Ralph Waldo Emerson

The mind of Emerson was a searchlight revealing not itself but the various objects on which it successively turned. An intense and narrow beam of light would shoot through the darkness and reveal some object. Then it would pick up another object which would have its brief moment of visibility. The landscape was never revealed in any one view.

The only way to know Emerson is to join him in his intellectual exercises. In spite of his personal aloofness I know of no one with whom we can more readily come to a feeling of intellectual intimacy. He had no pretensions and no reserves. In clear sentences he told us what from time to time he thought. He made no attempt to connect these thoughts into a coherent system. For any one else to attempt to do this would be to misrepresent him.

In the short chapters which follow I have treated Emerson as a contemporary rather than as a writer of the last generation. His thought is as pertinent to the twentieth century as to the nineteenth. Indeed I think that in many respects we may be nearer to him than were those who first listened to him. The prejudices which he encountered have largely died away. The problems over which he was meditating remain.

I wish to make grateful acknowledgment to Houghton Mifflin Company for special permission to make extracts from their authorized and copyright editions of Emerson’s works. Also to Doctor Edward Emerson for the use of his edition of his father’s journals.

S. M. M.

CHAPTER I

THE APPROACH TO EMERSON

SO Emerson writes of the Persian poet Saadi who “sat in the sun” and with smiling lips uttered his thoughts to whosoever chose to listen. He had nothing to prove, nothing to apologize for, nothing to lament.

We are so used to wrangling and defining, to building systems of thought, and with odious subtlety criticizing other men’s systems, that we hardly know how to get along without these intellectual exercises. What is there to say about a literary man or a philosopher who cares for none of these things?

To become acquainted with Emerson we must discard any conventional idea of the literary man or the philosopher. We must not become too much interested in his works. We must be genuinely interested in the things he was thinking about, so as to find joy in comparing notes. He was not a man of letters in the sense of a maker of books, and he was careless about the articulation of his thought, and so he is the despair of those who try to “place” him.

There are those who think they can explain a man of genius by means of painstaking investigation of the town he lived in, the folks he knew, the books he read, the party to which he belonged, and the family into which he was born. A great deal can be explained in this way, in fact all those things in which he was like the thousands of other persons who were subjected to similar influences. But what about his genius, which is the one thing in which he differed from those who were about him? It happens that it is this difference which is the matter of vital moment.

There are indeed great men whose difference from their contemporaries is in the quantity of their endowment rather than in its essential quality. They think and feel as does the average man, they share his opinions and habits of thought, only they have everything in greater abundance. They are representative of the time in which they lived and we can not think of them as belonging to any other place or period. This is perhaps what we mean by a great man. The term is quantitative.

But there are others whose genius is essentially timeless. They owe very little to their immediate environment. They might have lived anywhere or at any time, and the substance and manner of their thinking would have been very much the same. Ralph Waldo Emerson was of this order. In one sense he was a typical American, more than that he was a New Englander, and his thought was colored by the experience of the passing day. But it was only colored. The texture was not peculiar to America. That he was born at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the descendant of a long line of Puritan preachers, that he was educated at Harvard College, and became for a time the minister of a Unitarian Church, that he was interested in what was called the Transcendental Movement, that he traveled about the country delivering lyceum lectures, that he took a worthy part in all sorts of reform movements, and that he lived in Concord to a good old age—all these are interesting facts. If we happen to be interested in Emerson, we like to know about them. But they do not enable us to know what manner of man he was, or what gift he may have for us.

Indeed, if we take such facts too seriously, we may obscure the real Emerson, for he certainly did not take them very seriously, and was rather absent-minded in regard to them. It was one of his whimsies to profess a great contempt for foreign travel. Concord was good enough for him and he could see all that was most worth seeing without wandering from the vicinity of the town house. But this was not because he had any unusual prejudice for a particular locality, but that he had means of getting away from it that his neighbors did not possess. One place is as good as another to one whose mind is free of the universe.

Emerson’s mind was in the most literal sense cosmopolitan; he was a citizen of the world, as no mere traveler can become. The globe trotter is lured on by the expectation of coming to foreign parts. Emerson did not think of any portion of the world as foreign. It was all of a piece. Wherever he happened to be, he was confronted by the marvel of the whole which manifested itself in every part. He was like the citizen in a great metropolis, who leaves to strangers the transitory joys of sightseeing. He goes about his own business, and yet he is gladly conscious all the time that he belongs to the mighty aggregation.

In dealing with such a person, the biographer is always more or less of an intruder. To Emerson the inner life was much more important than the events and circumstances of the outer life. To the inner life as disclosed by himself, we may go directly. Thus only we know what manner of man he was. He was describing himself when he wrote:

All this is quite foreign to the mind of the typical American. It was not characteristic of the nineteenth century. It is not easy to explain why Emerson should have turned up when he did.

If, however, it is necessary for us to “place” Emerson, and to classify him, it might be as well to ignore the accident of his birth, and put him among those with whom his ways of thinking and speaking would have been most congenial.

He was a philosopher, not in the modern sense, but in the simpler ancient sense of a lover of wisdom. He belonged in a way with the men who in Athens liked to walk about in the gardens discoursing about the nature of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Perhaps the Greek dialectic might have wearied his more direct mind. It would have seemed a too roundabout way of getting at moral truths.

I rather think that he would have been more at home with less sophisticated thinkers, let us say with the lovers of wisdom in the land of Uz, who gathered around Job, in his happier days before Satan mingled with his affairs. It is in the cool of the evening, and they gather at the gate, and Job discourses on the pleasant mysteries of life. And people who had been bearing the heat and burden of the day, and whose souls were parched, came for refreshment. In their arid lives, it was wonderful to meet a man who was thinking aloud. “My speech dropped upon them, and they waited for me as for the rain.”

Such speech comes in sentences that are easily remembered. In the land of Uz people do not get their ideas from books, but from the lips of a man who has the gift of direct address.

In process of time scribes gather these scattered sentences into volumes, and we have collections of what the Hebrew scholars call Wisdom Literature. So we have the Proverbs, The Wisdom of Solomon, and the Wisdom of the Son of Sirach. They contain the observations and the meditations of men who had found time for such things. They are enjoyed by those of kindred temper.

Emerson’s essays belong to this Wisdom Literature. They are gnomic, that is to say, they consist of pregnant sentences. Their arrangement is a matter largely of accident.

Had he lived in the land of Uz, Emerson would have uttered these sentences to a little group at the city gate, and trusted to their memories for the preservation of what was of value. Being an American in the nineteenth century, he jotted them down in his note-book when they occurred to him, and then as opportunity offered presented them to groups of his fellow-citizens, gathered on winter evenings in poorly ventilated halls. All the way from Massachusetts to Iowa he found his audience, and gave them freely of his best. Then acting as his own scribe, he gathered the sentences together into the form familiar to us.

To get his general point of view, read the ninth chapter of Proverbs:

It is all very simple and natural. Wisdom is the builder. She builds according to her own plan, and when the house is furnished, she makes her feast and sends forth her maidens with the invitation to her table.

And the thinker, who is he? He is not the architect, he did not plan the building. Nor is he the high priest ordering the sacrifice. He does not take himself so solemnly. He is only one of the invited guests, who has not lost the sense of wondering curiosity. He can not churlishly sit down to the feast without being introduced to the hostess. He wanders about among all the marvels, seeking her. For, says the son of Sirach, “It is the chief point of Wisdom to know whose gift it is.”

In the nineteenth century Ralph Waldo Emerson lived a life that was as simple as that of the antique philosophers. He practised an art which has been thought to be lost—the art of meditation. The fruit of his meditations he offered to all those whom it might concern.

Emerson was a man thinking. There is no Emersonian system of philosophy, only an Emersonian way of looking at things, and that is perfectly simple. There is a legal phrase, “without prejudice,” which is used of parties to a controversy, implying that should the negotiations fail, nothing that has passed shall be taken advantage of thereafter. Thus should the defendant offer without prejudice to pay half the claim, the plaintiff can not consider this offer as an admission of his having the right to some payment.

To read the words of Emerson in the spirit in which they were written, we must remember to take what he says without prejudice. Each sentence makes its own appeal, and it is for us to determine whether it rings true or false. But we must not hold him responsible for the inferences which we may draw. He was not uttering oracles, though the form might sometimes seem oracular. He aimed to challenge us rather than to secure docile acceptance of his ideas. He did not attempt at any one time to state the whole truth. He preferred to state a half truth in such a manner that we should be ready to supply the other half. Instead of avoiding extreme opinions, he wished to have them confront each other in the same mind.

The method which he recommended and which he followed was in the highest degree unsystematic. It was “the method of taking up in turn each of the leading topics which belong to our scheme of human life, and by stating all that is agreeable to experience on one hand, and doing the same justice to the opposing facts, the true limitations will appear. Any excess of emphasis on one part would be corrected and a just balance made.”

In other words, Emerson would never assume the cool judicial attitude in regard to any vital question. He would speak as an advocate of the side which for the moment seemed to him most important. But he would always reserve the right to state the other side just as strongly. Not only did he claim the right to take both sides, but also to change the subject as often as he liked. He believed that there were certain general principles which were applicable to all the various professions and callings. One who was in Milton’s phrase “a skillful considerer of human things” had a right to express his opinions, for in spite of all the modern division of labor, life is still made up of a few simple elements.

In the following chapters I have made no attempt to harmonize the views of Emerson. That would only obscure the sharp outlines of each separate view. One who would know Emerson must not read his word with the docility of a mere disciple. He must rather take it as a game and match his wits against a quick antagonist.

It is the mental attitude which that unconventional sixteenth-century preacher, Bishop Hugh Latimer, sought to inspire in his congregation. In his famous Sermon on the Cards, he challenged his congregation to play a game of cards, which in those days was called “Triumph.”

Quoth Latimer: “Whereas, ye are wont to celebrate Christmas in playing at cards, I intend by God’s grace to deal unto you Christ’s cards. The game we shall play at shall be called the triumph (trump) which if it be well played, he that dealeth shall win, the players shall likewise win, and the standers and lookers on shall do the same, inasmuch that there is no man that is willing to play at this Triumph with these cards but that they shall all be winners, and no losers. Let therefore every Christian man and woman play at these cards, that they may have and obtain the triumph; you must mark also that the triumph must apply to fetch home with him all the other cards whatsoever suit they be of. Now then take ye this first card which must appear and be shewed to you as followeth.”

In some such way Emerson invites us to join in his favorite recreation. It is the free play of thought in which “he that dealeth shall win, the players shall likewise win and the standers and lookers on shall do the same.”

CHAPTER II

A DISCRIMINATING OPTIMIST

ONE of the most familiar terms of reproach in these days is “Victorian.” It is used by clever literary persons who have rebelled against the standards of their immediate predecessors. It implies a certain smugness and self-satisfaction which is very irritating to persons who are conscious of the cruel realities of this unfinished world. The Victorians are supposed to have been incorrigible optimists who mistook the Fool’s Paradise in which they lived for the final resting place of humanity. They were worshipers of the respectabilities, and were content with the cant of liberalism as their fathers had been content with the cant of Toryism.

To-day, however, we are taught that it is our duty to face the grimmest realities, and not to flinch when we see something that is ugly and threatening. We must see how the other half lives, and we must free ourselves from amiable delusions.

In turning from the work of our painfully sincere realists to Emerson, the first impression is that we are going back to that discredited state of mind, the early Victorian optimism. For Emerson faces the existing world with a smiling face. He takes for granted that there is a friendliness in its laws, and that the ultimate reality is not to be feared. He has a frank predilection for beauty and does not feel it his duty to feed his imagination on what is ugly and unwholesome. He is always glad to be alive, and glad to find so many other creatures alive at the same time. Sometimes he has a too debonair way of making light of the evils that are encountered by earnest people.

