expounded Hegel. But there were many other lecturers. Mrs. Edna Cheney
talked to us about art; though all that I recall of her conversation is
the fact that she pronounced _always olways_, and I wondered if that was
the regular Boston pronunciation. Dr. Jones, the self-taught Platonist
of Jacksonville, Illinois, interpreted Plato. Quite a throng of his
disciples, mostly women, had followed him from Illinois and swelled the
numbers of the Summer School. Once Professor Benjamin Peirce, the great
Harvard mathematician, came over from Cambridge, and read us one of his
Lowell Institute lectures, on the Ideality of Mathematics. He had a most
distinguished presence and an eye, as was said, of black fire. The
Harvard undergraduates of my time used to call him Benny Peirce; and on
the fly leaves of their mathematical text books they would write, "Who
steals my Peirce steals trash." Colonel T. W. Higginson read a single
lecture on American literature, from which I carried away for future use
a delightful story about an excellent Boston merchant who, being asked
at a Goethe birthday dinner to make a few remarks, said that he "guessed
that Go-ethe was the N. P. Willis of Germany."
Colonel Higginson's lecture was to me a green oasis in the arid desert
of metaphysics, but it was regarded by earnest truth-seekers in the
class as quite irrelevant to the purposes of the course. The lecturer
himself confided to me at the close of the session a suspicion that his
audience cared more for philosophy than for literature. Once or twice
Mr. Emerson visited the School, taking no part in its proceedings, but
sitting patiently through the hour, and wearing what a newspaper
reporter described as his "wise smile." After the lecture for the
session was ended, the subject was thrown open to discussion and there
was an opportunity to ask questions. Most of us were shy to speak out in
that presence, feeling ourselves in a state of pupilage. Usually there
would be a silence of several minutes, as at a Quaker meeting waiting
for the spirit to move; and then Mr. Alcott would announce in his
solemn, musical tones "I have a thought"; and after a weighty pause,
proceed to some Orphic utterance. Alcott, indeed, was what might be
called the leader on the floor; and he was ably seconded by Miss
Elizabeth Peabody, the sister of Nathaniel Hawthorne's wife. Miss
Peabody was well known as the introducer of the German kindergarten, and
for her life-long zeal in behalf of all kinds of philanthropies and
reforms. Henry James was accused of having caricatured her in his novel
"The Bostonians," in the figure of the dear, visionary, vaguely
benevolent old lady who is perpetually engaged in promoting "causes,"
attending conventions, carrying on correspondence, forming committees,
drawing up resolutions, and the like; and who has so many "causes" on
hand at once that she gets them all mixed up and cannot remember which
of her friends are spiritualists and which of them are concerned in
woman's rights movements, temperance agitations, and universal peace
associations. Mr. James denied that he meant Miss Peabody, whom he had
never met or known. If so, he certainly divined the type. In her later
years, Miss Peabody was nicknamed "the grandmother of Boston."
I have to acknowledge, to my shame, that I was often a truant to the
discussions of the School, which met three hours in the morning and
three in the afternoon. The weather was hot and the air in the Orchard
House was drowsy. There were many outside attractions, and more and more
I was tempted to leave the philosophers to reason high--
Of providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate--
Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute--
while I wandered off through the woods for a bath in Walden, some one
and a half miles away, through whose transparent waters the pebbles on
the bottom could be plainly seen at a depth of thirty feet. Sometimes I
went farther afield to White Pond, described by Thoreau, or Baker Farm,
sung by Ellery Channing. A pleasant young fellow at Miss Emma Barrett's
boarding house, who had no philosophy, but was a great hand at picnics
and boating and black-berrying parties, paddled me up the Assabeth, or
North Branch, in his canoe, and drove me over to Longfellow's Wayside
Inn at Sudbury. And so it happens that, when I look back at my fortnight
at Concord, what I think of is not so much the murmurous auditorium of
the Orchard House, as the row of colossal sycamores along the village
sidewalk that led us thither, whose smooth, mottled trunks in the
moonlight resembled a range of Egyptian temple columns. Or I haunt again
at twilight the grounds of the Old Manse, where Hawthorne wrote his
"Mosses," and the grassy lane beside it leading down to the site of the
rude bridge and the first battlefield of the Revolution. Here were the
headstones of the two British soldiers, buried where they fell; here the
Concord monument erected in 1836:
On this green bank, by this soft stream
We set to-day a votive stone:
That memory may their deed redeem
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.
