A History of American Literature

One fact to keep in mind in reading all Emerson is that he regularly expresses himself in emphatic terms. In consequence, what he says in one mood he is likely in another to gainsay, and in a third, though without any deliberate intention to defend himself, he may reconcile the apparent contradiction. He simply follows out his own ideas on consistency.

But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then?.. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

This sort of balancing of his views of independence is to be found in an essay of thirty years later on “Society and Solitude.” The first two thirds of this seem to be quite as unqualified as anything in the early declarations. He quotes Swedenborg: “There are angels who do not live consociated, but separate, house and house; these dwell in the midst of heaven, because they are the best of angels.” He says for himself: “We pray to be conventional. But the wary Heaven takes care you shall not be, if there is anything good in you.” “We sit and muse, and are serene and complete; but the moment we meet with anybody, each becomes a fraction.” Then, however, comes the corrective note: “But this banishment to the rocks and echoes no metaphysics can make right or tolerable. This result is so against nature, such a half view, that it must be corrected by a common sense and experience.” In the earlier essays and addresses Emerson had said repeatedly that a man’s education could not be complete unless it included contact with people, and in this essay he came round to the reverse of the medal, that no man could fully express himself who was not useful to his fellows. “Society cannot do without cultivated men.” This idea was, of course, always in Emerson’s mind, but it was in the later years, after he himself had seen more and more of life, that he expressed it in definite assertions instead of taking it for granted as something the wise man would assume. The concluding paragraph in this essay not only sums up Emerson’s views on society and solitude but illustrates the kind of balance which he often strikes between statements which little minds could erect into hobgoblins of inconsistency:

Here again, as so often, Nature delights to put us between extreme antagonisms, and our safety is in the skill with which we keep the diagonal line. Solitude is impracticable, and society fatal. We must keep our head in the one and our hands in the other. The conditions are met, if we keep our independence, yet do not lose our sympathy. These wonderful horses need to be driven by fine hands. We require such a solitude as shall hold us to its revelations when we are in the street and in palaces; for most men are cowed in society, and say good things to you in private, but will not stand to them in public. But let us not be the victims of words. Society and solitude are deceptive names. It is not the circumstance of seeing more or fewer people, but the readiness of sympathy that imports; and a sound mind will derive its principles from insight, with ever a purer ascent to the sufficient and absolute right, and will accept society as the natural element in which they are to be applied.

Throughout the most fruitful years of Emerson’s life he lived quietly in Concord, writing without hurry in the mornings, walking and talking with his friends who lived there and with the increasing number of more and less distinguished men who came to receive his inspiration. But three winter months of each year he gave to lecturing, giving frequent series in New York and Boston and going out into the West as far as Wisconsin and Missouri. In these months, as a combined prophet and man of business, he earned a fair share of his income and exerted his widest influence. What he meant to his auditors has been best said by Lowell in his brief essay on “Emerson the Lecturer.” Recalling the days when he was a college student, sixteen years younger than Emerson, Lowell wrote:

We used to walk in from the country [Cambridge, four miles out from Boston] to the Masonic Temple (I think it was) through the crisp winter night, and listen to that thrilling voice of his, so charged with subtle meaning and subtle music, as shipwrecked men on a raft to the hail of a ship that came with unhoped-for food and rescue… And who that saw the audience will ever forget it, where everyone still capable of fire, or longing to renew in himself the half-forgotten sense of it, was gathered?.. I hear again that rustle of sensation, as they turned to exchange glances over some pithier thought, some keener flash of that humor which always played about the horizon of his mind like heat-lightning… To some of us that long-past experience remains as the most marvellous and fruitful we have ever had… Did they say he was disconnected? So were the stars, that seemed larger to our eyes, as we walked homeward with prouder stride over the creaking snow. And were not they knit together by a higher logic than our mere senses could master? Were we enthusiasts? I hope and believe we were, and am thankful to the man who made us worth something for once in our lives. If asked what was left? what we carried home? we should not have been careful for an answer. It would have been enough if we had said that something beautiful had passed that way.