But those who look upon the optimism of Emerson as a part of the conventionalism of his time are, I think, superficial in their judgments. In the first place, he was not a Victorian, but an American, who was not under the spell of the good queen and her court. No one was less disposed to imitate the literary conventions then dominant in England. He was no more a Victorian than was Abraham Lincoln. There was nothing smug in his optimism. He was not an apologist for the existing state of things, nor interested in proving that this is the best of all possible worlds. He did not try to make himself agreeable by calling evil good. He recognized the existence of an enormous number of bad and cruel things. “Nature as we know her is no saint.”

He taught that nature does not coddle us, nor provide ready-made houses or clothes. She leaves us to make these things for ourselves. And the process of experiment is never an easy one. It is a long and tedious way by which we travel toward truth. Nature does not tell us what is good for us; to discover this is part of our experience.

So far from denying or seeking to hide the darker and more painful aspects of the world, he admitted them and placed them where they belong, at the beginning. They belong to the realm of chaos and night.

But the outstanding fact is that there has been a gradual emergence from chaos. The existence of man as a reasoning creature becomes more wonderful as we think of the odds against it. No good thing can be had without effort.

But the real question is, “Is the effort worth while?” You may say that it is not. You do not know whether or not you shall succeed, and therefore you will not try.

Emerson declares that the effort is most gloriously worth while. It reveals the joy of creation.

At this point it would be well to lay down Emerson’s essay on Experience and do a little meditating on the words, “the mind goes antagonizing on.”

Here is a philosophy that goes behind the old dispute between the optimist and the pessimist. The ordinary optimist tries to prove that there is no real antagonism between the facts of nature and the ideals of the human soul. Everything is exquisitely fitted to produce happiness. The pessimist denies this and insists on the flagrant opposition between what is and what ought to be. He arranges a deadly parallel between the world of the ideals and the world of hard reality.

Emerson answers that there is an antagonism. The human spirit must not be bullied by that which lies beneath it. It must assert its sovereignty, and in its resistance it makes the discovery of its power. It goes “antagonizing on.” That is the way of the conqueror.

A low haggard spirit sits by our side, “casting the fashion of uncertain evils, a sinister presentiment, a power of the imagination to disclose things orderly and cheerful and show them in startling array. Hark, what sounds on the night wind? the cry of murder in that friendly house, see those marks of stamping feet, of hidden riot. The whisper overhead, the detected glance, the glare of malignity, ungrounded fears, suspicions, half knowledge and mistakes, darken the brow and chill the heart of man. And accordingly it is natures not clear, nor of quick and steady perceptions, but imperfect characters from which something is hidden that all others see, that suffer most from these causes. In those persons who move the profoundest pity, tragedy seems to consist in temperament, not in events. There are people who have an appetite for grief; pleasure is not strong enough, and they crave pain, Mithridatic stomachs which must be fed on poisoned bread, natures so downed that no prosperity can soothe their ragged and dishevelled desolation. They mishear and misbelieve, they suspect and dread. They handle every nettle, and tread on every snake in the meadow.”

It is here that Emerson made his stand. It is not necessary for us to apologize for facts or to attempt to vindicate Eternal Providence. Events come and we must face them. But the Terror we must not yield to, this we can overcome. There is a health of the spirit which may be cultivated and which makes us immune to evil influences.

The optimism of Emerson was not to be expressed in the phrase, “looking at the bright side of things.” That is the lazy man’s optimism. There is a homelier phrase, “making the best of it.” Let the circumstances be what they may, the brave man accepts them resolved to make the best of them. And the surprise is that when he puts all his strength into the task, the result is something better than he had planned. Even when worst has come to worst, the hero turns upon the hostile powers and finds the Best which he has worshiped afar now realized in his own will.

The most complete expression of Emerson’s discriminating optimism can be found in his essay on Fate. Here he states the argument of the pessimist in the strongest terms. There are forces at work which bring pain and loss. There are laws which we can not control. There are tragedies which are inevitable. But the good man confronts the evil fate. Emerson believed that the result of that conflict was the creation of a higher good than had before been perceived. The struggle with Fate produced power.

CHAPTER III

THE OPENER OF DOORS

THERE are certain minds which have exercised a vast influence over the thought of the world, as constructors of intellectual systems. Their ambition has been to reduce all things to a formula. They become masters of existing knowledge and arrange it in orderly fashion. Thus Thomas Aquinas summed up the thought of the middle ages in a solid theology to be received by all who came after him. John Calvin, with lawyer-like logic, did the same thing for sixteenth-century Protestantism. Herbert Spencer, with prodigious industry, gathered an immense number of facts and attempted to bring them all into an agreement with his own scientific formula.

Up to a certain point the system-maker is a helper to all those who would live a reasonable intellectual life. He shows us where to put our facts and to a certain degree how to use them. The difficulty comes when new facts are discovered which do not fit into the system, or when in the course of our intellectual development we come upon a fresh point of view.

Then the system becomes a blind alley. We are led into it by a perfectly logical process, but there is no logical way out of it. The mind goes round and round and is conscious of the futility of its own effort. The universe is narrowed to the dimensions of a rigid creed. The system now shuts out more of reality than it explains.

It is when we become conscious of the dangers of making the universe a blind alley and becoming entrapped in rigid forms that we appreciate the function of philosophers like William James and Bergson. They are emancipators of the intellect. In their keen criticism of dogmatic systems they show us a way out. Reality, they assure us, is something vaster than any definition of it.

Emerson belonged to this little company of emancipators, and he went about his business in a very simple and yet effective way. He attacked the assumption that what is usually called consistency is a virtue. No saying of his is more often quoted, and more generally misunderstood:

That may be made to seem like a plea for careless and irresponsible ways of thinking and speaking. What standard are we to have by which to test our mental processes? I have heard the words quoted as if they offered an excuse for intellectual lawlessness.

We approach Emerson’s serious meaning only when we emphasize the adjective. It is a foolish consistency which is the hobgoblin of little minds. The fundamental question is “consistency with what?” The little mind is thinking not of reality but of its own previous utterances. When an opinion is to be expressed, it says, “This must be made consistent with what I said yesterday. Let me see! What did I say yesterday?” Then, with solemn conscientiousness, yesterday’s statement is repeated and there is felt the satisfaction which comes with duty done.

But what if to-day’s fact is really different from that of yesterday, and can not be expressed accurately by the same phrase? This possibility the little mind does not entertain. It will not allow itself to be contradicted, and so the process goes on which St. Paul describes, “they measuring themselves by themselves, and comparing themselves among themselves, are not wise.”

Emerson’s real plea is for consistency. But we must be consistent not with a form of words which we have adopted, but with a living reality which we encounter day by day.

What have you seen to-day? What have you done? What new aspect of the universe has become clear to you? What are the facts revealed in your present consciousness? These are the questions that are asked of a person who is using his mind. And his answers are valuable only as they are simple and direct.

In a court of justice this simplicity is required. The witness who is trying to make his answers consistent with one another and with a preconceived theory is sure to come to grief. The cross-questioner will discover flaws in the evidence. The only safe course is to tell the facts as they occurred.

Most of our intellectual confusion comes from the attempts to arrange our opinions according to an artificial order. The catechism is arranged in advance of experience. The questions follow one another in logical order, and each question has its appropriate answer. It is all very satisfactory until the answers are sharply challenged. How do we happen to know so much? How are we able to answer so glibly?

To Emerson the chief value of a catechism lay in the questions, not in the answers. That the deepest and most persistent questions have no satisfactory answers did not depress him. It only proved that both the mind that asks and the universe which delays the answer are greater than we thought. Their meaning can not be expressed in any form of words. He hears the Sphinx saying to the Soul:

The joy of the follower of Truth and Beauty is wonderfully expressed in the little poem called “Forerunners.” We are out-of-doors, and the air is bracing, and the distant hills are alluring. What does it matter that we do not catch up with our “happy guides”? It is enough that we are free to follow. Let others sing of the satisfactions of achievement. Emerson is satisfied with a life that is a continual quest.

It is not merely the poetic imagination which opens the doors into an enchanted country where one may wander endlessly. The sober reason has also an emancipatory power. There are realities which lie beyond the limits which the dogmatist defines. They may not be logically justified but they are nevertheless a part of the order of the universe. When we cease to dogmatize we become conscious of an order more wonderful than that which we had imagined possible. Things exist side by side which we had supposed to be absolutely incompatible. We can not logically reconcile them, but there they are.

Along with Emerson’s insistence on an absolute freedom in thinking we must remember his emphasis on the principle of identity which he discovers everywhere. The universe, he continually tells us is not a blind alley, neither is it a mere welter of conflicting forces. It is marvelously complicated, but touch it at any point and you will find it consistent with itself. Could we understand one part of it we would have the key to all mysteries.

CHAPTER IV

THE PARISH OF YOUNG MEN

“My parish is young men inquiring their way.”

EMERSON’S parish did not include all young men. Indeed he was very ill at ease with the typical “young person.” And there are many anecdotes which indicate that the young person shared the embarrassment. The gregariousness of youth with its tumultuous mass movements were rather appalling to one of his temperament. Nor was he fitted for the difficult rôle of spiritual adviser.

Emerson’s widely scattered parish was made up of another kind of young men. They were young men who were not seeking to find out his way, but their own. He encouraged them in it. That made them his debtors for life.

These parishioners of his could not possibly be gathered into one congregation. They formed no cult or party. Each was so absorbed in his own special endeavor that he had little time to make the acquaintance of his fellow parishioner, but each in the formative period of his life had received the stimulus he most needed. He had been bewildered by the conflicting counsels of his elders. Each counsellor had said, “Be like me.” Then one clear voice had suggested, “Why not be yourself?”

The suggestion was so unexpected and yet so reasonable that it was acted upon. The young man found himself, which is the one discovery that counts.

America prides itself on being the land of the free. We have had many political emancipators, but the roll of intellectual emancipators is short. Having dethroned kings, we live under the fear of public opinion. The aggregate mind tyrannizes over the individual intellect. There is a deadly average which it is not considered safe for one to pass.

To his parish of young men Emerson was always preaching that the world is in dire need of men with fresh insight who are not satisfied with things as they are. The “average man” should not be content with the average attainment. He has within him powers which rightly used could lift him far above his present condition. He is, and of right ought to be, a free and independent soul. A decent respect for the opinion of the world demands that he should declare his independence in unmistakable terms.

As for the chill wisdom of age with its timid counsels, let the young man defy it. Length of days does not bring wisdom unless it is accompanied by a power of spiritual rejuvenation, and then it becomes the wisdom of perpetual youthfulness.

The reader will observe that Emerson in the midst of his praise of the spirit of youth gives a sly dig at one of the foibles of his parishioners. There is a quality of bumptiousness which is often found in early life. Emerson treats it as a kind of premature senility. “Whilst we converse with what is above us we do not grow old.” Conversely the person who cannot look up religiously to something above his present attainments had aged rapidly. A person may be a dotard while yet in the twenties. This was a sobering thought not unfrequently presented to the parish of young men.

CHAPTER V

SPENT THE DAY AT ESSEX JUNCTION

ONE intent on becoming intimate with Emerson might well postpone reading the Oversoul, till he had meditated on the text, “Spent the Day at Essex Junction.” Perhaps no junction point in all New England has been the innocent cause of more vituperation than Essex Junction. Here, for more than a generation, impatient people have alighted and waited for trains which were not arranged for their convenience. To the commercial traveler, Essex Junction represents a sheer waste of time. To the summer tourist it means a postponement of enjoyment. It is a place on the way to somewhere else.

