It has been the fashion among our younger writers to speak slightingly
and flippantly of Emerson, referring to him as outworn, and as the
apostle of the obvious. This view is more discreditable to the young
people than is their criticism damaging to Emerson. It can make little
difference to Emerson's fame, but it would be much more becoming in
our young writers to garland his name with flowers than to utter these
harsh verdicts.
It is undoubtedly true that Emerson entered into and influenced the
lives of more choice spirits, both men and women, during the past
generation than did any other American author. Whether he still does
so would be interesting to know. We who have felt his tonic and
inspiring influence can but hope so. Yet how impossible he seems in
times like these in which we live, when the stars of the highest
heaven of the spirit which illumine his page are so obscured or
blotted out by the dust and the fog of our hurrying, materialistic
age! Try to think of Emerson spending a winter going about the Western
States reading to miscellaneous audiences essays like those that now
make up his later volumes. What chance would he stand, even in
university towns, as against the "movies" (a word so ugly I hesitate
to write it) in the next street?
I once defended Emerson against a criticism of Matthew Arnold's. It is
true, as Arnold says, that Emerson is not a great writer, except on
rare occasions. Now and then, especially in his earlier essays, there
is logical texture and cohesion in his pages; development, evolution,
growth; one thing follows another naturally, and each paragraph
follows from what went before. But most of his later writings are a
kind of patchwork; unrelated ideas are in juxtaposition; the
incongruities are startling. All those chapters, I suppose, were read
as lectures to miscellaneous audiences in which the attention soon
became tired or blunted if required to follow a closely reasoned
argument. Pictures and parables and startling affirmations suited
better. Emerson did not stoop to his audience; there was no
condescension in him. The last time I heard him, which was in
Washington in the early seventies, his theme was "Manners," and much
of it passed over the heads of his audience.
Certain of Emerson's works must strike the average reader, when he
first looks into them, as a curious medley of sense and wild
extravagance, utterly lacking in the logical sequence of the best
prose, and often verging on the futile and the absurd. Yet if one does
not get discouraged, one will soon see running through them veins of
the purest gold of the spirit, and insight into Nature's ways, that
redeem and more than redeem them.
I recall that when, as a young man, I looked into them the first time,
I could make nothing of them. I was fresh from reading the standard
essayists and philosophers of English literature--Addison, Steele,
Cowley, Johnson, Locke--and the poems of Pope, Young, and Cowper, all
of ethical import and value, and sometimes didactic, but never
mystical and transcendental, and the plunge into Emerson was a leap
into a strange world. But a few years later, when I opened his essays
again, they were like spring-water to parched lips. Now, in my old
age, I go back to him with a half-sad pleasure, as one goes back to
the scenes of one's youth.
Emerson taught us a mingled poetic and prophetic way of looking at
things that stays with us. The talented English woman Anne Gilchrist
said we had outgrown Emerson; had absorbed all he had to give us; and
were leaving him behind. Of course he was always a teacher and
preacher, in the thrall of his priestly inheritance, and to that
extent we leave him behind as we do not leave behind works of pure
literature.
As to continuity, some of his essays have much more of it than others.
In his "Nature" the theme is unfolded, there is growth and evolution;
and his first and second series of Essays likewise show it. The essays
on "Character," on "Self-Reliance," on the "Over-Soul," meet the
requirements of sound prose. And if there is any sounder prose than
can be found in his "Nature," or in his "English Traits," or in his
historical and biographical addresses, I do not know where to find it.
How flat and commonplace seem the works of some of the masters of
prose to whom Arnold alludes--Cicero, Voltaire, Addison,
Swift--compared with those of Emerson! A difference like that between
the prismatic hues of raindrops suspended from a twig or a trellis in
the sunlight and the water in the spring or the brook.
