Essays and poems of Emerson

Front matter

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ESSAYS AND POEMS OF EMERSON

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Introduction

~ Somer books, like some persons, convey to us all that they will ever have to give at a single sitting. Others hold our attention profitably through two or three encounters. But the books to be shipwrecked with, the great books into which rich and substantial lives have been distilled and packed — the Dialogues of Plato, Montaigne’s Essays, Boswell’s Johnson, the Essays and Journals of Emerson — these are to be lived with and returned to and made the companions of hours and days and moods as various as those in which they were written. You cannot discover what Emergon has been to others or what he may be to you by any cursory turning of his pages. Still less can you “set him up” by studying any summary of his philosophical system. Philosophers tell us indeed that his philosophical system is hopelessly antiquated, and fancy that they have disposed of him. But Emerson himself remarked: “T need hardly say to anyone acquainted with my thoughts that I have no system.” The value of his thoughts depends scarcely more upon the metaphysical filaments among them than the value of a string of alternating beads of gold and pearl depends upon the string. The figure has a momentary illustrative force but is very inadequate. Emerson lives, still speaks pertinently of our current affairs, and tomorrow we shall still find him commenting with equal pertinency on tomorrow’s affairs. To know him is not mere knowledge. It is an experience; for he is a dynamic personality, addressing the will, the emotions, the imagination, no less than the intellect. His value escapes the merely intellectual appraiser. Analysis cannot deal properly with his pungent wit—it must be savored; nor with the impetus that he gives to the will—it must be felt; nor with the purgation and serene aii INTRODUCTION rapture of the mind towards which his noble discipline tends—this rapture must be attained as a state of grace by imitation of those who have attained it, by lifelong intercourse with men whose tone and habit of life is noble.

I

Since we are to consider him primarily as an unspent ' force in our own times, what it most concerns us to inquire about him is what he can do for us. If we approach him with that question, we need not tarry long over. biographical details, interesting and rewarding as they may be to the student of literary history We pretty well sum up his external career when we say that he was a New Englander of Boston, where he was born in 1803, and of Concord, where he died in 1882, after a studious life of irre- _proachable purity, dignity, and simplicity becoming the descendant of several generations of New England gentlemen and scholars. His formal education he received at the Boston Latin School and at Harvard College, from which he was graduated in 1821, with a well-formed bias towards an intellectual life. The son of a Unitarian minister, he. inherited an ethical impulse which directed him to the Harvard Divinity School in 1825-6. In 1829 he was appointed pastor of the Second Unitarian Church of Boston. He was married in the same year to Ellen Tucker, who died two years later, leaving him a sweet and unfading memory of her fragile loveliness. After he had served his parish acceptably for three years, he felt obliged to announce, in 1832, that he was no longer able to administer the sacrament of communion in the general sense of his congregation, and resigned his charge. In December of that year he visited Europe and made acquaintance with three or four men whose residence in Europe constituted for him the chief reason for going abroad: Landor in Italy, Carlyle at Craigenputtock, and Coleridge and Wordsworth in England. He returned to America in October 1833, and in the following year settled permanently in Concord. In 1835 he married his second wife, Lydia Jackson. For three or four years he preached with some regularity in various pul-

INTRODUCTION ix pits, but he gradually abandoned the church for the lyceum, which invited him as far west as Wisconsin and Illinois. He made a second visit to England in 1848. He was an active participant in the anti-slavery movement. But, for the most part, barring his winter lecturing tours and an occasional excursion to deliver a commencement address or a Phi Beta Kappa oration, he lived placidly in Concord, read-. ing, meditating, writing, editing the short-lived Transcendental Dial, looking amusedly askance upon the Brook Farm experiment, and walking and talking with his famous fellow-villagers, the Alcotts, the Hawthornes, Margaret Fuller, Ellery Channing, and Thoreau.