In the field across the river was the spirited statue of the minuteman,
designed by young Daniel Chester French, a Concord boy who has since
distinguished himself as a sculptor in wider fields and more imposing
works.
The social life of Concord, judging from such glimpses as could be had
of it, was peculiar. It was the life of a village community, marked by
the friendly simplicity of country neighbors, but marked also by unusual
intellectual distinction and an addiction to "the things of the mind."
The town was not at all provincial, or what the Germans call
_kleinstädtisch_:--cosmopolitan, rather, as lying on the highway of
thought. It gave one a thrill, for example, to meet Mr. Emerson coming
from the Post Office with his mail, like any ordinary citizen. The petty
constraint, the narrow standards of conduct which are sometimes the bane
of village life were almost unknown. Transcendental freedom of
speculation, all manner of heterodoxies, and the individual queernesses
of those whom the world calls "cranks," had produced a general
tolerance. Thus it was said, that the only reason why services were held
in the Unitarian Church on Sunday was because Judge Hoar didn't quite
like to play whist on that day. Many of the Concord houses have gardens
bordering upon the river; and I was interested to notice that the boats
moored at the bank had painted on their sterns plant names or bird
names taken from the Concord poems--such as "The Rhodora," "The Veery,"
"The Linnæa," and "The Wood Thrush." Many a summer hour I spent with
Edward Hoar in his skiff, rowing, or sailing, or floating up and down on
this soft Concord stream--Musketaquit, or "grass-ground river"--moving
through miles of meadow, fringed with willows and button bushes, with a
current so languid, said Hawthorne, that the eye cannot detect which way
it flows. Sometimes we sailed as far as Fair Haven Bay, whose "dark and
sober billows," "when the wind blows freshly on a raw March day,"
Thoreau thought as fine as anything on Lake Huron or the northwest
coast. Nor were we, I hope, altogether unperceiving of that other river
which Emerson detected flowing underneath the Concord--
Thy summer voice, Musketaquit,
Repeats the music of the rain,
But sweeter rivers pulsing flit
Through thee as though through Concord plain....
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.
Edward Hoar had been Thoreau's companion in one of his visits to the
Maine woods. He knew the flora and fauna of Concord as well as his
friend the poet-naturalist. He had a large experience of the world, had
run a ranch in New Mexico and an orange plantation in Sicily. He was not
so well known to the public as his brothers, Rockwood Hoar, Attorney
General in Grant's Cabinet, and the late Senator George Frisbie Hoar, of
Worcester; but I am persuaded that he was just as good company; and,
then, neither of these distinguished gentlemen would have wasted whole
afternoons in eating the lotus along the quiet reaches of the
Musketaquit with a stripling philosopher.
The appetite for discussion not being fully satisfied by the stated
meetings of the School in the Orchard House, the hospitable Concord
folks opened their houses for informal symposia in the evenings. I was
privileged to make one of a company that gathered in Emerson's library.
The subject for the evening was Shakespeare, and Emerson read, by
request, that mysterious little poem "The Phoenix and the Turtle,"
attributed to Shakespeare on rather doubtful evidence, but included for
some reason in Emerson's volume of favorite selections, "Parnassus." He
began by saying that he would not himself have chosen this particular
piece, but as it had been chosen for him he would read it. And this he
did, with that clean-cut, refined enunciation and subtle distribution of
emphasis which made the charm of his delivery as a lyceum lecturer. When
he came to the couplet,
Truth may seem, but cannot be,
Beauty brag, but 'tis not she,
I thought that I detected an idealistic implication in the lines which
accounted for their presence in "Parnassus."
That shy recluse, Ellery Channing, most eccentric of the
transcendentalists, was not to be found at the School or the evening
symposia. He had married a sister of Margaret Fuller, but for years he
had lived alone and done for himself, and his oddities had increased
upon him with the years. I had read and liked many of his poems--those
poems so savagely cut up by Poe, when first published in 1843--and my
expressed interest in these foundlings of the Muse gave me the
opportunity to meet the author of "A Poet's Hope" at one hospitable
table where he was accustomed to sup on a stated evening every week.