But in Emerson's later work there is, as geologists say, nonconformity
between the strata which make up his paragraphs. There is only
juxtaposition. Among his later papers the one on "Wealth" flows along
much more than the one on "Fate." Emerson believed in wealth. Poverty
did not attract him. It was not suited to his cast of mind. Poverty
was humiliating. Emerson accumulated a fortune, and it added to his
self-respect. Thoreau's pride in his poverty must have made Emerson
shiver.
Although Arnold refused to see in Emerson a great writer, he did admit
that he was eminent as the "friend and aider of those who would live in
the spirit"; but Arnold apparently overlooked the fact that, devoid of
the merit of good literature, no man's writings could have high
spiritual value. Strip the Bible of its excellence as literature, and
you have let out its life-blood. Literature is not a varnish or a
polish. It is not a wardrobe. It is the result of a vital, imaginative
relation of the man to his subject. And Emerson's subject-matter at its
best always partakes of the texture of his own mind. It is admitted that
there are times when his writing lacks organization,--the vital
ties,--when his rhetoric is more like a rocking-horse or a
merry-go-round than like the real thing. But there are few writers who
do not mark time now and then, and Emerson is no exception; and I
contend that at his best his work has the sequence and evolution of all
great prose. And yet, let me say that if Emerson's power and influence
depended upon his logic, he would be easily disposed of. Fortunately
they do not. They depend, let me repeat, upon his spiritual power and
insight, and the minor defects I am pointing out are only like flies in
amber.
He thought in images more strictly than any other contemporary writer,
and was often desperately hard-put to it to make his thought wed his
image. He confessed that he did not know how to argue, and that he
could only say what he saw. But he had spiritual vision; we cannot
deny this, though we do deny him logical penetration. I doubt if
there ever was a writer of such wide and lasting influence as Emerson,
in whom the logical sense was so feeble and shadowy. He had in this
respect a feminine instead of a masculine mind, an intuitional instead
of a reasoning one. It made up in audacious, often extravagant,
affirmations what it lacked in syllogistic strength. The logical mind,
with its sense of fitness and proportion, does not strain or
over-strain the thread that knits the parts together. It does not jump
to conclusions, but reaches them step by step. The flesh and blood of
feeling and sentiment may clothe the obscure framework of logic, but
the logic is there all the same. Emerson's mind was as devoid of
logical sense as are our remembered dreams, or as Christian Science is
of science. He said that truth ceased to be such when polemically
stated. Occasionally he amplifies and unfolds an idea, as in the
essays already mentioned, but generally his argument is a rope of
sand. Its strength is the strength of the separate particles. He is
perpetually hooking things together that do not go together. It is
like putting an apple on a pumpkin vine, or an acorn on a hickory. "A
club foot and a club wit." "Why should we fear," he says, "to be
crushed by the same elements--we who are made up of the same
elements?" But were we void of fear, we should be crushed much oftener
than we are. The electricity in our bodies does not prevent us from
being struck by lightning, nor the fluids in our bodies prevent the
waters from drowning us, nor the carbon in our bodies prevent carbon
dioxide from poisoning us.
One of Emerson's faults as a writer arose from his fierce hunger for
analogy. "I would rather have a good symbol of my thought," he
confesses, "than the suffrage of Kant or of Plato." "All thinking is
analogizing, and it is the use of life to learn metonymy." His passion
for analogy betrays him here and there in his Journals, as in this
passage: "The water we wash with never speaks of itself, nor does fire
or wind or tree. Neither does a noble natural man," and so forth. If
water and fire and wind and tree were in the habit of talking of
anything else, this kind of a comparison would not seem so spurious.
A false note in rhetoric like the above you will find in Emerson
oftener than a false note in taste. I find but one such in the
Journals: "As soon as a man gets his suction-hose down into the great
deep, he belongs to no age, but is an eternal man." That I call an
ignoble image, and one cannot conceive of Emerson himself printing
such a passage.
We hear it said that Whittier is the typical poet of New England. It
may be so, but Emerson is much the greater poet. Emerson is a poet of
the world, while Whittier's work is hardly known abroad at all.
