Emerson's was an Asiatic mind, drawing its sustenance partly from the
hard soil of our New England, partly, too, from the air that has known
Himalaya and the Ganges. So imprest with this character of his mind
was Mr. Burlingame,[11] as I saw him, after his return from his
mission, that he said to me, in a freshet of hyperbole, which was the
overflow of a channel with a thread of truth running in it, "There are
twenty thousand Ralph Waldo Emersons in China."
[Footnote 10: From an address before the Massachusetts Historical
Society in 1862. Published by Houghton, Mifflin Company.]
[Footnote 11: Anson Burlingame, famous in his time for treaties
negotiated between China and the United States, England, Denmark,
Sweden, Holland, and Prussia. His son, E. I. Burlingame, has long been
the editor of _Scribner's Magazine_.]
What could we do with this unexpected, unprovided for, unclassified,
half-unwelcome new-comer, who had been for a while potted, as it
were, in our Unitarian cold green-house, but had taken to growing so
fast that he was lifting off its glass roof and letting in the
hailstorms? Here was a protest that outflanked the extreme left of
liberalism, yet so calm and serene that its radicalism had the accents
of the gospel of peace. Here was an iconoclast without a hammer, who
took down our idols from their pedestals so tenderly that it seemed
like an act of worship.
The scribes and pharisees made light of his oracular sayings. The
lawyers could not find the witnesses to subpoena and the documents
to refer to when his case came before them, and turned him over to
their wives and daughters. The ministers denounced his heresies, and
handled his writings as if they were packages of dynamite, and the
grandmothers were as much afraid of his new teachings as old Mrs.
Piozzi[12] was of geology. We had had revolutionary orators,
reformers, martyrs; it was but a few years since Abner Kneeland had
been sent to jail for expressing an opinion about the great First
Cause; but we had had nothing like this man, with his seraphic voice
and countenance, his choice vocabulary, his refined utterance, his
gentle courage, which, with a different manner, might have been called
audacity, his temperate statement of opinions which threatened to
shake the existing order of thought like an earthquake.
[Footnote 12: Hester Lynch Salisbury, who married first Henry Thrale,
the English brewer, and second an Italian musician named Piozzi; but
her fame rests on her friendship of twenty years with Doctor Samuel
Johnson, of whom she wrote reminiscences, described by Carlyle as
"Piozzi's ginger beer."]
His peculiarities of style and of thinking became fertile parents of
mannerisms, which were fair game for ridicule as they appeared in his
imitators. For one who talks like Emerson or like Carlyle soon finds
himself surrounded by a crowd of walking phonographs, who mechanically
reproduce his mental and vocal accents. Emerson was before long
talking in the midst of a babbling Simonetta of echoes, and not
unnaturally was now and then himself a mark for the small-shot of
criticism. He had soon reached that height in the "cold thin
atmosphere" of thought where
"Vainly the fowler's eye
Might mark his distant flight to do him wrong."
I shall add a few words, of necessity almost epigrammatic, upon his
work and character. He dealt with life, and life with him was not
merely this particular air-breathing phase of being, but the spiritual
existence which included it like a parenthesis between the two
infinities. He wanted his daily drafts of oxygen like his neighbors,
and was as thoroughly human as the plain people he mentions who had
successively owned or thought they owned the house-lot on which he
planted his hearthstone. But he was at home no less in the
interstellar spaces outside of all the atmospheres. The
semi-materialistic idealism of Milton was a gross and clumsy medium
compared to the imponderable ether of "The Over-soul" and the
unimaginable vacuum of "Brahma." He followed in the shining and daring
track of the _Graius homo_ of Lucretius:
_"Vivida vis animi pervicit, et extra
Processit longe flammantia moenia mundi."_
It always seemed to me as if he looked at this earth very much as a
visitor from another planet would look upon it. He was interested, and
to some extent curious about it, but it was not the first spheroid he
had been acquainted with, by any means. I have amused myself with
comparing his descriptions of natural objects with those of the Angel
Raphael in the seventh book of Paradise Lost. Emerson talks of his
titmouse as Raphael talks of his emmet. Angels and poets never deal
with nature after the manner of those whom we call naturalists.