If people were puzzled to follow the drift of Emerson’s lectures – and they often were – it was because most of them were so vague in outline. They literally did drift. There were two or three explanations for this defect. One was that Emerson seldom set himself the task of “composing” a complete essay. His method of writing was to put down in his morning hours at the desk the ideas that came to him. As thoughts on subjects dear to him flitted through his mind he captured some of them as they passed. These were related, – like the moon and the tides and the best times for digging clams, – but when he assembled various paragraphs into a lecture he took no pains to establish “theme coherence” by explaining the connections that were quite clear in his own mind. It happened further, as the years went on, that in making up a new discourse he would select paragraphs from earlier manuscripts, relying on them to hang together with a confidence that was sometimes misplaced. And auditors of his lectures in the last years recall how, as he passed from one page to the next, a look of doubt and slight amusement would sometimes confess without apology to an utter lack of connection even between the parts of a sentence.

In his sentences and his choice of words, however, there were perfect simplicity and clearness. Here is a passage to illustrate, drawn by the simplest of methods – opening the first volume of Emerson at hand and taking the first paragraph. It happens to be in the essay on “Compensation.”

Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass. Commit a crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in the wood the track of every partridge and fox and squirrel and mole. You cannot recall the spoken word, you cannot wipe out the foot-track, you cannot draw up the ladder, so as to leave no inlet or clew. Some damning circumstance always transpires. The laws and substances of nature – water, snow, wind, gravitation – become penalties to the thief.

In this passage of ninety words more than seventy are words of one syllable, and only one of the other eighteen —transpires– can baffle the reader or listener even for a moment. The general idea in Emerson’s mind is expressed by a series of definite and picturesque comparisons. “Be sure your sin will find you out,” he said. “You commit the wicked deed, creep, dodge, run away, come to your hiding place, climb the ladder, and hope for escape. But nature or God – has laid a trap for you. Your footprints are on the new-fallen snow; human eyes follow them to the tell-tale ladder leading to your window; and you are caught. The laws of the universe have combined against you in the snowfall, the impress of your feet, and the weight of the ladder which you could not raise.”

There is, perhaps, no great difference in the language used by Emerson and that in the paraphrase, but in the way the sentences are put together Emerson’s method of composing is once more illustrated. Emerson suggests; the paraphrase explains. Emerson assumes that the reader is alert and knowing; the paraphraser, that he is a little inattentive and a little dull. Lowell again has summed up the whole matter: “A diction at once so rich and homely as his I know not where to match in these days of writing by the page; it is like home-spun cloth-of-gold. The many cannot miss the meaning, and only the few can find it.” This is another way of saying, “Anybody can understand him sentence by sentence, but the wiser the reader the more he can understand of the meaning as a whole.” What is said of his prose applies in still greater degree to his poetry, as it does to all real poetry.

About his poetry, however, because common agreement has made poetry so much more dependent upon form and structure than prose, there has been wide disagreement, swinging all the way from the strictures of Matthew Arnold to the unqualified praise of George Edward Woodberry. On the whole, a good deal of the argument has been beside the mark because it has been a condemnation of Emerson for writing in an unusual fashion rather than an appraisal of the actual value of his verse. In “Merlin” Emerson stated his poetic thesis and in a measure threw out his challenge:

Thy trivial harp will never pleaseOr fill my craving ear;Its chords should ring as blows the breeze,Free, peremptory, clear.No jingling serenader’s art,Nor tinkle of piano strings,Can make the wild blood startIn its mystic springs.The kingly bardMust smite the chords rudely and hard,As with hammer or with mace…

