Part 2 (1/2)

Emerson was occupied entirely with the future, as Carlyle was occupied entirely with the past. Emerson shared the open expectation of the new world, Carlyle struggled under the gloom and pessimism of the old--a greater character, but a far less lambent and helpful spirit. Emerson seems to have been obsessed with the idea that a new and greater man was to appear. He looked into the face of every newcomer with an earnest, expectant air, as if he might prove to be the new man: this thought inspires the last stanzas of his ”Song of Nature”:

”Let war and trade and creeds and song Blend, ripen race on race, The sunburnt world a man shall breed Of all the zones and countless days.

”No ray is dimmed, no atom worn, My oldest force is good as new, And the fresh rose on yonder thorn Gives back the bending heavens in dew.”

Emerson was under no illusion as to the effect of distance. He knew the past was once the present, and that if it seemed to be transformed and to rise into cloud-land behind us, it was only the enchantment of distance--an enchantment which men have been under in all ages. The everyday, the near-at-hand, become prosaic; there is no room for the alchemy of time and s.p.a.ce to work in. It has been said that all martyrdoms looked mean in the suffering. Holy ground is not holy when we walk upon it. The now and the here seem cheap and commonplace.

Emerson knew that ”a score of airy miles will smooth rough Monadnoc to a gem,” but he knew also that it would not change the character of Monadnoc. He knew that the past and the present, the near and the far, were made of one stuff. He united the courage of science with the sensibility of poetry. He would not be defrauded of the value of the present hour, or of the thoughts which he and other men think, or of the lives which they live to-day. ”I will tell you how you can enrich me--if you will recommend to-day to me.” His doctrine of self-reliance, which he preached in season and out of season, was based upon the conviction that Nature and the soul do not become old and outworn, that the great characters and great thoughts of the past were the achievements of men who trusted themselves before custom or law. The sun s.h.i.+nes to-day; the constellations hang there in the heavens the same as of old. G.o.d is as near us as ever He was--why should we take our revelations at second hand? No other writer who has used the English language has ever preached such a heroic doctrine of self-trust, or set the present moment so high in the circle of the years, in the diadem of the days.

It is an old charge against Emerson that he was deficient in human sympathy. He makes it against himself; the ties of a.s.sociation which most persons find so binding seemed to hold him very lightly. There was always a previous question with him--the moral value of one's a.s.sociations. Unless you sicken and die to some purpose, why such an ado about it? Unless the old ruin of a house harbored great men and great women, or was the scene of heroic deeds, why linger around it?

The purely human did not appeal to him; history interested him only as it threw light upon to-day. History is a record of the universal mind; hence of your mind, of my mind--”all the facts of history preexist in the mind as laws.” ”What Plato thought, every man may think. What a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand.” ”All that Shakespear says of the king, yonder slip of a boy that reads in the corner feels to be true of himself”; and so on, seeing in history only biography, and interested in the past only as he can link it with the present. Always an intellectual interest, never a human or an emotional one. His Journal does not reveal him going back to the old places, or lingering fondly over the memories of his youth. He speaks of his ”unpleasing boyhood,” of his unhappy recollections, etc., not because of unkindness or hards.h.i.+ps experienced, but because of certain shortcomings or deficiencies of character and purpose, of which he is conscious--”some meanness,” or ”unfounded pride” which may lower him in the opinion of others. Pride, surely, but not ign.o.ble pride.

Emerson's expectation of the great poet, the great man, is voiced in his ”Representative Men”: ”If the companions of our childhood should turn out to be heroes, and their condition regal, it would not surprise us.” On the contrary, I think it would surprise most of us very much. It is from the remote, the unfamiliar, that we expect great things. We have no illusions about the near-at-hand. But with Emerson the contrary seems to have been the case. He met the new person or took up the new volume with a thrill of expectancy, a condition of mind which often led him to exaggerate the fact, and to give an undue bias in favor of the novel, the audacious, the revolutionary. His optimism carried him to great lengths. Many of the new stars in his literary firmament have quite faded out--all of them, I think, but Walt Whitman. It was mainly because he was so full of faith in the coming man that he gave, offhand, such a tremendous welcome to ”Leaves of Gra.s.s”--a welcome that cooled somewhat later, when he found he had got so much more of the unconventional and the self-reliant than he had bargained for. I remember that when I spoke of Walt Whitman to him in Was.h.i.+ngton in 1871 or '72, he said he wished Whitman's friends would ”quarrel” with him more about his poems, as some years earlier he himself had done, on the occasion when he and Whitman walked for hours on Boston Common, he remonstrating with Whitman about certain pa.s.sages in ”Leaves of Gra.s.s” which he tried in vain to persuade him to omit in the next edition. Whitman would persist in being Whitman.

