great poet should be regarded by a vast number of his countrymen, and
perhaps by the majority of the Paris mob which paid him the last
honors in so characteristic a way, as a revolutionary politician and a
democratic leader. We will take the privilege of the foreigner to
leave out that side of his life as much as may be practicable.
"Napoleon le Petit" and the "Histoire d'un Crime" are works but little
worthy of his genius. Political animosities, sharpened by personal
grievances, have in many cases an immense immediate effect in
literature, but they pay for this easy success by speedy collapse; and
scarcely even the magnificent rhetoric and splendid vituperation of
"Les Chatiments" will keep them living when the world has forgotten
the lesser Napoleon, as it already begins to do. His patriotic fury,
the impassioned utterances of his exile, the tremendous force of
feeling with which he flung himself into the struggles of France, took
up a large share of Victor Hugo's life, and will procure him a certain
place in the historical records of his period. But when all the
commotion and the din have died away, as indeed in a great measure
they have already done, these fiery diatribes, these burning
lava-streams, will be of little more importance than the dustiest
"memoires pour servir"--materials from which the historian, with much
smoothing down and apologies for the pyrotechnics of a past age, will
take here and there a vivid touch to illustrate his theories or
brighten his narrative. They will retain, too, a certain importance as
autobiography. But fortunately the great mass of the work which Victor
Hugo has left behind him can be separated from the polemics of his
troubled age and fiery temper. It is not in any sense a peaceful
literature. Conflict is its very inspiration. The struggle of human
misery with all the confusing and overbearing forces of life; of
poverty with the requirements and oppressions of wealth; of the small
with the great; of the people with tyrants; of Man with Fate--these
are his subjects, and he is never an impartial historian. He is on the
side of the weak in every combat, the partisan of the oppressed. But
this does not detract from his work when his opponents are the
oppressors of the past, or the still more subtle, veiled, and
unassailable forces of Destiny. The poet's region is there: he is
born, if not to set right the times which are out of joint, at least
to read to the world the high and often terrible lesson of the ages.
But it vulgarizes his work when he is seen, tooth and nail, in violent
personal conflict with foemen unworthy of his steel, embalming in
poetry the trivial or the uncompleted incidents of contemporary
warfare. It becomes almost ludicrous, indeed, when we find him pouring
forth page after page of vehement and burning complaint in respect to
the personal sufferings inflicted on himself, when we know that
throughout his career Hugo never knew what the cold shock of failure
was, and that, from the moment when Chateaubriand adopted him into the
ranks of the poets as _l'enfant sublime_, until the moment when all
Paris conducted him to his last resting-place, no man has had a more
enthusiastic following, or accomplished a more triumphant career.
Victor Hugo was a son of the Revolution. He was born, as it were,
between the two camps, at a moment when France was the theatre of the
greatest popular struggle in modern history, of a mother who was a
Breton and a Legitimist, and a father who was a Republican general--an
extraordinary combination. This does not seem, however, to have made,
as we might think, family life impossible, for Madame Hugo and her
children followed the drum, and, notwithstanding all differences of
opinion, found it possible to keep together. He was educated, it would
appear, under his mother's influence rather than that of the
soldier-father, and did not, till his mind was quite mature, throw
himself into the revolutionary opinions which afterward influenced him
so greatly. A Royalist in the Restoration period, an observant but not
excited spectator of public affairs from 1830 to 1848, it was not till
the _coup d'etat_ and the beginning of the reign of the third Napoleon
that he was seized with the passion of political life. That great
betrayal seems to have stung him to a frenzied resistance and put
poison in his veins. His country was cheated and betrayed; the liberty
for which she had made so many exertions, both heroic and fantastical,
taken from her; and his own personal liberty and safety threatened.