But to Emerson, Essex Junction was not conceived of as a point of departure until the hour came when he must actually depart. This was not till evening. In the meantime, he was living in Essex Junction rather than merely passing through it. There was no hurry, so that he had ample time to enjoy the banks of the Winooski river and the view of the distant mountains.

Emerson was on the way to Mount Mansfield, at which he arrived in due time. The next morning at the Mountain Hotel “a man went through the house ringing a loud bell and shouting ‘Sunrise,’ and everybody dressed in haste and went down to the piazza.” Emerson joined the eager procession and had his look with the rest of them. “After many sharp looks at the heavens and earth, we descended to breakfast. I found in this company many agreeable people.”

In this recital you have a glimpse of his philosophy of life. Essex Junction, Mount Mansfield and the troop of fellow-boarders who snatched a hasty sunrise on the way to breakfast were not all alike. In fact, they were quite different. But they were all equally real. The contemplation of them absorbed successive moments of his conscious life. Each for a little while occupied the foreground of his mind and became the representative of the cosmos. Each in its place and in its time was interesting. When it came to the question which was the most interesting, he would let them fight it out among themselves.

This was the philosophy of the Mountain and the Squirrel.

That talents differ is the fact on which we must agree before there can be any toleration or appreciation. Most of us have a bad habit of taking a personal preference and elevating it into a universal standard of value. Each new object is weighed in the balance and found wanting. We say, this is not that, and therefore it is not worth our attention. The word “discrimination” takes on a hostile meaning. We are likely to say “discriminate against.” The word “criticize” has also a suggestion of unfriendliness, for it is concerned with the perception of differences.

Emerson’s habitual point of view was that of appreciative discrimination. This is not that, of course not; it is quite different—that is what makes it interesting. Even where the tubs look alike, it is pleasant to consider that each stands on its own bottom.

What is the most important place in all the world? For you it is the place where you actually are at this moment. This is the only point from which at this particular time the universe is visible to you. If you are truly alive, you do not need a man with a bell to summon you to the sunrise. The day has its clear call.

There is a curious restlessness which is often mistaken for idealism. Not finding satisfaction in our real environment, we are filled with the desire to be somewhere else. When this restlessness becomes chronic, there is “that driven feeling” which transforms the pursuit of happiness into a hurried flight from unhappiness. Even our holidays become nerve-destroying tasks, as with jaded minds we are carried about to the places where we wait for sensations that do not come. And with our eyes on our watches, we know that we must hurry if we are not to miss the next sight that we have paid for.

Palestine was not a tourist country in the days when the author of Ecclesiastes wrote of the various vanities he had seen under the sun; else he might have added a lamentation over the futility of an empty mind going about in search of culture. This is a vanity I have seen. I have seen a rich, foolish man who came to a city strange and old, and that had a great history. Yet did he not seek to know what that history was, nor did he save an hour for quiet meditation on what he saw. He spent much gold to come to the place where the city was, and when he was there he worried over the delay in getting away. And that foolish rich man remembered nothing of the city except a dinner which was not so good as he might have had at home.

Because he found so much to interest him at home Emerson takes a whimsical pleasure in speaking against foreign travel as a means of culture. But he evidently had in mind the excessive value that was in his day put upon Europe and its traditions.

His disparagement of travel did not arise from any incuriosity. He had an eager desire to see all the world. But he was like a small boy who, having learned that the procession is to pass by his own house, takes his position on his own door step. Why should he go away when by staying at home he is sure to see the show?

There are times when the medium at a seance excuses herself for her inability to put the sitter in communication with departed spirits. She does not know what is the matter, but “the conditions are not right.”

Every traveler has experienced a similar difficulty. He has spent time and money to go to a famous spot; his body has been transported but not his soul. There are inhibitions that prevent imaginative communion with the mighty past.

Emerson preferred to be in Essex Junction when the spiritual conditions were right rather than in Rome when his mind was not properly functioning. Essex Junction is a wonderful place if one happens to be in the mood for seeing it.

CHAPTER VI

FRIENDSHIP WITHOUT INTIMACY

EMERSON was an upper classman, albeit only seventeen years of age, when he wrote thus of Martin Gay of Hingham, afterward a distinguished analytical chemist living in Boston. Emerson’s son, commenting on this passage, says that there is no evidence that his father, either in college or afterward, ever made any advances toward further acquaintance. It does not appear that he ever really knew him, yet he was always interested to hear of him, and was grieved at his untimely death in 1850. The two men were entirely different in their temperaments and interests, Gay being known by his classmates as “cool Gay.”

This capacity for shy admirations for his opposites, and for friendly interests in people with whom he would find it difficult to keep up a conversation, was characteristic of Emerson. He was sometimes painfully conscious of it as a barrier which prevented him from really “getting at” people whom he wished to know. At other times he defended the attitude that was natural to him, and so made a virtue of his necessity.

To most persons, Emerson’s essay on Friendship is unsatisfactory as an exposition of the subject, though it is very revealing of the author’s state of mind. “Friendship,” says Emerson, “like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.” And his account of friendship has a fine aloofness that befits the love for a disembodied spirit rather than a warm attachment to an imperfect creature of flesh and blood.

One of the conditions that Emerson would make in a treaty of friendship would be that neither party should trespass on the personality of others. It was friendship by “absent treatment.”

In all this we feel that Emerson was riding his high horse. It is a shy man’s way of comforting himself for something that he unfortunately lacks, but which he would give anything to possess. He was, to use Paul’s phrase, glorying in his infirmities. That which he was praising was not friendship but sublimated hero-worship, which is quite a different thing.

In the privacy of his note-books he treats his infirmity in quite a different spirit. He laments the fact that he was not a good mixer. Like so many New Englanders, it was difficult for him to establish personal relations.

At the age of twenty, when looking forward to the ministry, he makes this self-criticism:

“Every comparison of myself with my mates that six or seven, perhaps sixteen or seventeen, years have made has convinced me that there exists a signal defect of character which neutralizes in great part the just influence my talents ought to have.” He expresses it as the “absence of common sympathies.” By this he seems to mean the absence of the material for “small talk.” “Its bitter fruits are a sore uneasiness in the company of most men and women, a frigid fear of offending and jealousy of disrespect, an inability to lead and an unwillingness to follow the current conversation.... In my frequent humiliation I am compelled to remember the poor boy who cried, ‘I told you, father, they would find me out.’” He sums up his youthful confession, “What is called a warm heart, I have it not.”

When he was sixty, he was conscious of the same limitation. He jotted down in his note-book: “Barriers of man impassable. They who should be friends cannot pass into each other. Friends are fictitious, founded on some momentary experience. But what we want is consecutiveness.”

All this is not evidence of lack of a warm heart. It was rather a lack of an easy way of expressing what he felt. The chill was not in himself, but in the atmosphere that was about him. But there was evidently a personal experience behind this generalization about society.

There is something delightfully amusing in Emerson’s analysis of his own failure as a conversationalist.

With the remarkable group of men who made Concord famous, Emerson was on terms of familiar friendship. For Bronson Alcott he cherished an admiration which seems extravagant. He loved to walk and talk with the shy poet, Ellery Channing. Thoreau was for two years an inmate of Emerson’s house, and the two men worked in the garden together. In Boston Emerson was a member of the Saturday Club, where he continually met Longfellow, Holmes, Agassiz and the rest.

Yet he was not a man to shine in such society. His mind was contemplative, rather than conversational. He did not care to “hold his own” in a controversy. Why should he? “Emerson was a good citizen and a good neighbor with his neighbors, always went to town meeting and listened intently to the strong spirits who ruled the discussions, without taking any part in them himself.”

The most notable of his friendships was with Thomas Carlyle. The correspondence between them continued for many years, and there were many expressions of esteem. The friendship was a real one, but the fact that the broad Atlantic lay between them was a great aid to their good fellowship. For though the two men liked each other, they did not like the same things.

Carlyle threatened to visit America, and we may be sure that he would not have enjoyed the visit. Emerson’s cheery faith in the common man seemed to the testy Scotchman a bit of sentimentalism. They both believed in hero-worship, but they did not worship the same heroes. New England Transcendentalism did not agree with Carlyle’s temper.

Emerson sent a copy of the Dial to his friend. Carlyle writes, “The Dial No. 1 came duly. Of course I read it with interest; it is the utterance of what is youngest in your land, pure, etherial as the voices of the morning! And yet—you know me—for me it is too etherial, speculative, theoretic; all theory becomes more and more confessedly inadequate, untrue, unsatisfactory, almost a kind of mocking to me.”

“Faithful are the wounds of a friend.” And these tokens of friendship were seldom absent from the letters that passed between the two. Carlyle writes of the impression Emerson’s essays made upon him:

This is all very well for a friendship carried on by correspondence. Carlyle thinks of himself as a man who is dealing with concrete realities, while Emerson is dealing in remote abstractions.

But had they lived in the same town with opportunity to discuss the practical questions of politics and social welfare, they would have come into collision. The fact was that Emerson was as much interested in concrete realities as Carlyle, but he came to different conclusions in regard to them. Carlyle believed in government by strong men, like Frederick the Great and Cromwell. Democracy was an abomination to him. A statesman like Lincoln, who thought of himself as an interpreter of the popular will, was altogether outside his sympathy. Liberalism of the modern sort seemed to him utter weakness and muddleheadedness.

Emerson, though he preferred to write about principles rather than their immediate applications, was never in doubt as to which side he was on. The principles which he preached were the ones which were being applied by the democratic reformers of his own day. He believed in the movements at which Carlyle scoffed. Answering his friend’s criticism, he says:

Indeed, Emerson’s idea of real life differed so profoundly from Carlyle’s that their minds seldom met. To him the laws of the universe were not only the great realities, but the most intimate realities. Every person and every action illustrated them. He believed in the principles of democracy which Carlyle scorned. These fundamental differences would have been accentuated in daily intercourse. The visit of the Scotchman to New England never took place, and it was well that it did not; “for,” says Emerson, “the higher the style we demand of friendship the less easy to establish it in flesh and blood.”

CHAPTER VII

I HATE THIS SHALLOW AMERICANISM

A CONTEMPORARY of Emerson was Judge Haliburton of Nova Scotia, the creator of Sam Slick. Mr. Slick of Slickville, Connecticut, was a typical Yankee as seen by neighbors across the northern border. He was shrewd, enterprising, inquisitive, good-humored, and in his way religious. He was an ardent patriot, with his eye on the main chance. He was good at a bargain, and still better at an argument in defense of his rectitude in the transaction. He was no hypocrite, for he saw no reason to pretend to be something which he was not. He was simply a plain American citizen and he didn’t care who knew it. There were thousands in Connecticut just as good as he was. He felt it a privilege to represent the Great Republic.

The blatant Americanism of Sam Slick must be compared with the solid English complacency of Mr. Podsnap. Both were caricatures of national failings which were easily recognizable. Emerson was enough of an American to understand Sam Slick and to laugh with him as well as to laugh at him, but he recognized that this shallow Americanism had its dangers.

The very ease with which the American could make a living made him overestimate his own powers. He took the gifts of nature in a new continent for rewards for his own merit. Bold as he was and self-assertive in little things, he lacked in any standard by which to judge himself. He was gregarious in his mental habits, and curiously averse to strenuous intellectual effort.

“The timidity of our public opinion is our disease, or shall I say the publicness of our opinion, the absence of private opinion. Good nature is plentiful but we want justice with heart of steel to fight down the proud.” America has not produced a sufficient number of men who will instinctively throw themselves “on the side of weakness, of youth, of hope; on the liberal, on the expansive side, never on the defensive, the conserving, the timorous, the lock-and-bolt system.”