Emerson is known wherever the English language is spoken. Not that
Emerson is in any sense a popular poet, such as, for example, Burns or
Byron, but he is the poet of the choice few, of those who seek poetry
that has some intellectual or spiritual content. Whittier wrote many
happy descriptions of New England scenes and seasons. "The Tent on the
Beach" and "Snow-Bound" come readily to mind; "The Playmate" is a
sweet poem, full of tender and human affection, but not a great poem.
Whittier had no profundity. Is not a Quaker poet necessarily narrow?
Whittier gave voice to the New England detestation of slavery, but by
no means so forcibly and profoundly as did Emerson. He had a theology,
but not a philosophy. I wonder if his poems are still read.
In his chapter called "Considerations by the Way," Emerson strikes
this curious false note in his rhetoric: "We have a right to be here
or we should not be here. We have the same right to be here that Cape
Cod and Sandy Hook have to be there." As if Cape Cod or Cape Horn or
Sandy Hook had any "rights"! This comparison of man with inanimate
things occurs in both Emerson and Thoreau. Thoreau sins in this way at
least once when he talks of the Attic wit of burning thorns and
briars. There is a similar false note in such a careful writer as Dean
Swift. He says to his young poet, "You are ever to try a good poem as
you would a sound pipkin, and if it rings well upon the knuckle, be
sure there is no flaw in it." Whitman compares himself with an
inanimate thing in the line:
"I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by."
But he claims no moral or human attributes or rights for his level; it
simply acts in obedience to the principle it embodies--the law of
gravitation.
The lecturer "gets away" with such things better than the writer. An
audience is not critical about such matters, but the reader takes note
of them. Mosaics will do on the platform, or in the pulpit, but will
not bear the nearer view of the study.
The incongruities of Emerson are seen in such passages as this: "Each
plant has its parasites, and each created thing its lover and poet,"
as if there were any relation between the two clauses of this
sentence--between parasites and lovers and poets! As if one should
say, "Woodchucks are often alive with fleas, and our fruit trees bloom
in May."
Emerson was so emboldened by what had been achieved through the
mastery of the earth's forces that he was led to say that "a wise
geology shall yet make the earthquake harmless, and the volcano an
agricultural resource." But this seems expecting too much. We have
harnessed the lightnings, but the earthquake is too deep and too
mighty for us. It is a steed upon which we cannot lay our hands. The
volcano we may draw upon for heat and steam, as we do upon the winds
and streams for power, but it is utterly beyond our control. The
bending of the earth's crust beneath the great atmospheric waves is
something we cannot bridle. The tides by sea as by land are beyond us.
Emerson had the mind of the prophet and the seer, and was given to
bold affirmations. The old Biblical distinction between the scribes
and the man who speaks with authority still holds. We may say of all
other New England essayists and poets--Lowell, Whipple, Tuckerman,
Holmes, Hillard, Whittier, Longfellow--that they are scribes only.
Emerson alone speaks as one having authority--the authority of the
spirit. "Thus saith the Lord"--it is this tone that gives him his
authority the world over.
I never tire of those heroic lines of his in which he sounds a
battle-cry to the spirit:
"Though love repine, and reason chafe,
There came a voice without reply,--
''T is man's perdition to be safe,
When for the truth he ought to die.'"
The last time I saw Emerson was at the Holmes seventieth-birthday
breakfast in 1879. The serious break in his health had resulted in a
marked aphasia, so that he could not speak the name of his nearest
friend, nor answer the simplest question. Yet he was as serene as
ever. Let the heavens fall--what matters it to me? his look seemed to
say.
Emerson's face had in it more of what we call the divine than had that
of any other author of his time--that wonderful, kindly, wise
smile--the smile of the soul--not merely the smile of good nature, but
the smile of spiritual welcome and hospitality.
Emerson had quality. A good Emersonian will recognize any passage from
the Sage in a book of quotations, even if no name is appended.