To judge of him as a thinker, Emerson should have been heard as a
lecturer, for his manner was an illustration of his way of thinking.
He would lose his place just as his mind would drop its thought and
pick up another, twentieth cousin or no relation at all to it. This
went so far at times that one could hardly tell whether he was putting
together a mosaic of colored fragments, or only turning a kaleidoscope
where the pieces tumbled about as they best might. It was as if he had
been looking in at a cosmic peep-show, and turning from it at brief
intervals to tell us what he saw. But what fragments these colored
sentences were, and what pictures they often placed before us, as if
we too saw them! Never has this city known such audiences as he
gathered; never was such an Olympian entertainment as that which he
gave them.
It is very hard to speak of Mr. Emerson's poetry; not to do it
injustice, still more to do it justice. It seems to me like the robe
of a monarch patched by a New England housewife. The royal tint and
stuff are unmistakable, but here and there the gray worsted from the
darning-needle crosses and ekes out the Tyrian purple. Few poets who
have written so little in verse have dropped so many of those "jewels
five words long" which fall from their setting only to be more
choicely treasured. _E pluribus unum_ is scarcely more familiar to our
ears than "He builded better than he knew," and Keats's "thing of
beauty" is little better known than Emerson's "beauty is its own
excuse for being." One may not like to read Emerson's poetry because
it is sometimes careless, almost as if carefully so, tho never
undignified even when slipshod; spotted with quaint archaisms and
strange expressions that sound like the affectation of negligence, or
with plain, homely phrases such as the self-made scholar is always
afraid of. But if one likes Emerson's poetry he will be sure to love
it; if he loves it, its phrases will cling to him as hardly any others
do. It may not be for the multitude, but it finds its place like
pollen-dust and penetrates to the consciousness it is to fertilize and
bring to flower and fruit.
I have known something of Emerson as a talker, not nearly so much as
many others who can speak and write of him. It is unsafe to tell how a
great thinker talks, for perhaps, like a city dealer with a village
customer, he has not shown his best goods to the innocent reporter of
his sayings. However that may be in this case, let me contrast in a
single glance the momentary effect in conversation of the two
neighbors, Hawthorne and Emerson. Speech seemed like a kind of travail
to Hawthorne. One must harpoon him like a cetacean with questions to
make him talk at all. Then the words came from him at last, with
bashful manifestations, like those of a young girl, almost--words that
gasped themselves forth, seeming to leave a great deal more behind
them than they told, and died out discontented with themselves, like
the monologue of thunder in the sky, which always goes off mumbling
and grumbling as if it had not said half it wanted to, and ought to
say....
To sum up briefly what would, as it seems to me, be the text to be
unfolded in his biography, he was a man of excellent common sense,
with a genius so uncommon that he seemed like an exotic transplanted
from some angelic nursery. His character was so blameless, so
beautiful, that it was rather a standard to judge others by than to
find a place for on the scale of comparison. Looking at life with the
profoundest sense of its infinite significance, he was yet a cheerful
optimist, almost too hopeful, peeping into every cradle to see if it
did not hold a babe with the halo of a new Messiah about it. He
enriched the treasure-house of literature, but, what was far more, he
enlarged the boundaries of thought for the few that followed him, and
the many who never knew, and do not know to-day, what hand it was
which took down their prison walls. He was a preacher who taught that
the religion of humanity included both those of Palestine, nor those
alone, and taught it with such consecrated lips that the narrowest
bigot was ashamed to pray for him, as from a footstool nearer to the
throne. "Hitch your wagon to a star": this was his version of the
divine lesson taught by that holy George Herbert whose words he
loved. Give him whatever place belongs to him in our literature, in
the literature of our language, of the world, but remember this: the
end and aim of his being was to make truth lovely and manhood
valorous, and to bring our daily life nearer and nearer to the
eternal, immortal, invisible.