This description of a familiar kind of Americanism in 1844 is easily recognizable in 1920. The shallow reformers are equally familiar.

No foreign critic has ever pointed out more clearly the faults of the American temperament. But shallow Americanism, with its boastfulness and its conventionality, can not blind him to the ideal America that lies far deeper. It is yet in the making.

Emerson believed as much as the politicians of his day in Manifest Destiny. But he hoped for the country a destiny greater than that which the politicians planned. The commercial progress of the day was something to rejoice in as a part of a great onward movement. But commercialism was not the end toward which the nation was moving.

CHAPTER VIII

THE POET

EMERSON’S estimate of his poetical gifts was given in a letter to his future wife. When he so clearly points out his limitations, it seems ungracious to agree with his critical judgment, but one must do so. He was not a poet in the sense of a maker of mighty harmonies. He did not walk like Milton, with his “singing robes” about him. But he was a poet in the sense of being a perceiver and dear lover of natural harmonies, and he made us sharers of his perception.

His singing voice was certainly very husky. Only a few of his poems stand the test of being read aloud with perfect pleasure. Frequently we are conscious of a metrical jolt. Not only is the ear pained by dissonance, but there is a sense that the poetical inspiration has suddenly given out.

I am inclined to think that Emerson would have been happier if he had frankly adopted “free verse.” For though he was a poet, he was not a natural rhymster. In “Merlin” he makes a declaration of independence which would please our new poets.

And then he weakens his declaration by adding:

The critic is tempted to ask, Why not let the rhyme go rather than climb for it? Emerson’s rhymes were often most unhappy, and had the air of being forced into service.

Read his “May Day.” You will find jingling rhymes like

We have such lines as these:

After these rhymes that are easy to a fault, we have others that are difficult: as almanac and coming-back, Superior Lake and Mackinac, cavaliers and travelers. Sometimes an obsolete word is introduced for the sake of an imperfect rhyme:

All this needs to be said at the beginning. It is when full allowance is made for his poetical lapses that we are prepared to appreciate Emerson’s real poetical gifts. While he had no power of sustained verbal melody, he has given an unusual number of perfect lines.

In “Voluntaries” we have a succession of commonplace verses, and then come upon the lines that seemed chiseled by some great artist, austerely beautiful and true:

In “Forerunners” one would not change a word. There is a gladness of adventure.

“Each and All,” “The Problem,” “Days,” are sources of endless delight. In “Two Rivers,” Emerson expresses melodiously his poetical creed. He is a perceiver and dear lover of the correspondence between the outer and the inner worlds. The little river that runs through Concord is the symbol of the eternities.

In the longer poems, like “Monadnock” and “Woodnotes,” there is nothing consecutive. One might read them as Emerson himself was accustomed to read, beginning at the last page and turning back the leaves in search of a rewarding sentence. But there is a sparkling atmosphere and a sense of the New England woods and hills.

Emerson is the poet of nature, and it is nature as revealed in New England. We see the “twilight parks of beech and pine,” and the purple berries, the upland pastures, the delicate mosses, the granite ledges, over which the brooks go tumbling, the mountain lakes “edged with sand and grass,” the “damp fields known to bird and fox.” Nowhere is it far to the primitive granite, yet the land is not bare. Even on the ledges “the ropelike pine roots crosswise grown” give a homelike invitation. Nature is everywhere friendly, though there is a trace of austerity about her welcome.

But to the poet the outward forms of nature are but symbols.

Flashing through woods and mountains and sky, he sees truths that strengthen and inspire. What he seeks to express in his poetry is

Every poet who has any distinctive quality and is not merely an imitator of other poets sees something which he wants to express. This insight is his real contribution. The skill with which he is able to communicate what he sees is another matter.

The poets of the most universal appeal are those who see what everybody else sees, only more intensely, and who can tell their story in words which every one understands. Robert Burns, Whittier, James Whitcomb Riley, need no interpreters. They themselves are interpreting what we have already experienced.

There are other poets whose endeavor is to make us see something which, without their help, we might miss, or at least treat as something unpoetical. Browning saw a greater complexity in human conduct and character than we usually recognize, and he sought to present this complexity to the imagination as well as to the reason. This involved a good deal of explanation on his part, and explanatory remarks are always prose. But the true Browning lover knows what his poet is driving at and helps him out when he gets into difficulties.

Walt Whitman saw the poetry which is in mere bulk and the sublimity that is in great bare spaces. Let others sing of the finished products of art and nature; he would celebrate the glory of the imperfect, the romance of the raw material. To his mind a catalogue of the most ordinary things was suggestive. It was the stuff poems are made of. It was an inventory of the wealth we hold in common. He repeats the names of American states and cities as Milton repeated the names of the places old in story, which in his imagination stood for all sorts of vague sublimities. If we catch something of this imaginative enthusiasm for crude bulk and wide spaces and overflowing vitality, then we greet Whitman as a great poet. Otherwise, we make nothing of him. “There are in the world,” says Paul, “many kinds of voices, and no voice is without its significance.” But he adds, if we do not understand the person who is talking, he is a barbarian to us and we are as barbarians to him.

The poetry of Emerson has a quality growing out of a peculiar way of looking at things. Whitman saw things in the rough. “Here is what moves in magnificent masses, careless of particulars.” Emerson saw the motion of masses, but he was not careless of particulars. His attention was fixed not upon the mass but on the particles of which it was composed. And his quick eye perceived that these particles had each a motion of its own, and that the motion was bewilderingly rapid.

Our dull eyes see results but not processes. We talk of the quickness of thought, but we are really very slow-witted creatures and seldom see what is going on. The things which we watch and talk about are really the things which have already happened, just as we may be looking at a star by light, which only tells us that it was shining some centuries ago. Our judgment on what we call current events is apt to be misleading because it is not strictly contemporaneous.

The great illusion is that of arrested motion. Things seem to us to stand still, which in reality are whirling about with inconceivable velocity. Our sciences have demonstrated what our senses can not perceive, and that which staggers our imagination.

The astronomer tells us of the way this earthen ball on which we live goes hurtling through space. But even the astronomer does not feel the motion. The chemist tells us of the wild dances of the molecules. We in a dull way perceive the fact of growth and decay and attraction and repulsion, but we do not perceive them as incessantly happening. When a powder mill is destroyed, we are startled by the explosion. But of the multitude of tiny explosions, which result in the opening of a rose, or the scattering of thistledown, we are unconscious.

Now Emerson was profoundly stirred by thought of the explosive power of nature. Indeed his world was always exploding. He attempts to express the sense of these sudden happenings in his poetry. He is preeminently the poet of swift motion.

This was the theme of Emerson’s poetry. It was the genesis of things as revealed by modern science and interpreted by the poetic imagination. He was the poet of the “rushing metamorphosis.”

It was a world in which there was persistent force and ever-changing form. The world soul cries,

And that calm for which philosophers have always yearned, how shall we attain it? Not by standing still, seeking refuge in some venerable form, but by flinging ourselves into the swift current, and yielding ourselves to the eternal power.

It is possible for a man’s thought to keep step with nature “with triumphant piercing sight,” seeing the end toward which all things move.

The Actual is swift, but the Ideal is swifter.

There are poems of Emerson which we can make nothing of unless we have happened to brood over the same problems. There is “Initial, Dæmonic and Celestial Love.” It is unreadable, unless one reads between the lines.

When we ask what it is all about? the answer is that it is an attempt to follow that “rushing metamorphosis” that we call love. Under one name we speak of the attraction of sex which man shares with all the animal world, and the highest and most disinterested affections. Here is a passion in its beginning sensuous and selfish, capable of infinite refinement till it becomes purely spiritual. Between love as a natural impulse and love as a religious experience there are innumerable subtle gradations. Emerson’s lines suggest the swiftness of the transitions.

At first love is unmoral.

Out of these primitive instincts arise the higher kinds of love. They do not develop in logical order. They are rather fierce and sudden passions which, however, tend toward nobleness.

There is developed a loyalty to family and tribe. There come “throbs of a wild religion.” There is

After a time love is drawn to its object, not by a blind urgency, but a conscious choice. The lover is open-eyed.

But this love with all its possibilities of chivalry and romance is at heart selfish. It seeks its own, and scorns all else.

There is a love that “delights to build a road,” but “the Dæmon ever builds a wall.” That impulse which unites is met by an impulse which divides. So it happens that

But these partial preferences and passions do not exhaust the meaning of love. There is a celestial love.

There is a love that is one with justice and truth. It is a passion still, but it is a passion for perfection. It comes with insight of a swifter kind.

The love of the one becomes the symbol of good-will to all.

In all this Emerson is expressing his philosophy. But he does it not as a formal teacher, but as a poet.

In the “Threnody,” in which he sought comfort after the death of a dearly loved child, there is the same sense of the quick transitions between the physical and the spiritual. He summons his faltering thought to follow his boy into the vast regions of the unknown. It is not a void but full of possibilities of life.

The loved form disappears, but the love goes on in search of its object. Change there must be, but change does not mean destruction of real values. Emerson finds strength in the thought that what is “excellent is permanent.” And that permanence is not of form but of force.

CHAPTER IX

THE POETRY OF SCIENCE

EMERSON’S idea of the scientific intelligence keeping step with the moral and spiritual faculties is an illuminating one. It suggests to us what happened in the nineteenth century, and gave rise to so much confusion.

The orderly progress of the human mind was broken up by the sudden and unprecedented advance of the physical sciences. In a single generation knowledge advanced with great leaps, which carried it into regions which had never before been entered. There was a penetrating power in the scientific method which amazed those who used it. The geologist, the chemist, the biologist, were daily enlarging the sphere of knowledge. Political economists were claiming the whole sphere of morals as their own.

But all this progress was one-sided. Was the advance of scientific knowledge only another name for disenchantment? Was the bloom of the world to be brushed off, never more to return? The poets and the artists and idealistic moralists were panic-stricken. Those who picture the mood of the so-called Victorian Age as one of smug complacency forget the predominant feeling of its men of literary and artistic genius. Ruskin, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold agree in lamenting the fact that “knowledge comes but wisdom lingers.” A glory had departed from the world. We are in danger, they thought, of knowing too much.

Matthew Arnold voiced this despondent mood in his poem, “The Future.” Man was born in a boat that floats upon the River of Time. At the beginning it was a clear flowing mountain stream, and looking out upon the romantic mountains the voyager’s heart was full of joy.

Our fathers lived in a world of poetry. Life to them was simple but full of mystery. It was easy to believe and wonder and enjoy. But the tract which the River of Time now flows through is the level plain, bordered by cities, crowded with traffic. Our world is prosaic, and we must adapt ourselves to it as best we may. All that remains is a melancholy resignation.

It was against this mood of depression that Emerson always protested. The man of science, he says, does not divest the world of mystery. He does not “explain away” anything. His explanations are but the translating one mystery into another. His knowledge is never final. It reveals deep behind deep.

The trouble is with ourselves. We allow our imagination to grow torpid. In the processes of nature are the materials not only for scientific investigation, but for poetry also. An evolving universe is a theme that can never be exhausted.

Emerson had not the equipment of the man of science, but he had the imagination which sympathized with the tendencies of scientific investigation. It seemed to him that they were confirmations of the intuition of the poets. That matter is not dead but thrilling with energy; that space is not empty but is the medium through which forces operate; that all things are related; that lower forms of life are always reaching out toward that which is higher; that there is a tendency for the organism to grow more complex and therefore more wonderful,—these were discoveries that ought to kindle the poetic imagination.