The Concord Summer School of Philosophy went on for ten successive
years, but I never managed to attend another session. A friend from New
Haven, who was there for a few days in 1880, brought back the news that
a certain young lady who was just beginning the study of Hegel the year
before, had now got up to the second intention, and hoped in time to
attain the sixth. I never got far enough in Mr. Harris's lectures to
discover what Hegelian intentions were; but my friend spoke of them as
if they were something like degrees in Masonry. In 1905 I visited
Concord for the first and only time in twenty-six years. There is a good
deal of philosophy in Wordsworth's Yarrow poems--
For when we're there, although 'tis fair,
'Twill be another Yarrow!--
and I have heard it suggested that he might well have added to his
trilogy, a fourth member, "Yarrow Unrevisited." There is a loss, though
Concord bears the strain better than most places, I think. As we go on
in life the world gets full of ghosts, and at the capital of
transcendentalism I was peculiarly conscious of the haunting of these
spiritual presences. Since I had been there before, Emerson and Alcott
and Ellery Channing and my courteous host and companion, Edward Hoar,
and my kind old landlady Miss Barrett--who had also been Emerson's
landlady and indeed everybody's landlady in Concord, and whom her
youngest boarders addressed affectionately as Emma--all these and many
more had joined the sleepers in Sleepy Hollow. The town itself has
suffered comparatively few changes. True there is a trolley line through
the main street--oddly called "The Milldam," and in Walden wood I met an
automobile not far from the cairn, or stone pile, which marks the site
of Thoreau's cabin. But the woods themselves were intact and the limpid
waters of the pond had not been tapped to furnish power for any electric
light company. The Old Manse looked much the same, and so did the
Wayside and the Orchard House. Not a tree was missing from the mystic
ring of tall pines in front of Emerson's house at the fork of the
Cambridge and Lexington roads. On the central square the ancient tavern
was gone where I had lodged on the night of my arrival and where my
host, a practical philosopher--everyone in Concord had his
philosophy,--took a gloomy view of the local potentialities of the hotel
business. He said there was nothing doing--some milk and asparagus were
raised for the Boston market, but the inhabitants were mostly literary
people. "I suppose," he added, "we've got the smartest literary man in
the country living right here." "You mean Mr. Emerson," I suggested.
"Yes, sir, and a gentleman too."
"And Alcott?" I ventured.
"Oh, Alcott! The best thing he ever did was his daughters."
This inn was gone, but the still more ancient one across the square
remains, the tavern where Major Pitcairn dined on the day of the
Lexington fight, and from whose windows or door steps he is alleged by
the history books to have cried to a group of embattled farmers,
"Disperse, ye Yankee rebels."
Concord is well preserved. Still there are subtle indications of the
flight of time. For one thing, the literary pilgrimage business has
increased, partly no doubt because trolleys, automobiles, and bicycles
have made the town more accessible; but also because our literature is a
generation older than it was in 1879. The study of American authors has
been systematically introduced into the public schools. The men who made
Concord famous are dead, but their habitat has become increasingly
classic ground as they themselves have receded into a dignified,
historic past. At any rate, the trail of the excursionist--the "cheap
tripper," as he is called in England,--is over it all. Basket parties
had evidently eaten many a luncheon on the first battle-field of the
Revolution, and notices were posted about, asking the public not to
deface the trees, and instructing them where to put their paper
wrappers and _fragmenta regalia_. I could imagine Boston schoolma'ams
pointing out to their classes, the minuteman, the monument, and other
objects of interest, and calling for names and dates. The shores of
Walden were trampled and worn in spots. There were springboards there
for diving, and traces of the picnicker were everywhere. Trespassers
were warned away from the grounds of the Old Manse and similar historic
spots, by signs of "Private Property."