Victor Hugo's soul then burst into _feu et flamme_. He caught fire
like a volcano long silent, a burning mountain that had simulated
quiet unawares, and clothed itself with vineyards and villages. In the
tranquil days when Louis-Philippe plotted and pottered, and France lay
dormant, amusing her restrained spirit with the outbreak of the
romantic against the classical, and taking pleasure in the burst of
genius which had arisen suddenly and unawares in her midst, the poet
was so little dissatisfied with the _bourgeois regime_ that he
accepted the title of "pair de France." Montalembert had received it
some time before. There must have been something soothing, not
inharmonious to the poetical mind, in the slumbrous reign which
gradually became intolerable to the commonalty and got itself into
contempt with all the world. The young poets of the time were
peaceful, not discontented. Full of energy as they were, they took no
part in the gathering storm. Hugo, a peer, tranquil in the superior
chamber; young De Musset, a courtier of the Duke of Orleans, and
hoping for the king's notice of his verses. The eruption was
preparing, the subterranean fires alight; but the sons of genius took
no notice. When the tremendous awakening came, it must, in the case of
Hugo at least, have gained additional force from the long restraint.
He was in the height of life, a man of forty-six, the leader of the
romantic school, which by that time had overcome opposition and won
the freedom for which it contended, the author of "Hernani" and the
other great plays which form one of his chief titles to fame, and of
volumes of lyrics which had taken the very heart of the French people,
and given a new development to the language. And it was also during
this peaceful period that he had taken in another direction a first
step of unexampled power and brilliancy in the romance of "Notre
Dame." Even among men of acknowledged genius, few have done so much in
a lifetime as Victor Hugo had done up to this break in his career. We
are so accustomed to the attitude of demagogue which he took
afterward, to the violent revolutionary, the furious exile, the
denunciatory prophet of the "Chatiments," that it is strange to
realize that his later aspect was prefaced by a long, peaceful, and
prosperous beginning. France had never seen a more magnificent band
than that which surrounded him, and which has made the reign of the
_Roi-bourgeois_ illustrious in spite of itself; and it is curious to
mark that these great intelligences did not object to their ruler nor
to his ways, but lived like good citizens, with but an occasional
fling at semi-sentimental politics. Hugo was the champion of abstract
right in all the discussions in which he took part. He it was who
proposed, among other things, that the Bonaparte family should be
permitted to return to France. Perhaps, had he been less abstract and
logical, and more moved by the laws of expediency, it might have been
better both for France and for himself.
The plays which he produced in this time of prosperous calm and
apparent peace are without question the most remarkable dramatic works
of this century, and several of them will, we have no doubt, take
their place permanently among the few of all ages and countries which
the world will not willingly let die.
While these plays were being written, and the mind of their author
reaching its full development, the fountains of pure poetry, those
outbursts of song which are often the most delightful and dear of all
the utterances of the poet, were flowing forth, refreshing and
fertilizing French literature, and giving a noble utterance to the new
thought and rising energy of the times. His youth gave forth some
uncertain notes, his fancy roaming from Bourbon to Bonaparte. But that
his imagination should have been seized by the recollection of the
great Napoleon is so natural, so inevitable, one would suppose, for
every young Frenchman, and especially for the son of a Bonapartist
general, that there would have been something lacking in him had he
escaped that enthusiasm. Apart from these waves of national sentiment,
and from the vague music of the "Orientales" and other such preludes
and symphonies, there is poetry enough in the various volumes which
followed each other at uncertain intervals, to have fully furnished
one man of genius with fame enough for what we call immortality. Hugo
has enough and to spare for all subjects that occurred to him. A
sunset, a landscape, a love song, alternate in his pages with a
philosophical discussion, or a brief and brilliant scene snatched from
history, from contemporary life, from his own inner existence, all
clothed in the noblest verse of which the French language is capable.
His power over that language is boundless, the wealth of an utterance
which never pauses for a word, which disregards all rules yet
glorifies them, which is ready for every suggestion, and finds nothing
too terrible, nothing too tender for the tongue which, at his bidding,
leaps into blazing eloquence, or rolls in clouds and thunder, or
murmurs with the accent of a dove. Never had there been so great a
gamut, a compass so extended.
It is not, however, upon his poetry, either in the form of drama,
lyric, or narrative, that his fame out of France, or at least in
England, is founded. There is no more usual deliverance of superficial
criticism than that which declares French poetry in general to be
either nought--which is still a not uncommon notion--or at least not
great enough to be worth the study which alone could make it
comprehensible. There are many good people who dare to say this, yet
live, audacious, and unconscious of their folly. We have, however, to
consider Victor Hugo on a ground which no one ventures to dispute. The
great romances--for which we should like to invent another name--which
we cannot call novels, and which are too majestic even for the title
of romance, though that means something more than the corresponding
word in English--are in their kind and period the greatest works
produced in his time.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
By MONCURE D. CONWAY
(1803-1882)
[Illustration: Ralph Waldo Emerson.]