What ferment of radical thought went on beneath the deecorous exterior of that quiet scholar’s life we know with remarkable fullness and accuracy. From early boyhood Emerson kept a journal —a habit, in his case, denoting a mind disposed to make unusual exactions of the “hypocritic Days.” At first, he is much occupied with what he has read or proposes to read; but presently his note-book becomes a _ kind of storehouse for mellowing the fruits of his daily meditations, and an experimental garden for planting the seeds of new thoughts gathered on his intellectual adventures. The Journals, now published in twelve volumes, give us an invaluable commentary upon the long-familiar essays, and they enrich greatly our sense of the personality behind them. Especially they illuminate the turning point im Emerson’s life, when he abandoned the pulpit and became a wholly free thinker and speaker. With their help, one perceives that for years before the open break, the inner emancipation had been proceeding. One observes the young thinker expanding beyond the formulas of his parish, reaching out towards the life of his nation, feeling his way into the higher spirit of his times, daily becoming more eager to exchange messages and compare visions with the leaders of his generation.

It is a vulgar error of our day to think of Emerson and his friends as living-in a rude and mentally poverty-stricken era. In his formative period, say from 1820 to 1852, society around the Golden Gate and along the southern x INTRODUCTION margin of Lake Michigan was indeed in a somewhat more primitive state than at present. But in compensation, such civilized society as the country possessed was concentrated in a smaller geographical area. To reside in Boston or New York was not then, as now, to live on the rim but at the center of population, within reach of the molding pressure of all the great Americans of one’s time. The “moment,” furthermore, was peculiarly rich in the presence of eminent men who had been shaped by the Revolution, and in the presence of men who were to become eminent in the movement which led to the Civil War. To a young man of Emerson’s quality, the period of the Adamses, Jefferson, Randolph, and Jackson, the period of Webster, Clay, Calhoun, Everett, and Garrison, was not a dull period, not a dead interval, but a most stirring and exciting time between two epoch-making crises, with the thunder of a political Niagara at one’s back, and the roar of wild rapids ahead. The air was full of promise and of peril and of conflicting measures for avoiding the one and fulfilling the other. Politically-minded men, the Jacksons, the Clays, the Calhouns, brought to the problems of the hour political solutions. But the more sensitive spirits among the younger | generation in New England had already experienced a certain reaction against the political faith and enthusiasms of their fathers. Already they heard the ominous creaking of democratic machinery under the manipulation of unskilful and unscrupulous hands. To them it began to appear that the next great improvement in the condition of society must depend less upon the alteration of laws and institutions than upon the intellectual and moral regeneration of men. The new movement was genuinely Puritan by its inwardness} by its earnest passion for cleansing the inside of the cup, and by its protest against external powers which thwarted or retarded the efforts of the individual soul to move forward and upward by light from within. Looking back in 1844 over the multifarious projects for “the salvation of the world” unfolded by reformers in his part of the country, Kmerson remarks: “There was in all the practical activities of New England, for the last quarter of a century, a grad-

INTRODUCTION xi ual withdrawal of tender consciences from the social organization. There is observable throughout, the contest between mechanical and spiritual methods, but with a steady tendency of the thoughtful and virtuous to a deeper belief and reliance on spiritual facts.”

Those who place their reliance on spiritual facts have always been thought a little queer and rather dangerous by those who do not. Nor can it be denied that the radical protestantism of the Puritans, which Emerson inherited, has contained from the time of Wycliff an anarchical germ, a latent suspicion of church and state, a tendency towards “coming out,” till one shall stand alone in utter freedom and count for one and nothing more. It is hardly possible to exaggerate the individualism which characterized the movement in New England. For Emerson above all, the very rapture of the time rose from its challenge to a perfectly independent, a perfectly fearless, scrutiny and testing of received values in every field—religion, philosophy, morals, politics, literature and art.