Now, counseling such a course to a man in an essay on ”Self-Reliance”

is quite a different thing from entirely approving of it in a concrete example.

In 1840 Emerson writes: ”A notice of modern literature ought to include (ought it not?) a notice of Carlyle, of Tennyson, of Landor, of Bettina, of Sampson Reed.” The first three names surely, but who is Bettina, the girl correspondent of Goethe, that she should go in such a list? Reed, we learn, was a Boston bank clerk, and a Swedenborgian, who wrote a book on the growth of the mind, from which Emerson quotes, and to which he often alludes, a book that has long been forgotten; and is not Bettina forgotten also?

Emerson found more in Jones Very than has any one else; the poems of Very that he included in ”Parna.s.sus” have little worth. A comparatively unknown and now forgotten English writer also moved Emerson unduly. Listen to this: ”In England, Landor, De Quincey, Carlyle, three men of original literary genius; but the scholar, the catholic, cosmic intellect, Bacon's own son, the Lord Chief Justice on the Muse's Bench is”--who do you think, in 1847?--”Wilkinson”! Garth Wilkinson, who wrote a book on the human body. Emerson says of him in ”English Traits”: ”There is in the action of his mind a long Atlantic roll, not known except in deepest waters, and only lacking what ought to accompany such powers, a manifest centrality.” To bid a man's stock up like that may not, in the long run, be good for the man, but it shows what a generous, optimistic critic Emerson was.

VII

In his published works Emerson is chary of the personal element; he says: ”We can hardly speak of our own experiences and the names of our friends sparingly enough.” In his books he would be only an impersonal voice; the man Emerson, as such, he hesitated to intrude.

But in the Journals we get much more of the personal element, as would be expected. We get welcome glimpses of the man, of his moods, of his diversions, of his home occupations, of his self-criticism. We see him as a host, as a lecturer, as a gardener, as a member of a rural community. We see him in his walks and talks with friends and neighbors--with Alcott, Th.o.r.eau, Channing, Jones Very, Hawthorne, and others--and get s.n.a.t.c.hes of the conversations. We see the growth of his mind, his gradual emanc.i.p.ation from the bondage of the orthodox traditions.

Very welcome is the growth of Emerson's appreciation of Wordsworth. As a divinity student he was severe in his criticism of Wordsworth, but as his own genius unfolded more and more he saw the greatness of Wordsworth, till in middle life he p.r.o.nounced his famous Ode the high-water mark of English literature. Yet after that his fondness for a telling, picturesque figure allows him to inquire if Wordsworth is not like a bell with a wooden tongue. All this is an admirable ill.u.s.tration of his familiar dictum: ”Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you say to-day.”

In the Journals we see Emerson going up and down the country in his walks, on his lecture tours in the West, among his neighbors, wherever and whenever he goes as alert and watchful as a sportsman. He was a sportsman of a new kind; his game was ideas. He was always looking for hints and images to aid him in his writings. He was like a bird perpetually building a nest; every moment he wanted new material, and everything that diverted him from his quest was an unwelcome interruption. He had no great argument to build, no system of philosophy to organize and formulate, no plot, like a novelist, to work out, no controversy on hand--he wanted pertinent, concrete, and striking facts and incidents to weave in his essay on Fate, or Circles, or Character, or Farming, or Wors.h.i.+p, or Wealth--something that his intuitive and disjointed habit of thought could seize upon and make instant use of.