Emerson did not flatter himself that he had the ability to express the new view of the universe. The new poetry he believed would be realistic without losing its charm.

That to the true poet all things are poetical was a teaching that he repeats continually. It was this belief that made him greet Walt Whitman with such effusion. When in 1855 the “Leaves of Grass” appeared, the literary world was affronted. Whittier, it is said, threw his presentation copy into the fire. Emerson, almost alone in his recognition of the new note, wrote,

But when Walt, in the exuberance of joy over the appreciation, published a new edition with Emerson’s commendation printed on the cover, the Concord poet was displeased. There were later interviews, but each man became conscious of the limitations of the other. “I was simmering, simmering, simmering,” said Whitman, “and Emerson brought me to boil.” Emerson approved the ideas which were simmering in the younger poet’s mind, but when they actually boiled over he was inclined to get out of the way. This was not mere fastidiousness. It indicated a different conclusion drawn from what lawyers call “agreed facts.” Walt Whitman expresses the creed of Emerson in his “Song of the Universal:”

That spiritual realities are wrapped up in the material world, and that the seed of perfection may be found amid the apparent grossness of the earth, was a creed, which both poets fervently believed. But what had it to do with the poet’s art?

Whitman, in his robust faith that goodness was universal, felt relieved from the responsibility of choice. Nature had invited him to a feast of good things. He would take pot luck, and enjoy the rude plenty. This he conceived to be the very essence of democracy. He would take good things in the bulk.

Emerson also chanted the praise of the universal, but with a somewhat different emphasis. He was interested in the grossness and the slag only for the sake of the seed perfection that lay hidden in it. It is the uncaught bird that flies above the mountain, it is the ray of perfect light that now and then flashes through the murky clouds, that must be the theme of poetry. The poet must follow the guiding thread or he is lost in the labyrinth. There must be discrimination. Nature has something more than fecundity. There is an austere rejection of the lower forms of life in favor of the higher. There is a continual refinement going on. To interpret this side of nature is the function of art. In this discrimination he was in harmony with the scientific attitude.

The man of science does not yield to an idle curiosity. He selects the objects of his study and the method to be used. The laboratory is not cluttered up with all the objects which a naturalist might encounter in his walks. Only such objects as are fitted for the purpose are selected. Should not the poet exercise the same kind of discrimination?

Whitman tells us how on Beacon Street in Boston he walked with Emerson for two hours, discussing their agreements and differences.

As between Emerson and Whitman as poets, it is not necessary for us to decide. Both stood in the presence of nature. Whitman delighted in its obvious aspects, its sheer bulk, its prodigality, its endless variety. Emerson was more interested in the laws which it illustrated and the unseen forces which move it. He was listening to the “chorus of the ancient causes.” This is what made his words so precious to the men of science who in the nineteenth century were waging a battle against ancient formulas which obscured the meaning of their researches.

Professor Tyndall, in his famous address to the British Association in 1870, took his text from Emerson, to whom in many other places he acknowledged his indebtedness. His theme was “The Scientific Use of the Imagination,” and he began by repeating Emerson’s lines which I have already quoted, beginning:

Here, he said, is the poetic expression of the spirit of modern science.

In another essay, Professor Tyndall denies the common notion that advances in science are made simply by the patient pushing out of boundaries of knowledge according to a prosaic system. Beyond the region of actual light where facts are clearly seen, there is a penumbral region. Here is a field where intuition goes in advance of knowledge. “Here the investigator proceeds by combining intuition and verification. He ponders the knowledge he possesses and tries to push it further; he guesses and checks his guess, he conjectures and confirms or rejects his conjecture.... Thus the vocation of the true experimentalist may be defined as the continued use of spiritual insight, and its incessant correction and realization. His experiments constitute a body of which his purified intuitions are as it were the soul.”

Those “purified intuitions,” which Tyndall declares constituted the very soul of science, were to Emerson the essence of poetry. What the scientist discovered to be true, the poet saw to be beautiful. Both recognized the fact that nature was not fixed but fluid. We see the successive phases of an endless genesis.

CHAPTER X

PIETY

AMONG the strange adventures of words, which are continually losing their original meanings and taking up with new associations, there is none stranger than that of the word Piety. To the Romans it was preeminently a manly virtue. There was no suggestion of weakness about it. It represented the behavior of the strong man toward his parents, kinsmen, country or benefactors. It implied a fine courtesy and a sense of the fitness of things. There was a sober affection for all that was permanent in human relations. Antoninus Pius represented the kind of loyalty which the Romans most admired.

It is this piety in the ancient sense which Emerson’s hymn represents. It is the very opposite of conventional pietism. To him the New England meeting-house was venerable, because of its associations with what was most sacred and enduring in the life of his own people. Whittier himself has not expressed more tenderly his appreciation of the personal influences which have bound the generations together in common worship.

The same note is sounded in the hymn sung at the completion of the Concord Monument, April 19, 1836.

In the lines entitled “Grace” there is a recognition of the debt which the individual owes to the society of which he is a part, and by which he is protected.

In considering the individualism of Emerson we have to take account of the fact that he never really broke with the past, nor did he consider it necessary to do so in order to achieve freedom. He acknowledged his indebtedness to those who had gone before him. But his reverence for their example led him not to stand perpetually where they stood; but rather to go on in the same direction in which they were going.

All who heard Emerson in the pulpit bear witness to the atmosphere of reverence which pervaded his utterances. One who listened to him writes:

Emerson was remarkably incurious in regard to the problems propounded by formal theologians, but he was a profound believer in the religion of experience. Piety, whether manifest toward God or man, was something altogether natural.

CHAPTER XI

THOU SHALT NOT PREACH

IN one sense Emerson was always a preacher. His main interest was in the moral law and in the development of character. When he left the pulpit for the lecture platform he was only changing one congregation for another. In the Unitarian ministry to which he belonged, the sermon and the essay were not always clearly differentiated.

But in another sense Emerson obeyed the prohibition of the smiling muse. He had no genius for exhortation, nor had he any desire to enforce his precepts upon unwilling minds. He lacked the fervor of the true evangelist, and could not cry, “Turn ye! turn ye! why will ye die?” He could not enforce the gospel of liberalism as did his friend, Theodore Parker. His attitude was like that of the man of science to the subject of his investigation. “Here is the truth as I see it. Now investigate it for yourselves and see what you think of it.”

In the Divinity School address, Emerson startled his hearers by a bold prophecy.

The born preacher appeals to the will and seeks to change its direction. He pleads and threatens. He is instant in season and out of season. Only on a few great occasions did Emerson adopt that tone. The greatest truths seemed to him to be self-evidencing. In their presence all minds were equal. “The weight of the universe is pressed down on the shoulders of each moral agent to hold him to his task.”

To all this the preacher might answer, “You have left out of your account something which is very important in human nature, namely, its weakness. The ordinary man lives amid the wonders of nature, but he may be very little affected by them. He needs some strong voice to urge him to open his eyes to what is around him. If it is so with the most obvious sights, is it not more so with moral and spiritual beauty? Is not the preacher needed as well as the philosopher and poet?”

No one would be more willing to acknowledge this than Emerson. His criticism of Plato would be equally true of himself.

CHAPTER XII

THE LURE OF THE WEST

NEW England has always been the home of an intense patriotism. The spirit of Bunker Hill and Lexington has never been quenched. Nor can it be said that any part of the country has sent out more men who have taken part in an effective way in large national enterprises.

Yet in the days before the Civil War, when Boston became conscious of itself as a literary center, it was open to the charge of not having yet discovered America. It belonged to a New England that still looked to Old England for its models. This, I take it, was always true more of the literary circles than of the mass of the people, but it was that which determined the admiration of those who aspired to “culture.” As Daniel in Babylon prayed with his windows opened toward Jerusalem, so the Boston literati, when they took pen in hand, wrote with their study windows open toward London. As to what was happening in the great hinterland beyond the Hudson, they cared little. And the people in the hinterland, who were so busy opening up the resources of the continent that they hadn’t time to be literary, resented in a good-natured way the Bostonian attitude. It had that “certain condescension” which Lowell resented on the part of Europeans, but from which he and his friends were not altogether free when they encountered the representative men of the West.

I think if is fair to say that Emerson did more than any one else to redeem the New England group of authors from the kind of provincialism which was their darling sin. He did it in a twofold way: first, by attacking their imitation of things English, and then by inculcating a hearty admiration for the America that was growing up in the West.

In “English Traits” he pays tribute to the sturdy virtues of the English character and the wealth of English talent. But he insists on treating England not as the Mother Country, but as a different country,—as different as France or Italy. He admires it, but it is with a critical detachment. Hawthorne wrote of England as The Old Home. Emerson had very little of the Old Home idea. There were ties of deep friendship, but he recognized that the genius of Britain and the genius of America were different. He admired the differences.

But this admiration has nothing in it of the provincial’s attitude to the greatness and privilege of those who belong to the capital. Had one said, “Go thou and do and be likewise,” Emerson would not have budged an inch. His attitude toward the sturdy Englishman would be like his attitude toward the Churchman:

Emerson had an admiration for the true-born Englishman, but not for the anglicized American. He believed in culture, but there must be an American culture that must grow out of the conditions of our own life. In his lines entitled “Culture” he defined the cultivated man as one who

And when he thought of the world’s flowing fates, his mind turned westward. There great things were happening. A new civilization was being created. There was nothing condescending in the attitude of the thinker to these men of action, who on an unparalleled stage were beginning a new act.

Against the fastidious critics of Boston, Emerson defends the rough and ready men of the West, who were already making their influences felt in politics.

Even before the Civil War Emerson discerned clearly the significance of the Middle West and the great part it was destined to play in the development of civilization. The old thirteen states had a tradition that was essentially British. The great states which had been established in the Mississippi valley were in their origin purely American. There was no colonial background to their history. Here the pioneer spirit had developed freely. It was the spirit of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett and Peter Cartwright.

Emerson reminds his fastidious friends that there is an explosive energy in young America.

Emerson could not satisfy all his wants in the Boston Athenæum or the Saturday Club. Every year he escaped from his neighbors for a lecture tour in the West. It was before the days of the Pullman car, and traveling in interior America meant roughing it.

He did not put on any airs as a missionary of culture. He could not make a living as a writer of books. He must earn something as an itinerant lecturer.

The ways of the lecturer were not always pleasant. “Two nights in a rail car and a third on the floor of a canal boat, where the cushion allowed me for a bed was crossed at the knees by another tier of sleepers as long-limbed as I, so that the air was a wreath of legs.”

In 1853 he writes from Springfield, Illinois, “Here I am in the deep mud of the prairies. It rains and thaws incessantly and if we step off a short street we go up to the shoulders perhaps in mud. My chamber is a cabin, my fellow-boarders are legislators. Two or three governors or ex-governors live in the house. But in the prairie we are all new men, and must not stand on trifles.”

In mid-winter he makes this entry in his journal: “My chief adventure was the necessity of riding in a buggy forty-eight miles to Grand Rapids; then after lecture twenty more in return, and the next morning back to Kalamazoo in time for the train hither at twelve.” This was at a time when Kalamazoo was a name strange to Bostonian ears.

It was not comfortable traveling through blizzards to discourse to audiences which gathered in chilly or stuffy halls, but it was interesting. “Here is America in the making, America in the raw. But it does not want much to go to lecture, and ’tis a pity to drive it.”