-Emerson was preserved from the fanaticism of a secession from “the social organization” partly by his culture. A moral reformation which undertakes to investigate the bases of morals will develop and transform itself into an intellectual renascence as soon as those who are conducting it perceive that everything in heaven and earth has a bearing on moral questions. Emerson discovered early that the first step towards thinking greatly and freely on moral matters is to consult the world’s accumulated wisdom. Hasty writers speak of his “jaunty” attitude towards the past. If he is jaunty about the past, it is because he is very familiar with it. What impresses the thoughtful student of his journals is his steady effort to hold himself and his contemporaries under the searching cross-lights of human experience. He reads Plato, Cicero, Hafiz, Confucius, Buddha, Mahomet, Dante, Montaigne, Milton, Voltaire, Kant, Goethe, Napoleon, Coleridge, Carlyle, because that, he finds, is the effective way to set his own intelligence free, and because freedom, he finds, means ability to move at ease and as an equal among such minds as these.

xii INTRODUCTION

But Emerson was also preserved from excessive individualism by a passion which, properly elevated and directed, may be a young man’s guardian angel, the passion of am-

~ bition. “All young persons,” he observes, “thirst for a real existence for a real object, — for something great and good which they shall do with their heart. Meanwhile they all pack gloves, or keep books, or travel, or draw indentures, or cajole old women.” By habitual imaginative association with great men, he had assimilated their thoughts and virtues, and had accustomed himself to look forward with an almost Miltonic assurance to playing a part above the ordinary in the life of his country. At the age of twenty-one he is sketching a series of papers on the improvement of the nation. He thinks the demand for a moral education the best sign of the times, and deems the exploration of the field a task fit for-a‘new Columbus.) He queries whether it were not an “heroic adventure” for him to “insist on being a popular speaker.” And with perceptible elation at the prospect he concludes: “To address a great nation risen from the dust and sitting in absolute judgment on the merits of men, ready to hear if any one offers good counsel, may rouse the ambition and exercise the judgment of a man.”

II

There is some disposition at present to look upon Emerson’s ambition as extravagant and to regard his work as a closed chapter in the intellectual life of America. It is even asserted that he never much affected the thinking of his countrymen. Says a recent writer, “What one notices about him chiefly is his lack of influence upon the main stream of American thought, such as it is. He had admirers and even worshippers, but no apprentices.” But this judgment will not stand examination. Emerson had Thoreau for an apprentice; and between them they established relations with the natural world, which successive poet-naturalists have maintained and broadened to the dimensions of a national tradition. He had Whitman for a disciple; and a large part of what passes with us as poetry today is ulti-

~ INTRODUCTION xiii mately traceable to their inspiration. He left the imprint of his spirit upon Lowell, who said, “There is no man living ‘to whom, as a writer, so many of us feel and thankfully acknowledge so great an indebtedness for ennobling impulses.” Whatever is finely academic, highbred, and distinguished in our critical literature today has felt the influence of Emerson. “To him,” according to Lowell, ‘“‘more than to all other causes together did the young martyrs of our civil war owe the sustaining strength of thoughtful heroism that is so touching in every record of their lives.” By his aid innumerable clergymen have found a way to translate the message of ancient scriptures into the language of modern men. Every American who pretends to know anything whatever of the American classics has at one time or another read the “Essays”; and tht “idealism” which is thought to be characteristic of the American people is most readily formulated in a half dozen of his “familiar quotations,” which every one knows, whether he has read a line of Emerson or not. Directly and indirectly Emerson probably did as much as any other writer in our history to establish what we mean by “a good American”; and that, in the long run, is the most important sort of influence that can be exerted by any writer in any country.

That his influence abroad has been considerable may be briefly suggested by the reminder that he touched deeply such various men as Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Nietzsche, and M. Maeterlinck. When Arnold visited America in 1883, he lectured on Emerson, on whom thirty years earlier he had written a sonnet of ardent admiration and homage. The lecture, the fruit of his ripest critical reflection, was not altogether satisfactory to his American audience. It impressed them as quite inadequately appreciative of their chief literary luminary. For Arnold very firmly declared that Emerson is not to be ranked with the great poets, nor with the great writers of prose, nor with the great makers of philosophical systems. These limitations of Emerson’s power are commonly quoted as if detraction were the main burden of Arnold’s message. As a matter of fact they are preliminary to his deliberate and remarkable declaration