On the 30th day of April, 1882, Ralph Waldo Emerson was "gathered to
his fathers," at Concord, Mass. The simple Hebrew phrase was never
more appropriate, for his ancestors had founded the town and been
foremost at every period of its remarkable history. More than two
hundred and fifty years ago John Eliot, who had gone from the
University of Cambridge, England, to be the "Apostle of the Indians,"
found on the banks of the Musketaquid a settlement of natives, into
whose language he translated the New Testament. In 1634, the Rev.
Peter Bulkeley, of Bedfordshire, whose Puritan proclivities brought
him under the ban of Laud, migrated with a number of his parishioners
to New England; these settled themselves at Musketaquid, which they
named Concord. In the next year went, from County Durham probably,
Thomas Emerson, whose son married a Bulkeley, and his grandson Rebecca
Waldo, descendant of a family of the Waldenses. It was at Concord that
the soldiers of George III. first met with resistance. Along the road
where many Englishmen have walked with Emerson and Hawthorne, the
retreat took place, and wounded soldiers were taken into homes they
had invaded to learn the meaning of love to enemies. Some of these
brave men never again left the village where they were so kindly
nursed. Concord, with its thirteen hundred inhabitants, supplied
Washington's army with wood and hay, and suffering Boston with grain
and money, with a generosity that shines in American annals.
Washington's headquarters were at Craigie House, so long the home of
Longfellow, and the Harvard buildings being used as barracks, the
university was transferred to Concord.
No mere literary estimate of Emerson's writings can adequately report
the man or his work. The value placed upon him by Americans appears
strangely exaggerated beside the contemporary English criticism. It
were, indeed, easy to cite from European thinkers--Carlyle, Quinet,
John Sterling, Arthur Clough, Tyndall, Herman Grimm--words concerning
Emerson glowing as those of Margaret Fuller, Hawthorne, Curtis,
Lowell, and other American authors; but if such tributes from
individual minds are universally felt in America alone, to be simplest
truth and soberness, it is because Emerson cannot be seen detached
from the cumulative tendencies summed up in him, and from the
indefinable revolution in which they found, and still find,
expression.
The father of Emerson was a Unitarian preacher of fine culture,
melodious voice, handsome person, and especially noted for his
paramount interest in the ethical and universal element of religion.
He died in 1811, at the age of forty-two, leaving his five sons, of
whom Waldo, then eight years old, was the second, to the care of his
young wife, who had been Ruth Haskins, of Boston. Emerson's early
growth was under the fostering care of good and refined women. His
mother has been described by one who knew her, the late Dr.
Frothingham, as "of a discerning spirit, and a most courteous bearing;
one who knew how to guide the affairs of her own house, as long as she
was responsible for that, with the sweetest authority. Both her mind
and character were of a superior order, and they set their stamp upon
manners of peculiar softness and natural grace and quiet dignity." She
was assisted in bringing up her family by her sister-in-law, Mary
Emerson, a scholarly woman, well read in theology and philosophy,
whose original ideas and sayings marked her as "a character." Another
woman who exercised a great influence upon him was Sarah Bradford,
afterward married to his relative, Samuel Ripley. She was as thorough
a Greek scholar as any person in America, a good mathematician, and a
diligent student of science. Many a Harvard student has she coached in
that Old Manse where she resided until her death (1867), and where the
writer of this has often listened with admiration to her extraordinary
conversation. At the same time nothing could have exceeded the
practical wisdom and tact with which her household was regulated. "She
was absolutely without pedantry," said Emerson. "Nobody ever heard of
her learning until a necessity came for its use, and then nothing
could be more simple than her solution of the problem proposed to
her." At eleven years of age, when Emerson was in the Latin school at
Boston, he used to send his translations, generally poetic, to Sarah
Bradford for criticism. The "Fates" of Michael Angelo, a large copy of
which hung in Emerson's study, must sometimes have softened to the
faces of the Ruth and Mary and Sarah, who spun for him the fine golden
thread of destiny. Mrs. Emerson had the happiness of seeing four of