We see him walking in free converse with his friends and neighbors, receiving them in his own house, friendly and expectant, but always standing aloof, never giving himself heartily to them, exchanging ideas with them across a gulf, prizing their wit and their wisdom, but cold and reserved toward them personally, dest.i.tute of all feeling of comrades.h.i.+p, an eye, an ear, a voice, an intellect, but rarely, or in a minor degree, a heart, or a feeling of fellows.h.i.+p--a giving and a taking quite above and beyond the reach of articulate speech. When they had had their say, he was done with them. When you have found a man's limitations, he says, it is all up with him. After your friend has fired his shot, good-by. The pearl in the oyster is what is wanted, and not the oyster. ”If I love you, what is that to you?” is a saying that could have been coined only in Concord. It seems to me that the basis of all wholesome human attachment is character, not intellect. Admiration and love are quite different things.

Transcendental friends.h.i.+ps seem to be cold, bloodless affairs.

One feels as if he wanted to squeeze or shake Emerson to see if he cannot get some normal human love out of him, a love that looks for nothing beyond love, a love which is its own excuse for being, a love that is not a bargain--simple, common, disinterested human love. But Emerson said, ”I like man but not men.”

”You would have me love you,” he writes in his Journal. ”What shall I love? Your body? The supposition disgusts you. What you have thought and said? Well, whilst you were thinking and saying them, but not now.

I see no possibility of loving anything but what now is, and is becoming; your courage, your enterprise, your budding affection, your opening thought, your prayer, I can love--but what else?”

Can you not love your friend for himself alone, for his kins.h.i.+p with you, without taking an inventory of his moral and intellectual qualities; for something in him that makes you happy in his presence?

The personal attraction which Whitman felt between himself and certain types of men, and which is the basis of most manly friends.h.i.+ps, Emerson probably never felt. One cannot conceive of him as caring deeply for any person who could not teach him something. He says, ”I speculate on virtue, not burn with love.” Again, ”A rush of thoughts is the only conceivable prosperity that can come to me.” Pure intellectual values seem alone to have counted with Emerson and his followers. With men his question was, ”What can you teach me?” With Nature, ”What new image or suggestion have you got for me to-day?”

With science, ”What ethical value do your facts hold?” With natural history, ”Can I translate your facts and laws into my supernatural history?” With civil history, ”Will your record help me to understand my own day and land?” The quintessence of things was what he always sought.

”We cannot forgive another for not being ourselves,” Emerson wrote in 1842, and then added, ”We lose time in trying to be like others.” One is reminded of pa.s.sages in the Emerson-Carlyle correspondence, wherein each tried to persuade the other to be like himself. Carlyle would have Emerson ”become concrete and write in prose the straightest way,” would have him come down from his ”perilous alt.i.tude,”

”soliloquizing on the eternal mountain-tops only, in vast solitude, where men and their affairs lie all hushed in a very dim remoteness and only _the man_ and the stars and the earth are visible--come down into your own poor Nineteenth Century, its follies, its maladies, its blind, or half-blind but gigantic toilings, its laughter and its tears, and try to evolve in some measure the hidden G.o.d-like that lies in it.” ”I wish you would take an American hero, one whom you really love, and give us a History of him--make an artistic bronze statue (in good words) of his Life and him!” Emerson's reply in effect is, Cremate your heroes and give me their ashes--give me ”the culled results, the quintessence of private conviction, a _liber veritatis_, a few sentences, hints of the final moral you draw from so much penetrating inquest into past and present men.”

In reply to Carlyle's criticism of the remote and abstract character of his work, Emerson says, ”What you say now and heretofore respecting the remoteness of my writing and thinking from real life, though I hear substantially the same criticism made by my countrymen, I do not know what it means. If I can at any time express the law and the ideal right, that should satisfy me without measuring the divergence from it of the last act of Congress.”

VIII

Emerson's love of nature was one of his ruling pa.s.sions. It took him to the country to live, it led him to purchase Walden Pond and the Walden woods; it led him forth upon his almost daily walks, winter and summer, to the fields and the woods. His was the love of the poet and the idealist, of the man who communes with Nature, and finds a moral and an intellectual tonic in her works. The major part of his poetry is inspired by Nature. He complains of Tennyson's poetry that it has few or no wood notes. His first book, ”Nature,” is steeped in religious and poetic emotion. He said in his Journal in 1841: ”All my thoughts are foresters. I have scarce a day-dream on which the breath of the pines has not blown, and their shadows waved. Shall I not then call my little book Forest Essays?” He finally called it ”Nature.” He loves the ”hermit birds that harbor in the woods. I can do well for weeks with no other society than the partridge and the jay, my daily company.”