XIV INTRODUCTION that in his judgment Emerson’s Essays are the most i

portant work done in prose in our language during the nine teenth century. This is high praise from an exacting criti who was little given to the use of superlatives in any case least of all in the case of American authors. 7

For what merit does Emerson deserve this presmiieal place? Because, says Arnold, in a phrase full of eae because “he is the friend and aider of those who would liv in the spirit.” Let us unfold a little the implications of this phrase and make its application more precise. Important as Emerson may have been to young Englishmen in the first half of the last century, he was still more important to young Americans. Helpful as he may become to European minds, he will always remain peculiarly the friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit amid an enyironment which, as is generally thought, tends powerfully to confirm on the one hand the hard and merely practical genius of the Yankee and, on the other hand, the narrow and inflexible righteousness of the merely traditional Puritan, the Puritan who feels no longer the urgency and progressive force of new moral life within him. To the posterity of Franklin and Edwards, Emerson is the destined and appropriate counsellor because he brings them undiminished the vital force of their great traditions, while at the same time he emancipates them from the “dead hand,” the cramping and lifeless part of their past. To children of the new world, Emerson is a particularly inspiring friend, because with deep indigenous voice he frees them from unmanly fear of their elders, lifts from their minds the overawing prestige of Europe, liberates the powers and faith of ‘the individual man and makes him at home in his own time and place.

A great part of our lives, as we all recognize in what we call our educational period, is occupied with learning how to do and to be what others have been and have done before us. We come abreast of our predecessors by imitating them, and are grateful to the masters when they reveal to us their secrets, to the older men when they give us the benefit of their experience. But presently we discover that the world

INTRODUCTION XV is changing around us, and that the secrets of the masters and the experience of our elders do not wholly suffice — much though they aid us — to establish us effectively in our younger world. We discover within us needs, aspirations, powers of which the generation that educated us seems unaware, or towards which it appears to be indifferent, un- ~ sympathetic, or even actively hostile. We perceive gradually or with successive shocks of surprise that_many things which our fathers declared were true and satisfactory are not at all satisfactory, are by no means true, for us. Then it dawns upon us, perhaps as an exhilarating opportunity, perhaps as a grave and sobering necessity, that in a little while we ourselves shall be the elders, the responsible generation. Our salvation in the day when we take command will depend, we are constrained to believe, upon our disentanglement from the lumber of heirlooms and hereditary devices, and upon the discovery and free wise use of our own faculties. The vital part of education begins in the hour when consciousness of self-dependence breaks upon the mind. That is the hour for Emerson.

He appeals to unfolding minds because he is profoundly in sympathy with the modern spirit. By this phrase we mean primarily the disposition to accept nothing on authority but to bring all reports to the test of experience. The modern spirit is first of all a free spirit, open on all sides to the influx of truth. But freedom is not its only characteristic. The modern spirit is marked further by an active curiosity which grows by what it feeds upon, and goes ever inquiring for fresher and sounder information, not content till it has the best information to be had anywhere. But since it seeks the best, it is, by necessity, also a critical spirit, constantly sifting, discriminating, rejecting, and holding fast that which is good, only till that which is better is within reach. This endless quest, when it becomes central in a life, requires labor, requires pain, requires a measure of courage; and so the modern spirit, with its other virtues is an heroic spirit. As a reward for difficulties gallantly undertaken, the gods bestow on the modern spirit a kind of eternal youth with unfailing powers of recuperation

XVi INTRODUCTION and growth. This spirit—free, actively curious, upward-striving, critical, courageous, and self-renewing — Emerson richly possesses; and that is why he is so happily qualified to be a counsellor of youth in the period of intellectual emancipation.