her sons distinguished for their ability; indeed, it seemed for a time
doubtful whether William, Waldo, Edward, or Charles promised the more
brilliant career. When the two elder had graduated at Harvard
University, they taught at school in order to aid the two younger in
completing their course; but these two died prematurely. William was
to have been the preacher of the family, but, while pursuing his
studies in Germany, he found that he could not honestly follow his
father's profession--albeit Goethe, whom he knew, sought to persuade
him otherwise. He afterward became an eminent lawyer. His mother's
disappointment at this probably led to Emerson's adoption of the
profession that his brother had declined. He graduated at eighteen,
with a reputation for classical knowledge, general literary culture,
and elocution. He had won the Boylston prize for "declamation," and
was chosen by his class to deliver the usual poem at graduation. I
have heard him say that it was then his ambition to become a teacher
of elocution, and that he still regarded it as a less humble
aspiration than it might seem. Those who have sat under the spell of
Emerson's discourse would certainly never associate anything commonly
called rhetoric with him; but I derived, from conversation with him,
that his discontent with conventionalisms of thought first took this
form of dissatisfaction with the conventional oratory. He thought
there might be taught an art of putting things so that they could not
be gainsaid. But a man must really hold that which he is to state
successfully. He startled me by saying, "I believe that a really
eloquent man, though an atheist, or whatever his opinions, would be
listened to by any educated congregation in Boston." No one, he said,
could discover the charm of Channing's preaching by reading his
sermons; there was the heart that rose up to meet him: here was
something sufficient, and the multitude went off radiant, fed,
satisfied. But Emerson was to teach the new art of eloquence by
example.
In 1823, now twenty years of age, Emerson began his studies in
theology. Though often attending lectures in Harvard Divinity College
he never regularly entered there, but still sat at the feet of
Channing, who took a deep personal interest in him. He was
"approbated" by the Ministers' Association in 1826. His health having
suffered by overwork he passed a winter in the South, and in the
following year preached several Sundays at New Bedford, Mass., where
he found some friends among the Quakers. He also preached for a time
in Concord. In 1829 he was chosen minister of a large congregation in
Boston. A venerable minister gave me an account of a sermon he heard
from Emerson in those days, impressed on his memory by the vitality it
infused in an old theme, and the simplicity with which it was
delivered. The text was, "What is a man profited if he shall gain the
whole world and lose his own soul?" The emphasis was on the word
"own;" and the general theme was, that to every man the great end of
existence was the preservation and culture of his individual mind and
character. Each man must be saved by his own inward redeemer; and the
whole world was for each but a plastic material through which the
individual spirit was to realize itself. Aspiration and thought become
clear and real only by action and life. If knowledge lead not to
action, it passes away, being preserved only on the condition of being
used. "The last thing," said my informant, "that any of us who heard
him would have predicted of the youth, whose quiet simplicity and
piety captivated all, was that he would become the religious
revolutionist of America."
And, indeed, so softly did the old religious forms slip away from
Emerson, that when he informed his congregation that he could not
longer administer the sacrament to them, they could not associate any
formidable heresy with his position. They were loath to part with him.
In the three years of his ministry he had reflected honor upon their
pulpit. He had been active in the philanthropic work of Boston, was
chaplain of the Legislature, and on the School Board. A few months
after his settlement in Boston he had married Ellen Louisa Tucker and
a few months before he gave up his pulpit she died. Under these
circumstances of depression Emerson came on his first visit to Europe.
The record of his pilgrimage to Coleridge's house at Highgate, to
Rydal Mount, and to Craigenputtock, is given in Emerson's "English
Traits." He came, hoping to find light upon more serious questions
than any that had arisen between him and his Boston congregation; he
returned with but one thing made clearer, namely that he had begun an
ascent which each must climb alone.