It is only fair to add that Emerson’s appreciation of the new West was intellectual rather than intimately social. He saw it in the large, and treated it in a symbolic way. He saw the significance of the western man’s boastfulness over the growth of the country. He liked to watch towns grow. He would have delighted in the Chicago man’s remark that when Chicago turned to culture it would make culture hum. That was after Emerson’s own heart, and it was that spirit which he wished to infuse into his well-beloved Boston.

In 1839 he writes, “It is a sort of maxim with me never to harp on the omnipotence of limitations. Least of all do we need any suggestion of checks and measures, as if New England were anything else.... Our virtue runs in a narrow rill, we have never a freshet. One would like to see Boston and Massachusetts agitated like a wave with some generosity, mad for learning, for music, for philanthropy, for freedom, for art. We have insight and sensibility enough if we had constitution enough.”

The old Puritan capital of Massachusetts has become a great cosmopolitan city, and what were then raw towns of the West are to-day making culture hum, but it is interesting to read Emerson’s judgments. He insisted that the rough work which the pioneers were doing, clearing the forest, building railroads, laying out cities and incidentally speculating in corner lots did not indicate that they were materialistic. They were idealists of an heroic sort. They were big men doing big things. The amenities would come in time. The fierce energy with which they did their work would be turned at length to the finer arts. He greeted them as the makers of a new civilization. The men of the West knew all this before. But they were glad to have Mr. Emerson come out and confirm them in their splendid anticipations.

CHAPTER XIII

EMERSON’S ELUSIVE SMILE

IT was only the accident of local contiguity that made Doctor Holmes attempt a biography of Emerson. The men were altogether unlike, and their minds seldom met. Emerson’s mysticism was to Holmes an intellectual frailty to be covered over by a friendly apology. But the doctor, though averse to transcendentalism, was a good judge of wit and humor. He tells us that no one can fully appreciate Emerson who has not seen the quick smile with which he read passages which his sober-minded disciples took as oracles to be pondered, while to him they were flashes of wit.

Emerson certainly had wit, but he was not witty in the ordinary sense, nor did he really enjoy the broader kinds of humor. He tells us how he went with little Waldo to the circus and they enjoyed themselves hugely till the clown came out to perform his antics. Waldo whispered, “The funny man makes me want to go home.” His father adds that he was of his opinion. It was a sore trial to him, therefore, when in his lectures he was sometimes expected to play the funny man. In preparing them for the press he, to the disappointment of some of his friends, cut out the enlivening anecdotes which his more austere taste disapproved.

Play of wit there was, but it was a game of solitaire. The great wits like Sidney Smith need antagonists and spectators for their play. Theirs is the quick give and take, or the unexpected word that sets the table in a roar. Emerson, as we have seen, was strangely deficient in conversational aptitude, and had no power of repartee. He complains of the way in which he was put down by clever talkers. “A snipper snapper eats me whole.”

Many of those who had been attracted by his writings were disappointed when they came to him to talk over the subjects which he had suggested. They found it hard to get at him. Henry James, the elder, declares that he knew of no one “whose conversation was less remunerative.”

Emerson’s wit was, to use William Penn’s phrase, “the fruit of solitude.” It was produced by collisions of thought that took place in his own mind, these happenings having no particular relation to time or place. They are “the smile of reason” over the incongruities developed in the course of human reasoning.

It was a part of Emerson’s philosophy. To him the man thinking was like a schoolboy with lexicon and grammar trying to read a Latin classic. It is hard work, and the schoolboy frowns as he bends to the task. The frown indicates his grim determination, which is a good sign. He is making hard work of it, will learn the lesson in time. But his serious demeanor indicates also that he does not yet know the meaning of the words he is painfully puzzling over. For they were written in lighter vein and contain a merry jest. When the meaning flashes forth, the words are forgotten, and the boy smiles understandingly.

Emerson’s quick but illusive smile came when he perceived the meaning of something which had seemed to be meaningless. The riddle of existence seems to most men the cause of futile effort to understand. The sphinx is a very solemn character indeed. To Emerson the mystery was not a cause of complaint. He suspected the sphinx of practical jokes. She was concealing something from us.

When thus challenged

Then the frowning face gave way to a smile, and “up rose the merry sphinx and crouched no more in stone.”

The conception of a “merry sphinx” is deliciously Emersonian. The tables are turned upon the bitter satirist. The satirist smiles when he sees the incongruity between what men expect and what they actually receive, between what they profess to be and what they are. In all this it is assumed that the reality is worse than the expectation. Things are not what they seem.

Quite so, says Emerson, but they are not always worse than they seem. They are often infinitely better than they seem. We are all the time entertaining angels unawares. We are dull creatures, and are slow to recognize our betters. If it is amusing to unmask a hypocrite, is it not still more amusing to discover that the commonplace individual whom we have been patronizing is really a king in disguise?

And when the performance does not come up to the expectation, the sudden discovery is not always unpleasant.

Emerson was very seldom known to laugh outright, and indeed rather disliked that explosion. But he was exceedingly sensitive to “breaks in the continuity of the intellect.” His mind was naturally logical. If this be so, that will follow, he argued. But he was quick-witted to see that sometimes the thing which he expected did not follow. He could not help but smile at the contradiction to his logic.

This intellectual perception is necessary for our sanity.

The rogue who can laugh at himself may be converted. But the sentimentalist who takes himself too seriously is in an unsalvable condition.

It happened that Emerson attracted many of these sentimentalists and he was not unconscious of the humor of the situation.

CHAPTER XIV

THE QUIET REVOLUTIONIST

It is not easy for some people to understand Emerson’s attitude toward the revolutionary forces that are all the time threatening the stability of society. One can appreciate the fierce energy of the revolutionist who, believing that the social structure is altogether bad, seeks to destroy it. On the other hand, there are those who look with alarm at every project that involves radical change.

But here was a quiet householder who habitually uttered the most revolutionary sentiments as if they were the most natural thoughts in the world. Of course the institutions which we see around us are not permanent. They are not the real things with which we have to do. They are the results of what took place yesterday; they are yielding to what is taking place to-day. The only reality is the force which makes and unmakes them. Laws, customs, constitutions, churches, are the results of the revolutionary impulse in man. They are the temporary embodiments of restless thought. Everything follows thought. You think of armies, and priesthoods, and courts of justice, as necessities. Yes, they are necessities of thought. Change the thought and they change their form. The temple that seems to have grown out of the solid earth has in reality grown out of the vague aspirations of the worshipper. It grew as the tree grows, through a power of working from within. It was built as the bird builds its nest, through an instinct which was irresistible.

One might watch the face of a man in the act of thinking. As one thought follows another, the mobile features change. Nerves and muscles respond to the impulses from within. The lips curve now downward, now upward, the cheeks quiver, the eyes dilate and then close, tell-tale wrinkles appear upon the forehead, the chin grows firm and then is relaxed, the pose of the head is now defiant and again it droops. The man is lost in thought, and unconscious of how he appears. To him the thought is all.

Two painters may be watching him. One is a literalist. To him the pose and features are everything. He imagines himself to be a realist, and his ambition is to portray the man as he actually is. Now it is obviously impossible literally to put all the changing expressions on a single canvas. So what the painter does is to seize one attitude and treat it as if it were permanent. The result is something hard and unyielding. We recognize the likeness, but there is no suggestion of the possibility of a change of mood. It is not, as we say, a speaking likeness.

The other painter is a real artist. To him the features are quivering with expression, and the expression changes at every instant. He sees his subject as alive. The smile, the frown, the tense muscles all mean something. They indicate what the man is thinking about. The shape and poise of the head tell whether nature has endowed him with the capacity to have thoughts that are significant. The aim of the artist is first to get inside the man’s mind and then to interpret that mind through the outward features.

If he succeeds, we say his picture is alive. The limitation of his art demands that he shall present only the attitude of a single moment, but we perceive that attitude is about to change. He is in the act of doing something, and there is on our part a feeling of expectancy. The orator’s lips are mobile, he is about to speak. The soldier’s hand is on his sword, he is about to grasp it firmly and wield it with all his might. It is always the suggestion of something that is coming that marks the work of genius.

Now there are two ways of looking at human institutions,—from without or from within. We may look at laws and customs as if they were fixed and final. They are the features of a giant carved in stone. We may be idolaters of the existing order, worshipping the carved image. Or we may be iconoclasts, ready to give it a smashing blow.

But to one who seeks to look at it all from within, the institutions represent but the transitory glory of features of the Great Being. The Great Being is thinking, he is dreaming of things to come, he is planning his dwelling place upon earth. The thoughts come thick and fast, and the acts follow each after its kind.

Humanity, conceived of as a great composite being, of which we are parts, is all alive and quivering with aspiration. It is never satisfied with the work of its own hands, and it never gives up working. Thousands of human beings are at a given time impelled by one spirit, and cooperate to one end. Their actions are not rational in the sense that each individual is able to give a reason, or least the right reason, for what he does. And yet the process, looked at as a whole, is not irrational. There is some big thought behind it all, of which all the action is expressive. Give us time and we can see the outlines of the thought.

Humanity is thinking. It is storing up experience. It is a creative force. Even what we call matinalistic progress, is itself but the following of an idea.

The historian tells of the Roman Empire, Feudalism, the Crusades, the French Revolution. These are tremendous facts. But the facts mean nothing till we see them as the expression of successive states of mind. Royalty as an institution is incredible to the born democrat who is without imagination, and who does not take the trouble to ask how the loyal subject feels toward his anointed king. And democracy is an empty name to one who has never felt the thrill of the idea that lies behind it.

In looking back from the vantage ground of several centuries, it is possible to see how a generation of men may be obsessed by an idea that determines all their achievements. We may see that idea lose hold upon the mind of the next generation, and lo all the mighty works lose all interest. It is as if one moment we saw the face of the Great Being all aquiver with interest. Then suddenly the light fades and he turns away from the work of his own hands.

But it is not so easy to realize that the mighty works of our own day owe their existence, and depend for their security on the same transitory support of thought. They represent our present thinking, and when we come to think differently they will disappear.

“Ah,” but we say, “we go down to hard facts. We build upon the granite of actuality, not on anything so unsubstantial as mere thought.”

Emerson would answer. “You think of the granite mountain peak as unchanging. Ask the geologist to tell you what he knows about Monadnock. To him the mountain does not seem very old. Its present form is but a transitory thing. It is but a bubble upon the earth that is sailing through stars with all its history.”

The poet who has learned the lesson of geology hears the mountain confess its own instability.

Older than the mountain is the power from which it sprang. And that power is only interpreted by Thought.

“When the greater comes again.” That was what Emerson was always murmuring to himself. The greatness that he recognized was the greatness of thought.

He was therefore always eager to meet men who were dissatisfied with existing things and making plans for betterment. He received them hospitably, he listened sympathetically. That their schemes involved radical changes did not frighten him. It seemed to be in the order of nature.

But he always applied the same test. It was not enough that their proposal should be for something different. It must also be something greater, and the greater includes the less. When the greater thought comes, it shall make us understand and appreciate the good that already exists. It will make universal what is now partial. The “song of Human progress” he expresses in the song of nature.

Notice the way in which the view of nature and the hopes for human nature are blended. Out of a few ancient elements, nature is continually making new and amazing combinations. Nothing is destroyed, everything is transformed. The same conservation of energy he discerns in humanity. The elements of character are old as the race, but no one can prophesy what new perfection can be obtained from them.

One may see Emerson’s thought best by contrasting it with that of a poet whose mind turned toward the same subject. Wordsworth and Emerson both loved to personify nature, and in communion with nature they found refreshment of spirit. But Emerson, who was not accustomed to use terms of disparagement, sometimes spoke more harshly of Wordsworth than of any other modern English poet.