The natural result was that there is the closest of resemblances between much of Emerson’s verse and some of his most elevated prose. His prose frequently contains poetic flashes; his verse not seldom is spirited prose both in form and substance. In his Journal he sometimes wrote in prose form what with a very few changes he transcribed into verse, and in his essays there are many passages which are closely paralleled in his poems.15 They are the poems of a philosopher whose first concern is with truth and whose truth is all-embracing. Emerson wrote no narratives, no dramatic poems, no formal odes, almost no poems for special occasions, and when he did write such as the “Concord Hymn” he made the occasion radiate out into all time and space when the embattled farmers “fired the shot heard round the world.” The utter compactness and simplicity of his verse made it at times not only rugged but difficult of understanding. “Brahma,” which bewildered many of its first readers, is hard to understand only so long as one fails to realize that God is the speaker of the stanzas. The poems are like Bacon’s essays in their meatiness and unadornment. Had they been more strikingly different from the ordinary measures they would probably have been both blamed and praised more widely. Few of his poems have passed into wide currency, but many of his brief passages are quoted by speakers who have little idea as to their source.

Not for all his faith can seeWould I that cowled churchman be.Wrought in a sad sincerity.Earth proudly wears the ParthenonAs the best gem upon her zone.… if eyes were made for seeing,Then Beauty is its own excuse for being.Oh, tenderly the haughty dayFills his blue urn with fire!

Those who are fortunate enough to have known him – he died in 1882 – all agree that the real Emerson can be known only in part through his printed pages. His life was after all his greatest work. He was serene, noble, dignified. His portraits, at whatever age, testify to his fine loftiness. Every hearer speaks of the music of his voice. Withal he was friendly, full of humor, a good neighbor, a loyal townsman, and an engaging host to those who were worthy of his hospitality. Charles Eliot Norton, returning from Europe with him in 1873, when Emerson was sixty-nine years old, wrote in his journal: “Emerson was the greatest talker in the ship’s company. He talked with all men, yet was fresh and zealous for talk at night. His serene sweetness, the pure whiteness of his soul, the reflection of his soul in his face, were never more apparent to me.” No single quotation nor any group of them can make real to the young student that quiet refrain of reverent affection which is sounded in the recollections of scores and hundreds who knew him.

This almost unparalleled beauty of character is the final guarantee of the line upon line of his poetry and the precept upon precept of his prose. What he taught must be understood partly in the light of himself and partly in the light of the years in which he was teaching. Let us take, for example, his two chief contentions. First, his insistence that the truth can be found only by searching one’s own mind and conscience. Testing this doctrine by an examination of the man who preached it, one sees that he inherited a power to think from generations of educated ancestry. He had an “inquiring mind” and an inclination to use it. Furthermore, he inherited from this same ancestry a complete balance of character. He did not tend to selfishness or self-indulgence, and was free from thinking that the “voice of God” counseled him to ignoble courses. Puritan restraint was so ingrained in him that he needed no outward discipline and did not see the need of it for others. Freedom for him was always liberty under the law of right; and this freedom he championed in a period and among a people who for two centuries had been accepting without thought what the clergy had been telling them to believe. It had been for them to do what they were told, rather than to think what they should do. Now in Emerson’s day there was a general restlessness. The domination of the old church was relaxed, and all sorts of new creeds were being propounded. The theory of democratic government was on trial, and no man was quite certain of its outcome. The expansion of Western territory and the development of the factory system were making many quick fortunes and creating discontent with quiet and settled frugality. Men needed to be told to keep their heads, to combine wisely between the old and the new, and to accept no man’s judgment but their own. The “standpatter” would be left hopelessly behind the current of human thought; the wild enthusiast would just as certainly run on a snag or be cast up on the shore.