The Old Manse was built in 1767 for Emerson's grandfather, who had
become minister of Concord church. Emerson's father was the first
child born in it, and used to claim that he was "in arms" on the field
when the British were repulsed, being six years old when the fight
occurred close to the windows. In this house we now find Emerson, at
the age of thirty-one, studying Plato and Plotinus, and the English
mystics, but also, with Sarah Ripley, studying Goethe and savants of
the new school, like Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire. Here was conceived his
first book, "Nature." This essay was published in 1836, the same year
in which he wrote the Concord hymn, since annually sung, with its line
about "the shot heard round the world." The little book was not at
once heard so far, but it proved also the first shot of a revolution.
A writer in the _Saturday Review_ speaks of "the great men whom
America and England have jointly lost"--Emerson and Darwin--and
remarks that "some of those who have been forward in taking up and
advancing the impulse given by Darwin, not only on the general ground
where it started, but as a source of energy in the wider application
of scientific thought, have once and again openly declared that they
owe not a little to Emerson." This just remark may be illustrated by
Dr. Tyndall's words, in 1873: "The first time I ever knew Waldo
Emerson was when, years ago, I picked up at a stall a copy of his
'Nature'; I read it with such delight, and I have never ceased to read
it; and if anyone can be said to have given the impulse to my mind it
is Emerson; whatever I have done the world owes him." But there is
still more significance in this matter. In 1836, when Darwin returned
from his voyage round the world, Emerson's "Nature" appeared, in which
the new world discovered by the Englishman was ideally recognized by
the American.
In 1835 Emerson was married to Lidian Jackson, sister of the late Dr.
C. T. Jackson, well known in connection with the discovery of
anaesthetics. The Concord house and farm were now purchased, and
Emerson's mother came to reside with him. The first works of Emerson
brought to his doors those strange pilgrims whom Hawthorne has
described in his "Mosses from an old Manse." Lover of solitude as he
was, the new teacher had never the heart to send empty from his door
anyone of those dejected people groping for the light who sought him
out. Mrs. Emerson, a lady of refined sensibilities and profoundly
religious nature, must often have been severely tried by these
throngs, but not even delicate health prevented her from exercising a
large and beautiful hospitality to these spiritually lame, halt, and
heart-sick who came to receive a healing touch. Though never ruffled,
Emerson was not defenceless before boorish intruders. On one occasion
a boisterous declaimer against "the conventionalities," who kept on
his hat in the drawing-room after invitation to lay it aside, was
told, "We will continue the conversation in the garden," and was
genially taken out of doors to enter them no more. Few were the sane,
as he told me, who visited him in those earlier days, but the unsane
were pretty generally those whose first instinct under any new light
is to get it into a tabernacle. Fortunately for Emerson and his
household, some of his ablest friends conceived the idea of founding a
new society on his principles at Brook Farm, near Boston; but,
unfortunately for that community, the unsane folk flocked to it, and
it was speedily brought to nought. Some able men, like George Ripley,
George Curtis, and Charles Dana, belonged to that community in their
youth, but probably Hawthorne wrote the experience of all of them
when, just after leaving it, he entered in his note-book (1841),
"Really I should judge it to be twenty years since I left Brook
Farm.... It already looks like a dream behind me. The real Me was
never a member of the community; there had been a spectral appearance
there, sounding the horn at daybreak, and milking the cows, and hoeing
the potatoes, and raking hay, toiling in the sun, and doing me the
honor to assume my name. But this spectre was not myself." The
Transcendental Club, too, which preceded this, and which met a few
times at the house of Dr. Channing (who tried to comprehend the new
ideas, and was always the friend of Emerson), failed. The quarterly
magazine that was started, the _Dial_, did more. Four volumes of it
appeared, and to this day they are so interesting that it is a wonder
they have not been reprinted; but the serene hours thereon marked were
speedily succeeded by days of strife and storm, in which the writers
of that periodical were summoned to be leaders. Emerson remained in
his home. He now and then visited Brook Farm, but was shrewd enough to
foresee its catastrophe from the first. The child who sought her lost
butterfly with tears, not knowing that it was softly perched upon her
head, had a counterpart in the many enthusiasts, who continued to seek
in communities or new sects the beauty which had floated before their
eyes; but some there were who made the happier discovery that a quiet
New England village, with its cultivated families, in whose Town Hall
Emerson taught, was ideal enough. Gradually Prospero drew around him
the spirits to which he was related, and Concord became the
intellectual centre of the country.