The fact was that the two men looked at nature with quite different eyes. To Wordsworth, nature was the arch conservative. Over against the vain commotion of humankind was the great brooding presence of a power that could be relied upon because it was ever the same. And after his first fever of revolutionary ardor, Wordsworth returned to nature as to a refuge from all innovations. Here was the calm of an established order, and the more nearly human institutions conformed to this stability, the better for them.

To Emerson, nature was not the symbol of what is unchanging; it was eager, flashing, evanescent, infinitely suggestive. It was never the same. When it seemed the same it was only because our eyes are so dull that we can not catch all the transitions.

And that which helps us in our contact with the natural world is not its soothing lullabys. It is the challenge which comes to join in the quick and rude play of the forces which are creating and recreating the world. Come out-of-doors, the voice cries, and know what it is to live.

Nature does not rebuke our impatience when we break up old forms in order to make better. She is our accomplice, and conspires with us. We misrepresent her when we try to imitate her. Only in some stroke of originality do we accept her challenge. To see only repetition in nature is not to see at all.

That which he saw in nature he saw in every human effort that was free and spontaneous. He loved to call it the Newness. The Newness is that “which reconciles impossibilities, atones for shortcomings, expiates sins or makes them virtues, buries in oblivion the crowded historical past, sinks religions, philosophies, persons to legends, reverses the score of opinion of fame, reduces science to opinion, and makes the thought of the moment the key to the universe and the egg of history to come.”

To the worshipper of the Divine Newness, there was nothing terrible in the voices of eager innovators, for innovation is in the order of nature, and “the good human race outlives them all, and forever in the heart abides the old sovereign sentiment requiring justice and good-will to all, and rebuilds the decayed temples, and with new names chants again the praises of Eternal Right.”

CHAPTER XV

MEDITATIONS ON POLITICS

WHAT has been said of Emerson’s faith in the “Divine Newness” must be taken into account when we read his essay on politics. Like the Epistles of St. Paul, it contains some things hard to be understood, “which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest to their own destruction.” I have seen an anarchistic pamphlet which was made up almost entirely of quotations from Emerson.

Indeed, on the face of it, it appears to be an argument not only against political parties, but against government in general. This is because doubt is thrown upon what we usually call the foundations of organized society. Emerson did not believe that government had any foundations. He did not think of it as a building solidly resting upon a rock, and where one stone is fitted upon another. He thought of the state as a living body perpetually being renewed and having a power of motion. This organism so long as it is healthy can adapt itself to all kinds of conditions. The aim of politics is not to prevent change, but to prevent stagnation, which is death.

Before reading Emerson on Politics, read Burke’s wonderful tributes to the British Constitution and diatribes on the French Revolution. To Burke the British Constitution was a stately English mansion. It was the home of ordered Liberty. Generations have worked upon this mighty edifice. It was founded by the fathers; the new generations could add to it. But let no vandal attempt to dislodge one stone. It must be preserved in all its original beauty. The institution once formed became itself the object of pious solicitude. It was not a tool to be used, but a sacred symbol of the nation’s life.

Emerson did not feel that any political institution had such sanctity as that. “To the young citizen,” he says, “organized society lies in rigid repose, men and institutions rooted like oak trees to the center around which all arrange themselves as best they can. But the old statesman knows that society is fluid; there are no such roots and centers, but any particle may suddenly become the center of the movement and compel the system to gyrate around it.”

He then considers the two objects for which governments exist—persons and property. He shows how it is the tendency of the propertied classes to get control of the government and make the laws. This is so even in a democracy. The protection of property then becomes the business of governments rather than the welfare of persons.

The conservative party may be composed of kind-hearted and excellent people, but it can never be trusted when property interests conflict with personal rights. “The conservative party, composed of the most moderate, able and cultivated part of the community, is timid and merely defensive of property. It vindicates no right, it aspires to no real good, it brands no crime, it proposes no generous policy, it does not build, nor cherish the arts, nor foster religion, nor establish schools, nor encourage science, nor emancipate the slave, nor befriend the poor, or the Indian, or the immigrant.”

We Americans boast of our political institutions.

The essay ends with a glowing picture of a society of perfect freedom, in which reliance would be put on moral forces alone, and “the private citizen might be reasonable and a good neighbor without the hint of a jail or confiscation.”

As we come to this conclusion, we say with a start, “This mild-spoken gentleman has been saying something which sounds very much like what the revolutionary radicals have been preaching with lamentable results. He has brought us to the edge of the precipice of philosophic anarchy.”

Perhaps so, but the mild-mannered gentleman is not an anarchist, and it has never entered his head to jump off the precipice. He has come to look at the view and he intends to return home by way of the turnpike.

What Emerson has been saying is that political institutions are not ends in themselves, and that it is a superstition to regard them as such. They are expedients that are always capable of improvement. The resort to physical coercion would not be necessary in a perfect society. But in the meantime, what are we to do? Emerson’s common sense makes answer.

Emerson would agree with the philosophical anarchist in saying that a society is possible in which men and women can regulate their affairs without the consciousness of any coercive governmental force. He would agree also that we ought to strive after such a free society. But when it came to the practical question as to how to attain this ideal, they would part company. The anarchist would say, “Let us abolish government, and then we shall have a community of individuals each one of whom will be a law unto himself.”

Emerson would say, “I can not follow you. You put the cart before the horse. You have fallen into the political superstition against which I have been protesting. You attribute to the absence of government power which the legalists attribute to governmental control. They think that law can make men virtuous; you think that the lack of it can perform the miracle. My attitude is that of Paul in regard to the observance of the Jewish ceremonial law. ‘Circumcision availeth nothing, and uncircumcision but the new creature.’”

“Yes,” the practical man would say, “that is all very well, but how are you going to get the new creature? If we had better men, wise, temperate, just, tolerant, we should not need so many laws; but how are we to produce such personalities?”

At this point, the philosophy of the twentieth century would take issue with the liberalism of the nineteenth century. We have more faith in the power of institutions than had Emerson and his contemporaries. We are trying the experiment of free government under much more difficult conditions, The study of the social sciences has made us emphasize cooperation. May not society through wise laws and well-conceived institutions direct its own destinies?

To which Emerson would answer: “Yes, if society is composed of enough wise and self-reliant individuals. But social progress depends on individual progress. A man must be able to stand alone before he is able to cooperate to any advantage.”

His faith in the destiny of America was founded on the belief that the people were better than their politics. There was a power there to be invoked in time of need. We are as yet only incompletely organized, but the power is there. Little by little there will be created institutions that will more adequately represent the aspirations of multitudes of private persons.

In regard to the definite political issues of the time, Emerson’s sympathies were clearly expressed. Slavery was always an abomination to him, but he was slow to identify himself with the abolitionists. Their narrowness and intolerance offended his sense of fair play, while their courage attracted him. When the issue became one of the right to free speech, he stood squarely with them. Against the extension of slavery he protested vigorously. When the Civil War came, Emerson threw himself heartily into the side of the Union. Toward Lincoln himself his attitude was one of doubt till the proclamation of emancipation came. After that there was no one who did more to interpret the soul of Lincoln to the people.

But in one thing Emerson differed from most of the New England idealists. He did not put his trust in the respectable classes alone. He delighted in the crude strength of the people. His conception of American politics was that which Theodore Roosevelt so admirably illustrated in the generation following. It was the magnificent challenge to the reformer who was virile enough to meet all men on their own ground and overcome them there.

But he believed that there were elements of strength which the timid man did not take into account. The rough and ready politician was likely to be more nearly right than the fastidious person who despairs of the republic.

Wisdom is justified of her children and Emerson’s political teachings bore fruit in a man of the next generation,—Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt’s “strenuous life” was a popular exposition of the Emersonian doctrine. The strong man is needed in a democracy. He must understand the snarling majorities and the obstinate minorities. He must enjoy the conflict. He must play the game. But he must at the same time have a moral ideal of his own, simple and commanding. He must be not a statuesque statesman but a rough and ready idealist.

CHAPTER XVI

THE CANDID FRIEND OF ENGLAND

WHEN in 1833 Emerson first visited England, his chief interest was in a few great men whose writings had inspired him with a desire to see their faces. He met Coleridge, Wordsworth, Landor and Carlyle; but he had few opportunities to become acquainted with the English people.

In 1847 he was invited to give a course of lectures before various Mechanics’ Institutes in different parts of England. This visit gave him an opportunity to compare the Englishman at home with his own countrymen. The results of his observations were embodied in a volume entitled “English Traits.” This book differs from the other works of Emerson in that it follows a distinct method. The writer gives us a picture of England and the English as he saw them in the middle years of the nineteenth century. The book gives the impressions of a philosophic traveler who was anxious to get beneath the surface and get at the secrets of power. He treats of wealth, race, literature, journalism, aristocracies, religion, education.

Emerson differs from his contemporary Americans in treating England not as “the mother country,” but as a foreign country. The result of this is a detachment of mind which enables him to give judgments which are free from prejudice. The thing which impressed Emerson the most was the robustness of the people. There was a rude vigor which had not been impaired by centuries of civilization. The Englishman seemed a better animal than the American. In common sense, in practical sagacity, in the adoption of means to ends the English manifested themselves to be a masterful race.

There is a delightful chapter on English manners.

In regard to America the Englishman was in those days apt to be condescending.

Emerson’s criticism of the England which he saw is of interest to-day because most Englishmen would agree with it. It is a penetrating study of a period that has now passed away. From the consideration of defects he turns to the wealth and plenitude of the English nature, and the essential soundness of character.

CHAPTER XVII

AMONG HIS BOOKS

LIVING as he did in the midst of the New England colleges, one may wonder why Emerson did not find a place in some chair of literature. Longfellow, Lowell and Holmes were professors. Why was not Emerson sought for as a teacher of youth?

The question occurred to him more than once, but he answers it in a characteristic fashion. The reason why he was not asked, he says, was because those in authority thought he was not fitted for such a position, and he had a suspicion that they were right.

I am ready to concur in this judgment. Professor Emerson, I am sure, would have been embarrassed by a row of students conscientiously taking notes and giving docile assent to his challenging sentences with a keen eye to the marks that were to be the reward of their attention.

Emerson’s attempts to be didactic were uniformly unfortunate. He could not command his moods for any systematic exposition. He confesses that the ways of the academic scholar were always an astonishment to him. His thoughts would not “stay put.” In the course of a year he managed to get through with a respectable amount of work, but it came occasionally. When he knew that he ought to write a lecture, it quickened his wits to write a poem for the Dial, and when the editor of the Dial demanded a poem, it stirred his mind to a new effort at prose composition. Having found that this method answered best for his own constitution, he became reconciled to it, but it could not be recommended by a professor to his students. Neither could his favorite method of reading, beginning at the end of the book and reading backward, with wide intervals between the acts, be recommended, although it has its advantages as a method of testing. If there is a suspicion that the apples in a basket have been “deaconed,” the skeptical buyer will reverse the order in which they appear. The fruit looks different bottom side up.

But the chief disability of Emerson as a formal teacher of literature takes us back to the consideration to which attention was drawn in the first chapter. His mind has its real affinity to the thinkers of antiquity, to whom books were not an object of special interest. The proper study of mankind was man and nature. The book was only the record of some fellow-student, useful as stimulating his own thought.

Bibliolatry, in the wide sense of book worship, had no more uncompromising enemy. “We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.”

One can imagine Emerson’s intonation as he expressed his wonder that we would actually read four or five hundred pages for the sake of a golden sentence which might be concealed in them. The great art of the reader was to pass quickly over the desert place in order to linger long in the green oasis.

For the mere book worm he had little respect.