Concord has grown more self-conscious under the pressure of all this
publicity and resort. Tablets and inscriptions have been put up at
points of interest. As I was reading one of these on the square, I was
approached by a man who handed me a business card with photographs of
the monument, the Wayside, the four-hundred-year-old oak, with
information to the effect that Mr. ---- would furnish guides and livery
teams about the town and to places as far distant as Walden Pond and
Sudbury Inn. Thus poetry becomes an asset, and transcendentalism is
exploited after the poet and the philosopher are dead. It took Emerson
eleven years to sell five hundred copies of "Nature," and Thoreau's
books came back upon his hands as unsalable and were piled up in the
attic like cord-wood. I was impressed anew with the tameness of the
Concord landscape. There is nothing salient about it: it is the average
mean of New England nature. Berkshire is incomparably more beautiful.
And yet those flat meadows and low hills and slow streams are dear to
the imagination, since genius has looked upon them and made them its
own. "The eye," said Emerson, "is the first circle: the horizon the
second."
And the Concord books--how do they bear the test of revisitation? To me,
at least, they have--even some of the second-rate papers in the "Dial"
have--now nearly fifty years since I read them first, that freshness
which is the mark of immortality.
No ray is dimmed, no atom worn:
My oldest force is good as new;
And the fresh rose on yonder thorn
Gives back the bending heavens in dew.
I think I do not mistake, and confer upon them the youth which was then
mine. No, the morning light had touched their foreheads: the
youthfulness was in _them_.
Lately I saw a newspaper item about one of the thirty thousand literary
pilgrims who are said to visit Concord annually. Calling upon Mr.
Sanborn, he asked him which of the Concord authors he thought would last
longest. The answer, somewhat to his surprise, was "Thoreau." I do not
know whether this report is authentic; but supposing it true, it is not
inexplicable. I will confess that, of recent years, I find myself
reading Thoreau more and Emerson less. "Walden" seems to me more of a
book than Emerson ever wrote. Emerson's was incomparably the larger
nature, the more liberal and gracious soul. His, too, was the seminal
mind; though Lowell was unfair to the disciple, when he described him as
a pistillate blossom fertilized by the Emersonian pollen. For Thoreau
had an originality of his own--a flavor as individual as the tang of the
bog cranberry, or the wild apples which he loved. One secure advantage
he possesses in the concreteness of his subject-matter. The master, with
his abstract habit of mind and his view of the merely phenomenal
character of the objects of sense, took up a somewhat incurious attitude
towards details, not thinking it worth while to "examine too
microscopically the universal tablet." The disciple, though he professed
that the other world was all his art, had a sharp eye for this. Emerson
was Nature's lover, but Thoreau was her scholar. Emerson's method was
intuition, while Thoreau's was observation. He worked harder than
Emerson and knew more,--that is, within certain defined limits. Thus he
read the Greek poets in the original. Emerson, in whom there was a
spice of indolence--due, say his biographers, to feeble health in early
life, and the need of going slow,--read them in translations and excused
himself on the ground that he liked to be beholden to the great English
language.
Compare Hawthorne's description, in the "Mosses," of a day spent on the
Assabeth with Ellery Channing, with any chapter in Thoreau's "Week."
Moonlight and high noon! The great romancer gives a dreamy, poetic
version of the river landscape, musically phrased, pictorially composed,
dissolved in atmosphere--a lovely piece of literary art, with the soft
blur of a mezzotint engraving, say, from the designs by Turner in
Rogers's "Italy." Thoreau, equally imaginative in his way, writes like a
botanist, naturalist, surveyor, and local antiquary; and in a pungent,
practical, business-like style--a style, as was said of Dante, in which
words are things. Yet which of these was the true transcendentalist?
Matthew Arnold's discourse on Emerson was received with strong dissent
in Boston, where it was delivered, and in Concord, where it was read
with indignation. The critic seemed to be taking away, one after
another, our venerated master's claims as a poet, a man of letters, and
a philosopher. What! Gray a great poet, and Emerson not! Addison a
great writer, and Emerson not! Surely there are heights and depths in
Emerson, an inspiring power, an originality and force of thought which
are neither in Gray nor in Addison. And how can these denials be
consistent with the sentence near the end of the discourse, pronouncing
Emerson's essays the most important work done in English prose during
the nineteenth century--more important than Carlyle's? A truly enormous
concession this; how to reconcile it with those preceding blasphemies?
Let not the lightning strike me if I say that I think Arnold was
right--as he usually was right in a question of taste or critical
discernment. For Emerson was essentially a prophet and theosophist, and
not a man of letters, or creative artist. He could not have written a
song or a story or a play. Arnold complains of his want of concreteness.