We speak of Emerson as outgrown, yet only yesterday I saw in J. Arthur
Thomson's recent Gifford Lectures on "The System of Animate Nature,"
repeated quotations from Emerson, mainly from his poetry. I think he
is no more likely to be outgrown than are Wordsworth and Arnold. Yet I
do not set the same value upon his poetry that I do upon that of
Wordsworth at his best.
Emerson is the last man we should expect to be guilty of
misinterpreting Nature, yet he does so at times. He does so in this
passage: "If Nature wants a thumb, she makes it at the cost of the
arms and legs." As if the arm were weaker or less efficient because of
the thumb. What would man's power be as a tool-using animal without
his strong, opposable thumb? His grasp would be gone.
He says truly that the gruesome, the disgusting, the repellent are not
fit subjects for cabinet pictures. The "sacred subjects" to which he
objects probably refer to the Crucifixion--the nails through the hands
and feet, and the crown of thorns. But to jump from that fact to the
assertion that Nature covers up the skeleton on the same grounds, is
absurd. Do not all vertebrates require an osseous system? In the
radiates and articulates she puts the bony system on the outside, but
when she comes to her backbone animals, she perforce puts her osseous
system beneath. She weaves her tissues and integuments of flesh and
skin and hair over it, not to hide it, but to use it. Would you have a
man like a jellyfish?
The same want of logic marks Carlyle's mind when he says: "The drop by
continually falling bores its way through the hardest rock. The hasty
torrent rushes over it with hideous uproar, and leaves no trace
behind." But give the "hasty torrent" the same time you give the drop,
and see what it will do to the rock!
Emerson says, "A little more or a little less does not signify
anything." But it does signify in this world of material things. Is
one man as impressive as an army, one tree as impressive as a forest?
"Scoop a little water in the hollow of your palm; take up a handful of
shore sand; well, these are the elements. What is the beach but acres
of sand? what is the ocean but cubic miles of water? A little more or
a little less signifies nothing." It is the mass that does impress us,
as Niagara does, as the midnight sky does. It is not as parts of this
"astonishing astronomy," or as a "part of the round globe under the
optical sky"--we do not think of that, but the imagination is moved by
the vast sweep of the ocean and its abysmal depths, and its ceaseless
rocking. In some cases we see the All in the little; the law that
spheres a tear spheres a globe. That Nature is seen in leasts is an
old Latin maxim. The soap bubble explains the rainbow. Steam from the
boiling kettle gave Watt the key to the steam engine; but a tumbler of
water throws no light on the sea, though its sweating may help explain
the rain.
Emerson quotes Goethe as saying, "The beautiful is a manifestation of
secret laws of nature which, but for this appearance, had been forever
concealed from us." As if beauty were an objective reality instead of
a subjective experience! As if it were something out there in the
landscape that you may gather your arms full of and bring in! If you
are an artist, you may bring in your vision of it, pass it through
your own mind, and thus embalm and preserve the beauty. Or if you are
a poet, you may have a similar experience and reproduce it, humanized,
in a poem. But the beauty is always a distilled and re-created, or,
shall we say, an incarnated beauty--a tangible and measurable
something, like moisture in the air, or sugar in the trees, or quartz
in the rocks. There is, and can be, no "science of beauty." Beauty,
like truth, is an experience of the mind. It is the emotion you feel
when in health you look from your door or window of a May morning. If
you are ill, or oppressed with grief, or worried, you will hardly
experience the emotion of the beautiful.
Emerson said he was warned by the fate of many philosophers not to
attempt a definition of beauty. But in trying to describe it and
characterize it he ran the same risk. "We ascribe beauty to that which
is simple," he said; "which has no superfluous parts; which exactly
answers its end; which stands related to all things; which is the mean
of many extremes." Is a boot-jack beautiful? Is a crow-bar? Yet these
are simple, they have no superfluous parts, they exactly serve their
ends, they stand related to all things through the laws of chemistry
and physics. A flower is beautiful, a shell on the beach is beautiful,
a tree in full leaf, or in its winter nudity, is beautiful; but these
things are not very simple. Complex things may be beautiful also. A
village church may be beautiful no less than a Gothic cathedral.