There are many prophets abroad in the land today, offering themselves as emancipators, who have only very partially comprehended their task. By the incompleteness of their message they bring the modern spirit itself into disrepute. They understand and declare that the modern spirit is free and curious. They fail to recognize that it is also critical and upward-striving. When the well-born soul discards “old clothes,” it seeks instinctively for fresh raiment; but these Adamites would persuade it to rejoice in nakedness and seek no further. They know that man is an animal; but it escapes their notice that man is an animal constituted and destined by his nature to make pilerimages in search for a shrine, and to worship, till he finds it, the Unknown God. Because they understand so ill the needs and cravings of man, they go about eagerly hurrying him from a predicament into a disaster. They conceive that they have properly performed the emancipative function when they have cut the young generation loose from the oid moorings, and set it adrift at the mercy of wind and tide.

It is these partial liberators who rode in our young people that false and bewildering sense of illumination, so eloquently described by John Henry Newman. Says that penetrating analyst of modern libertinism: “When the min throws off as so much prejudice what it has hitherto held, and, as if waking from a dream, begins to realize to its imagination that there is no such thing as law and the transgression of law, that sin is a phantom, and punishment a bugbear, that it is free to sin, free to enjoy the world and the flesh; and still further, when it does enjoy them, and reflects that it may think and hold just what it will, that ‘the world is all before it where to choose,’ and what system to build up as its own private persuasion; when this torrent of wilful thoughts rushes over and inundates

INTRODUCTION xvii it, who will deny that the fruit of the tree of knowledge, or what the mind takes for knowledge, has made it one of the gods, with a sense of expansion and elevation, — an intoxication in reality, still, so far as the subjective state of the mind goes, an illumination?”

The true emancipator, the man who ‘has entered fully into the modern spirit, is always a reconstructionist. The enlargement of mind which he offers is always, to modify slightly the words of Newman, an enlargement not of tumult and intoxication, but of clearer vision and fruitful peace. In our Civil War slaves set free by proclamation flung up their caps and shouted with a vague joy. But shortly afterwards, we are told, many of them returned to their old masters and sought re-employment at their former tasks. So little was their undirected freedom worth. The true liberator strikes off the old shackles but immediately he suggests new service, a fuller use of our powers. He cuts us loose from the old moorings; but then he comes aboard like a good pilot, and while we trim our sails, he takes the wheel and lays our course for a fresh voyage. His message when he leaves us is not, “Henceforth be masterless,” but “Bear thou henceforth the sceptre of thine own control through life and the passion of life.”

Ill

Religious emancipation as conducted by Emerson makes a man not less but more religious. It frees the restless modern soul from ancient sectarian fetters, from ceremonial that has become empty, and from the litter of meaningless creeds. But straightway it re-establishes the soul in a new doctrine of “continuous revelation” and in works and conduct proper to those who have been freshly inspired. There is an element that looks like mystical experience underlying this fundamental part of Emerson’s religious teaching. But since mysticism constitutes a difficulty and an obstacle to the average modern mind, let us reduce as much as possible the irrational or superrational element. Let us explain what we can.

Emerson’s belief in continuous revelation is clearly ascrib-

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XVili INTRODUCTION able in large measure to the breadth of his spiritual culture. Throughout his life he was a student of the religions of the world. With free and open mind he compared the teachings of Plato, Confucius, Jesus, Buddha, Mahomet, seeking the spirit beneath the letter transmitted by each. This comparison did not bring him to the hasty thinker’s conclusion that the Bible of Christians is an uninspired book but rather to the conclusion that all the bibles are inspired books. The further he pressed his studies in religion, in philosophy, in poetry, the more obvious it became to him that elevated thought and noble emotion are not the exclusive endowment of any special period or person but are common to the highest representatives of all great peoples in all the great ages.

How account for that undeniable and really very inspiriting fact? Emerson explained it by what might be called the law of the conservation of spiritual energy. The mortal forms, momentarily fixed in the shape of Plato or Confucius, decay and are dispersed, yet their elemental force, as modern science teaches us, is not destroyed but resumed and conserved in the all-encompassing energy of the universe, and is recreated forever and ever in new shapes of men and things. In like fashion, as it appeared to Emerson, the thought and feeling of men, since thought and feeling are also forms of energy, must be resumed and conserved indestructibly in the general reservoir of moral energy, the “over-soul,” from which they flow again into individuals, generations, races, with such sustaining recurrence as the vernal sap observes.