There were not many authors who were admitted to his little heaven. They were so congenial to his own mind that there was no question of mine and thine. It did not matter what the subject was so that it was treated in a suggestive way. The great purpose of literature is to stimulate the faculty of thinking.

His ambition for his own books was that they might be treated in the same fashion. “I would have my books read as I read my favorite books, not with explosion and astonishment, a marvel and a rocket, but as a friendly and agreeable influence.”

In his incursions into Book-land he followed the same method, or lack of method. He read what pleased him. The best guide to such books he thought was common fame. Certain books had pleased generations of readers. This proved that they were readable.

Emerson’s advice is that we should read famous books, but that we should not approach them as “classics,” but with the same familiarity with which we read the daily newspaper. Plato’s Socrates was not a dignified literary person. We can know him just as we know a shrewd Yankee farmer. He may be to the reader a character whose oddity delights us.

In like manner Shakespeare is not to be thought of in terms of mere literature. We forget the technicalities of his art. “He was a full man who liked to talk.”

With this conception of literature Emerson did not accept the doctrine of those realists who think that the highest praise of a literary work is that it gives an exact transcript of actual life. We all are surrounded by actuality, we do not need to have some one reproduce for us what we have every day an opportunity to see for ourselves. What the man of genius does is to allow us to become acquainted with the working of his own mind. And the reader must make sure that it is the kind of mind that is worth knowing.

CHAPTER XVIII

EMERSON’S HISTORIC SENSE

A CRITIC has declared that Emerson was lacking in the “historic sense.” By this he means that Emerson had no aptitude for historical investigation as it has been developed by modern scholars. He could never have been an historian like Lord Acton, seeking to get at the exact truth in regard to all the events of past periods of time. He was incapable of the fierce industry with which Thomas Carlyle investigated the records of long dead Hohenzollerns. One Hohenzollern would have been enough for Emerson. He had no taste for antiquarian research.

But to say that a man is without the historic sense is like accusing him of a lack of the sense of humor. This latter accusation usually means little more than there is a difference in the taste for jokes.

Instead of saying that Emerson lacked the historic sense, it would be better to inquire as to that which was characteristic in his attitude to history. Only when we sympathize with that can we obtain any benefit from him.

There are two ways of looking at human history. One may fix his mind on the differences between one period and another, or he may be more profoundly interested in the identities which he recognizes.

In the former case, what is seen is a succession of events and personages each having its little day and passing away forever. Each is different from the other, and it is the business of the historian to note those differences. He is the stage manager careful about the entrances and the exits of the actors, and about the way the lights are arranged for each scene. There are distinctly marked periods of time, each with its beginning, middle and end. This is one way of looking at history.

Another way is that of the philosopher who is interested primarily not in persons or events, but in the forces of which they are the temporary manifestations. He perceives not so much the differences as the identities. This was Emerson’s habitual point of view. He did not care for the dead past. So much of it as was really dead he would decently bury. But that part of it which was alive he would incorporate into the living present and treat as of contemporary interest. It was here that Emerson’s historic sense manifested itself.

In the volume called “Representative Men” Emerson illustrates his conception of History. “The search after the great men,” he says, “is the dream of youth, and the most serious occupation of manhood.” And yet when we have found the great man, we find a person very much like ourselves. We agree with him, which means that he expresses thoughts that are very like our own. We are conscious of the fact that he reveals what is in us as well as in him. Plato, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Napoleon, were representative men. There were millions of persons who had the same qualities, but in less degree. The fact that they have been appreciated proves their kinship to the multitude.

Here Emerson differed radically from his friend Carlyle. To Carlyle the hero was an original force; Luther was more than the Reformation of the sixteenth century. Cromwell and Frederick the Great were treated as if they were creatures who were unlike the Englishmen and the Prussians whom they governed. To Emerson they were men who best represented the ideals of their countrymen.

To my mind Emerson’s most brilliant bit of historical criticism is contained in his Essay on Napoleon. Many have been the descriptions of the life and character of the great Corsican adventurer. Emerson makes us see the kind of man Napoleon was. “Bonaparte was the idol of common men because he had in transcendent degree the qualities and powers of common men.”

He was “a man of stone and iron, capable of sitting on horseback sixteen or seventeen hours, of going many days together without rest or food, except by snatches, and with the speed and spring of a tiger in action; a man not embarrassed by any scruples; compact, instant, selfish, prudent, and of a perception which did not suffer itself to be balked or misled by any pretences of others, or any superstition or any heat or haste of his own.

Napoleon’s change from the young revolutionist to the Emperor was nothing strange. “The democrat is the young conservative. The aristocrat is the democrat, ripe and gone to seed—because both parties stand on the one ground of the supreme value of property, which one endeavors to get and the other to keep. Bonaparte may be said to represent the whole history of this party, its youth and its age, yes and with poetic justice its fate in his own.”

Turn from the Essay on Napoleon to that on Power. In the description of the village tavern keeper you will recognize a poor relation of the great Napoleon. There is the same combination of force and unscrupulousness.

Schoolboys dispute the question—Was the career of Napoleon Bonaparte beneficial to Europe? The same question arises in regard to the public-spirited and disreputable tavern keeper. Emerson as an historian would not attempt to give a final verdict. He would insist on having the facts on both sides presented. And then he would judge the value of the facts by their correspondence with his own experience.

One experiences history as he experiences religion. There are a few passions that are common to all men. They are the keys to all story of the past. It is mere pedantry to explain the worship and the achievements of other ages as if they were mysteries. After all they are nothing strange. We have felt the same impulses.

CHAPTER XIX

PEACE AND WAR

IN 1838 Emerson delivered a lecture on War which has furnished many excellent texts for thoroughgoing pacifists. And yet in the war for the preservation of the Union, he threw himself unreservedly into the conflict. At first sight, it might seem that under the stress of circumstances he had given up his earlier convictions.

Yet the words which I have placed at the head of this chapter were written at the time he was making his plea for universal peace. Emerson’s position was practically unchanged by the events of his time. He was a believer in peace, but it was the peace of the strong man armed. It was peace established and maintained by men who were not to be coerced. Having demonstrated that they were able to take care of themselves they could lay aside their arms and trust to moral force. His lecture was in praise of the glory of peace which he believed in the end would supersede the meretricious glories of war.

But because war has had such uses in the past, does it follow that it must continue indefinitely?

There are passages in praise of non-resistance which sound very much like the words of doctrinaire pacifists. But it is the non-resistance of the soldier who with arms in his hand will not use them to revenge a private wrong.

War is barbarous, peace has possibilities of heroic achievement, but are these not circumstances under which the good man must fight? In 1838 Emerson answered, “A wise man will never impawn his future being and action, and decide before-hand what he shall do in a given extreme event. Nature and God will instruct him what to do.”

When the extreme event came he had no hesitancy. In 1862 he wrote, “It is wonderful to see the unseasonable senility of the Peace Party through all its masks, blinding their eyes to the main feature of the war, namely its inevitableness.”

Heroism is after all the same whether in peace or in war. It is the deliberate choice of the highest service possible under the circumstances. He thinks of the soldier who when war is inevitable obeys the call of duty as one who is sacrificed to make peace possible.

CHAPTER XX

THE FORTUNES OF THE POOR

TO the present-day reader Emerson is least satisfactory when he touches upon what we call the problem of poverty. We have in mind the condition of thousands of persons who through no fault of their own are condemned to live in city slums. They are, we believe, victims of social misadjustment. They can be redeemed only by social effort.

When we hear Emerson saying that the whole interest of history lies in the fortunes of the poor, we expect to hear him say something bearing upon our problem. How does he propose to abolish poverty? We are disappointed. Poverty, he tells us, is not so bad after all. Indeed it has many advantages. Sometimes he rises into a strain that reminds us of Saint Francis of Assisi.

We can only understand Emerson and Saint Francis when we define the terms they used. When Francis sang the praises of my lady Poverty he was not thinking of the condition of those who lived in the hideous slums of great cities. He had in mind the poverty of the Italian peasants whose fortunes he was glad to share. They were poor in this world’s goods, but rich in spiritual resources. They lived in the open air, they listened to the song of birds, and they were happy in human companionship.

The poverty which Emerson praised was the poverty of the well-born New England youth. It was a life without luxury, but with endless opportunity. There was a stimulating of necessity acting upon natural ambition. The poor man’s son could aspire to any station in society. The way was open to him. If he had health he was to be congratulated as one of the children of good fortune. This was a theme of which he never tired.

In the last fifty years there have been vast social changes. Even in America we have begun to feel the pressure of population on the means of subsistence. The young man can not obtain a farm by the simple device of going West. And yet America is still a land of opportunity. It is still “a poor man’s country” even though the poor man has to be more alert than formerly in order to win success.

It is still true that inherited wealth is not necessary for the attainment of the most desirable things. One may be born poor and yet be a child of good fortune.

CHAPTER XXI

THE CUTTING EDGE

THE virtue which Emerson insisted upon as essential was courage. In the ruder contacts of life it is common enough, but it is needed equally in time of peace.

There could not be a more perfect illustration of the kind of courage which Emerson admired than the voice of the singer directed by a sure sense of power. It does not domineer and yet it dominates.

Emerson felt that the America of his day exhibited courage in many directions. It faced the material problems with an indomitable energy. But he felt a lack of the cutting edge in dealing with intellectual problems. The American scholars seemed to him tame-spirited. They were not sure of themselves, and were followers rather than leaders.

In his oration before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard in 1837, he made a bold attack on the education of the day and ended with a plea for the courage of the intellect. The scholar must develop a heroism of his own.

He does not belong to a protected class.

In 1876, in an address at the University of Virginia, Emerson returns to the same theme.

In his celebrated address to the Cambridge Divinity School, Emerson insisted on a spiritual courage which makes of religion an independent force.

In the lines entitled “Worship” he returns to the same theme. The essence of real worship is spiritual courage. It is the “sword of the spirit,” and it has a cutting edge.

CHAPTER XXII

TERMINUS

TO the man of action the approach of age is dreaded because it means defeat. The strong man conscious of failing powers yields to one stronger than himself because younger.

To Emerson, as a man thinking, the great weakness of age was to be found in its lack of faith in ideals. He saw old men who accepted the actual and denied the possibility of what they had not been able to achieve. They praised the past time and looked askance at the threatening future. From the timidities of age which are often mistaken for wisdom, he asked to be delivered, and his prayer was granted.

He had lived through a transition period in thought. Almost all his contemporaries, including those who were younger than himself, have left in their later utterances a record of disillusion. Carlyle, Ruskin, Matthew Arnold and Tennyson were inclined to sing dirges over a beautiful age of faith which had vanished before the advance of science. James Russell Lowell, with all his sturdy Americanism yielded to the same impulse. There was an acknowledgment of spiritual defeat. It might be expressed in gallant language, but the meaning was none the less clear.

To Emerson this so-called disillusion was only another illusion. He speaks of the man “who during all his years of health has planted himself on the side of progress, but who as soon as he begins to die, checks his forward play, calls in his troops, and becomes conservative. All conservatives are such from personal defects. They can only, like invalids, act on the defensive.”

One thing he resolved to do, to “obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime.” In this he was eminently successful.

Doctor Holmes speaks delicately and discriminatingly of “the decline of Emerson’s working faculties.” That exactly describes what happened. The working faculties gradually failed, memory became less clear, but spiritual insight and loyalty to youthful ideals remained to the last.

While yet a young man, he had written down certain resolutions by which he wished to guide his life. Seldom has any one been more consistent in following his principles.

As to death, he had always been unafraid. When it came at the end of his seventy-ninth year, it found him in the mood that was habitual to him. He had long ago learned the lesson.

THE END

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

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