly persuaded that there is not a passage
in the human soul, perhaps not a shade of thought, but has its emblem
in nature, that he was ever on the alert to discover these relations
of his own mind to the external world. "I see the law of Nature
equally exemplified in bar-room and in a saloon of the philosopher. I
get instruction and the opportunities of my genius indifferently in
all places, companies, and pursuits, so only there be antagonisms."
Emerson thought that science as such bereaved Nature of her charm. To
the man of little or no imagination or sensibility to beauty, Nature
has no charm anyhow, but if he have these gifts, they will certainly
survive scientific knowledge, and be quickened and heightened by it.
After we have learned all that the astronomers can tell us about the
midnight heavens, do we look up at the stars with less wonder and awe?
After we have learned all that the chemist and the physicist can tell
us about matter--its interior activities and its exterior laws and
relations--do we admire and marvel less? After the geologist has told
us all he has found out about the earth's crust and the rocks, when we
quarry our building-stone, do we plough and hoe and plant its soil
with less interest and veneration? No, science as the pursuit of truth
causes light to spring out of the abysmal darkness, and enhances our
love and interest in Nature. Is the return of the seasons less
welcome because we know the cause? Is an eclipse less startling
because it occurs exactly on time? Science bereaves Nature of her
dread and fearsomeness, it breaks the spell which the ignorance and
credulity of men have cast upon her.
Emerson had little use for science except so far as it yielded him
symbols and parables for his superscience. The electric spark did not
kindle his interest unless it held an ethical fact for him; chemical
reactions were dull affairs unless he could trace their laws in mental
reactions. "Read chemistry a little," he said, "and you will quickly
see that its laws and experiments will furnish an alphabet or
vocabulary for all of your moral observations." He found a lesson in
composition in the fact that the diamond and lampblack are the same
substance differently arranged. Good writing, he said, is a chemical
combination, and not a mechanical mixture. That is not the noblest
chemistry that can extract sunshine from cucumbers, but that which can
extract "honor from scamps, temperance from sots, energy from beggars,
justice from thieves, benevolence from misers."
Though mindful of the birds and flowers and trees and rivers in his
walks, it was mainly through his pressing need of figures and symbols
for transcendental use. He says, "Whenever you enumerate a physical
law, I hear in it a moral law." His final interest was in the moral
law. Unless the scientific fact you brought him had some moral value,
it made little impression upon him.
He admits he is more interested to know "why the star form is so oft
repeated in botany, and why the number five is such a favorite with
Nature, than to understand the circulation of the sap and the
formation of buds." His insight into Nature, and the prophetic
character of his genius, are seen in many ways, among others in his
anticipation or poetic forecast of the Darwinian theory of the origin
of species, in 1853.
"We want a higher logic to put us in training for the laws of
creation. How does the step forward from one species to a higher
species of an existing genus take place? The ass is not the parent of
the horse; no fish begets a bird. But the concurrence of new
conditions necessitates a new object in which these conditions meet
and flower. When the hour is struck in onward nature, announcing that
all is ready for the birth of higher form and nobler function, not one
pair of parents, but the whole consenting system thrills, yearns, and
produces. It is a favorable aspect of planets and of elements."
In 1840 he wrote, "The method of advance in Nature is perpetual
transformation." In the same year he wrote:
"There is no leap--not a shock of violence throughout nature. Man
therefore must be predicted in the first chemical relation exhibited
by the first atom. If we had eyes to see it, this bit of quartz would
certify us of the necessity that man must exist as inevitably as the
cities he has actually built."
X
How fruitful in striking and original men New England was in those
days--poets, orators, picturesque characters! In Concord, Emerson,
Thoreau, Hawthorne, Alcott; in Boston and Cambridge, Lowell,
Longfellow, Norton, Holmes, Higginson, Father Taylor, Bancroft,
Everett, and others, with Webster standing out like a Colossus on the
New Hampshire granite. This crop of geniuses seems to have been the
aftermath of the Revolution. Will our social and industrial revolution
bring anything like another such a crop? Will the great World War
produce another? Until now too much prosperity, too much mammon, too
much "at ease in Zion" has certainly prevailed for another band of
great idealists to appear.
Emerson could never keep his eyes off Webster. He was fairly
hypnotized by the majesty and power of his mind and personality, and
he recurs to him in page after page of his Journal. Webster was of
primary stuff like the granite of his native hills, while such a man
as Everett was of the secondary formation, like the sandstone rocks.
Emerson was delighted when he learned that Carlyle, "with those
devouring eyes, with that portraying hand," had seen Webster. And this
is the portrait Carlyle drew of him: "As a Logic-fencer, Advocate, or
Parliamentary Hercules, one would incline to back him at first sight
against all the extant world. The tanned complexion, that amorphous,
crag-like face; the dull black eyes under their precipice of brows,
like dull anthracite furnaces, needing only to be _blown_; the
mastiff-mouth, accurately closed:--I have not traced as much of
_silent Berserkir-rage_, that I remember of, in any other man."
Emerson's description and praise and criticism of Webster form some of
the most notable pages in his Journal. In 1843, when Webster came to
Concord as counsel in a famous case that was tried there, the fact so
excited Emerson that he could not sleep. It was like the perturbation
of a planet in its orbit when a large body passes near it. Emerson
seems to have spent much time at the court-house to hear and study
him: "Webster quite fills our little town, and I doubt if I shall get
settled down to writing until he has well gone from the county. He is
a natural Emperor of men." He adjourned the court every day in true
imperial fashion, simply by rising and taking his hat and looking the
Judge coolly in the face, whereupon the Judge "bade the Crier adjourn
the Court." But when Emerson finally came to look upon him with the
same feeling with which he saw one of those strong Paddies of the
railroad, he lost his interest in the trial and did not return to the
court in the afternoon. "The green fields on my way home were too
fresh and fair, and forbade me to go again."
It was with profound grief that he witnessed the decline of Webster's
political career, owing to his truckling to the Southern proslavery
element, and to his increasing intemperance. To see the placid,
transcendental Emerson "fighting mad," flaring up in holy wrath, read
his criticisms of Webster, after Webster's defection--his moral
collapse to win the South and his support of the Fugitive Slave Law.
This got into Emerson's blood and made him think "daggers and
tomahawks." He has this to say of a chance meeting with Webster in
Boston, at this period: "I saw Webster on the street--but he was
changed since I saw him last--black as a thunder-cloud, and
careworn.... I did not wonder that he depressed his eyes when he saw
me and would not meet my face."
In 1851 he said that some of Webster's late speeches and state papers
were like "Hail Columbia" when sung at a slave-auction; then he
follows with the terrible remark: "The word _liberty_ in the mouth of
Mr. Webster sounds like the word _love_ in the mouth of a courtezan."
The prizes or fancied prizes of politics seem to have corrupted all
the great men of that day--Webster, Choate, Foote, Clay, Everett.
Their "disgusting obsequiousness" to the South fired Emerson's wrath.