The vividness of his belief in this inflowing power may be ascribed to certain personal experiences, emotional and exalting, for which the entire discipline of his life had prepared him. From his youth up he had conversed in his reading with strong-souled men, with the saints, heroes, and sages. He had meditated on their counsels not occasionally but daily, persistently, for hours together, till the bounds between their minds and his disappeared, and their thoughts actually became his thoughts and their temper his temper. It is a discipline which breaks down the walls of personality

Mos INTRODUCTION x1x and merges the individual with the over-soul. By books, he writes in his journal in 1824 at the age of twenty-one, “my memory goes back to a past immortality, and I almost realize the perfection of a spiritual intercourse which gains all the good, and lacks all the inconvenience and disgust of close society of imperfect beings. We are then lkest to the image of God, for in this grateful rapidity of thought a thousand years become one day.”

A mind thus stored and sensitized will respond now and then to an apparently slight stimulus with an extraordinary excitement and something in the nature of “vision” and “iNumination.” The young man reads in quiet solitude one of the more poetical dialogues of Plato, or he walks in flowering fields communing with his thoughts, or he lifts his head from his sick-bed at sunrise and beholds “the spotless orange light of the morning streaming up from the dark hills into the wide Universe.” |Suddenly, to him unaccountably, there is a profound stirring of his emotional deeps. A sense of sublimity fills his consciousness. His will appears to him godlike, invincible. He is elate with benign resolution. In a delighted ecstasy he feels streaming through his being eternal forces, all the wisdom and all the virtues that have — ever been in the world: However we may attempt to explain, or to explain away, his sensations, he himself is incontrovertibly convinced that he has been visited and breathed upon by a power-not-himself. He has been but a passive vessel filled to the brim by an inrush of energy from the Over-Soul, from the circumfluent seas of moral power.

Such inspiration, Emerson holds, is natural to man. It is probably open to everyone who will subject himself to the requisite preliminary discipline —who will live steadily with such thoughts as Emerson entertained. Record of these visitations one may find here and there in the Journals

| in such statements as this: “I am surrounded by messengers | of God who send me credentials day by day” — statements | which an intelligent reader may accept as substantially true ‘ and essentially verifiable by the method just indicated.)

This personal and direct relationship which he cultivated with the Over-Soul had a two-fold effect. On the one hand, xx _ INTRODUCTION it quite indisposed him to render allegiance to intermediate powers. Thus he declares in a poem of 1833, “Self-Relance”:

Henceforth, please God, forever I forego The yoke of men’s opinions. I will be Light-hearted as a bird, and live with God. I find him in the bottom of my heart,

I hear continually his voice therein.

On the other hand, this direct relationship with the source of moral power made him joyfully obedient to the impulses of what he at various times designated as the heavenly vision, the divine necessity, or the overlord of his soul. A certain levity, almost a frivolity, which he exhibits now and then in the presence of creeds, churches, pious organizations, is actually the consequence of his entire reverence in the presence of every unmistakable manifestation of spiritual life. Like his friend Carlyle, he feels that the religious edifices of the day are become uninhabitable; the religious spirit is seeking a new house. “Religion,” he remarks, “does not seem to me to tend now to a cultus as heretofore but toa heroic life. We find extreme difficulty in conceiving any church, any liturgy, any rite that would be genuine.”

This sounds like a radical utterance. It is radical with the root and branch thoroughness of Emerson’s inherited Puritanism, a vital Puritanism urgent with fresh power, impatient of a corrupted tradition and a conformity that withholds one from the living truth. “The tendency of the: traditional religious culture, he criticizes as indifferent to aesthetic development; as narrowly and incompletely moral; and as averse from the wide reaches of living truth which are open to the modern mind in the domains of science. He holds that the founder of the faith in which most of his countrymen were bred was indeed a “pure beam of truth,” whose ethical utterances cannot be overprized, yet that he. exhibited a “very exclusive and partial development of the moral element. . . . A perfect man should exhibit all the traits of humanity. and should expressly recognize intel-