Emerson was himself a beautiful writer, a beautiful character, and his
works are a priceless addition to literature.
"Go out of the house to see the moon," says Emerson, "and it is mere
tinsel; it will not please as when its light shines upon your
necessary journey." This is not true in my experience. The stars do
not become mere tinsel, do they, when we go out to look at the
overwhelming spectacle? Neither does the moon. Is it not a delight in
itself to look at the full moon--
"The vitreous pour of the full moon, just tinged with blue,"
as Whitman says?
"The moon doth look round her with delight when the heavens are bare,"
says Wordsworth, and equally with delight do we regard the spectacle.
The busy farmer in the fields rarely sees the beauty of Nature. He has
not the necessary detachment. Put him behind his team and plough in
the spring and he makes a pleasing picture to look upon, but the mind
must be open to take in the beauty of Nature.
Of course Emerson is only emphasizing the fact of the beauty of
utility, of the things we do, of the buildings we put up for use, and
not merely for show. A hut, a log cabin in a clearing, a farmer's
unpainted barn, all have elements of beauty. A man leading a horse to
water, or foddering his cattle from a stack in a snow-covered field,
or following his plough, is always pleasing. Every day I pass along a
road by a wealthy man's estate and see a very elaborate stone wall of
cobblestones and cement which marks the boundary of his estate on the
highway. The wall does not bend and undulate with the inequalities of
the ground; its top is as level as a foundation wall; it is an offense
to every passer-by; it has none of the simplicity that should mark a
division wall; it is studied and elaborate, and courts your
admiration. How much more pleasing a rough wall of field stone, or
"wild stone," as our old wall-layer put it, with which the farmer
separates his fields! No thought of looks, but only of utility. The
showy, the highly ornate castle which the multimillionaire builds on
his estate--would an artist ever want to put one of them in his
picture? Beauty is likely to flee when we make a dead set at her.
Emerson's exaggerations are sometimes so excessive as to be simply
amusing, as, when speaking of the feats of the imagination, he says,
"My boots and chair and candlestick are fairies in disguise, meteors
and constellations." The baseball, revolving as it flies, may suggest
the orbs, or your girdle suggest the equator, or the wiping of your
face on a towel suggest the absorption of the rain by the soil; but
does the blacking of your shoes suggest anything celestial? Hinges and
levers and fulcrums are significant, but one's old hat, or old boots,
have not much poetic significance. An elm tree may suggest a
cathedral, or a shell suggest the rainbow, or the sparkling frost
suggest diamonds, or the thread that holds the beads symbolize the law
that strings the spheres, but a button is a button, a shoestring a
shoestring, and a spade a spade, and nothing more.
I cherish and revere the name of Emerson so profoundly, and owe him
such a debt, that it seems, after all, a pity to point out the flaws
in his precious amber.
Let us keep alive the Emersonian memories: that such a man has lived
and wrought among us. Let us teach our children his brave and heroic
words, and plant our lives upon as secure an ethical foundation as he
did. Let us make pilgrimages to Concord, and stand with uncovered
heads beneath the pine tree where his ashes rest. He left us an estate
in the fair land of the Ideal. He bequeathed us treasures that thieves
cannot break through and steal, nor time corrupt, nor rust nor moth
destroy.[2]
[Footnote 2: At the onset of the author's last illness he attempted to
rearrange and improve this essay, but was even then unequal to it,
and, after a little shifting and editing, gave it up. "Do what you can
with it," he said; and when I asked him if he could not add a few
words to close it, he sat up in bed, and wrote the closing sentences,
which proved to be the last he ever penned.--C. B.]