The essay was his chosen medium, well-nigh the least concrete, the least
literary of forms. And it was not even the personal essay, like Elia's,
that he practised, but an abstract variety, a lyceum lecture, a
moralizing discourse or sermon. For the clerical virus was strong in
Emerson, and it was not for nothing that he was descended from eight
generations of preachers. His concern was primarily with religion and
ethics, not with the tragedy and comedy of personal lives, this motley
face of things, _das bunte Menschenleben_. Anecdotes and testimonies
abound to illustrate this. See him on his travels in Europe, least
picturesque of tourists, hastening with almost comic precipitation past
galleries, cathedrals, ancient ruins, Swiss alps, Como lakes, Rhine
castles, Venetian lagoons, costumed peasants, "the great sinful streets
of Naples"--and of Paris,--and all manner and description of local color
and historic associations; hastening to meet and talk with "a few
minds"--Landor, Wordsworth, Carlyle. Here he was in line, indeed, with
his great friend, impatiently waving aside the art patter, with which
Sterling filled his letters from Italy. "Among the windy gospels,"
complains Carlyle, "addressed to our poor Century there are few louder
than this of Art.... It is a subject on which earnest men ... had better
... 'perambulate their picture-gallery with little or no speech.'"
"Emerson has never in his life," affirms Mr. John Jay Chapman, "felt the
normal appeal of any painting, or any sculpture, or any architecture, or
any music. These things, of which he does not know the meaning in real
life, he yet uses, and uses constantly, as symbols to convey ethical
truths. The result is that his books are full of blind places, like the
notes which will not strike on a sick piano." The biographers tell us
that he had no ear for music and could not distinguish one tune from
another; did not care for pictures nor for garden flowers; could see
nothing in Dante's poetry nor in Shelley's, nor in Hawthorne's romances,
nor in the novels of Dickens and Jane Austen. Edgar Poe was to him "the
jingle man." Poe, of course, had no "message."
I read, a number of years ago, some impressions of Concord by Roger
Riordan, the poet and art critic. I cannot now put my hand, for purposes
of quotation, upon the title of the periodical in which these appeared;
but I remember that the writer was greatly amused, as well as somewhat
provoked, by his inability to get any of the philosophers with whom he
sought interviews to take an æsthetic view of any poem, or painting, or
other art product. They would talk of its "message" or its "ethical
content"; but as to questions of technique or beauty, they gently put
them one side as unworthy to engage the attention of earnest souls.
At the symposium which I have mentioned in Emerson's library, was
present a young philosopher who had had the advantage of
reading--perhaps in proof sheets--a book about Shakespeare by Mr. Denton
J. Snider. He was questioned by some of the guests as to the character
of the work, but modestly declined to essay a description of it in the
presence of such eminent persons; venturing only to say that it "gave
the ethical view of Shakespeare," information which was received by the
company with silent but manifest approval.
Yet, after all, what does it matter whether Emerson was singly any one
of those things which Matthew Arnold says he was not--great poet, great
writer, great philosophical thinker? These are matters of classification
and definition. We know well enough the rare combination of qualities
which made him our Emerson. Let us leave it there. Even as a formal
verse-writer, when he does emerge from his cloud of encumbrances, it is
in some supernal phrase such as only the great poets have the secret of:
Music pours on mortals its beautiful disdain;
or:
Have I a lover who is noble and free?
I would he were nobler than to love me.
A WORDLET ABOUT WHITMAN
In this year many fames have come of age; among them, Lowell's and Walt
Whitman's. As we read their centenary tributes, we are reminded that
Lowell never accepted Whitman, who was piqued by the fact and referred
to it a number of times in the conversations reported by the Boswellian
Traubel. Whitmanites explain this want of appreciation as owing to
Lowell's conventional literary standards.
Now convention is one of the things that distinguish man from the
inferior animals. Language is a convention, law is a convention; and so
are the church and the state, morals, manners, clothing--_teste_ "Sartor
Resartus." Shame is a convention: it is human. The animals are without
shame, and so is Whitman. His "Children of Adam" are the children of our
common father before he had tasted the forbidden fruit and discovered
that he was naked.