This led to the second of Emerson’s leading ideas – that a man should not be “warped clean out of his own orbit.” Reasoning from the evident working of a natural law in the universe, he was convinced that there was a spiritual law which controlled human affairs. He was certain that in the end all would be well with the world. It was his duty and every other man’s to be virtuous and to encourage virtue, but as the times were “in God’s hand” no man need actively fight the forces of evil. It was the “manifest destiny” theory cropping out again, a belief easy to foster in a new country like America, where wickedness could be explained on the ground that in a period of national youth temporary mistakes were sure to be committed, – and equally sure to be rectified. “My whole philosophy,” he said, “is compounded of acquiescence and optimism.” Hence there was more of sympathy than coöperation in Emerson’s attitude toward life. Like Matthew Arnold in these same years, he distrusted all machinery, even the “machinery” of social reform.

To some of his younger friends, and particularly to those who were more familiar than he with the unhappy conditions in the older European nations, Emerson’s “acquiescence and optimism” seemed wholly mistaken. We may return to Norton’s comment (p. 215), which was unfairly interrupted: “But never before in intercourse with him had I been so impressed with the limits of his mind… His optimism becomes a bigotry, and though of a nobler type than the common American conceit of the preëminent excellence of American things as they are, had hardly less of the quality of fatalism. To him this is the best of all possible worlds, and the best of all possible times. He refuses to believe in disorder or evil.” This comment is not utterly fair to Emerson, but it represents the view of the practical idealist who feels that for all Emerson’s insistence on the value of learning from life, he had drawn more from solitude than from society. One may quote with caution what the pragmatic Andrew D. White said of Tolstoi:

He has had little opportunity to take part in any real discussion of leading topics; and the result is that his opinions have been developed without modification by any rational interchange of thought with other men. Under such circumstances any man, no matter how noble or gifted, having given birth to striking ideas, coddles and pets them until they become the full-grown, spoiled children of his brain. He can see neither spot nor blemish in them, and comes virtually to believe himself infallible.

Those who most admire Emerson to-day have perhaps as much optimism as he but very much less acquiescence. For certain vital things have happened since he did his work. Time, – Emerson’s “little gray man,” – who could perform the miracle of continual change in life, has done nothing more miraculous than making men share the burden of creating a better world. Millions are now trying to follow Emerson’s instruction to retain their independence and not to lose their sympathy, but they are going farther than he in expressing their sympathy by work. They are fighting every sort of social abuse, as Emerson’s Puritan ancestors fought the devil; they are adopting Emerson’s principles and Bryant’s tactics; they are subscribing to Whittier’s line:

O prayer and action, ye are one.

BOOK LIST

Ralph Waldo Emerson. Centenary Edition. The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. 1903–1904. 12 vols. Uncollected Writings. Essays, Addresses, Poems, Reviews, and Letters, by Ralph Waldo Emerson. 1912. The chief works appeared in book form originally as follows: Nature, 1836; The American Scholar, 1837; An Address delivered before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge, 1838; Essays, 1841; Essays, Second Series, 1844; Poems, 1847; Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, 1849; Representative Men, 1850; English Traits, 1856; The Conduct of Life, 1860; May-Day and Other Pieces, 1867; Society and Solitude, 1870; Letters and Social Aims, 1876; The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1883; Lectures and Biographical Sketches, 1884; Natural History of Intellect and Other Papers, 1893; Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, with Annotations, 1909–1914.

Bibliography

A volume compiled by G. W. Cooke. 1908. Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. I, pp. 551–566.

Biography and Criticism

The standard life is by James Elliot Cabot. A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson. 1887. 2 vols.

Boynton, Percy H. Democracy in Emerson’s Journals. New Republic, Vol. I, No. 4, pp. 25–26.

Boynton, Percy H. Emerson’s Feeling toward Reform. New Republic, Vol. I, No. 13, pp. 16–18.

Boynton, Percy H. Emerson’s Solitude. New Republic, Vol. III, pp. 68–70.

Brownell, William C. Emerson, in American Prose Masters. 1909.

Burroughs, John. Emerson. Birds and Poets. 1877.

Chapman, J. J. Emerson, Sixty Years After, in Emerson and Other Essays. 1898.

Concord School of Philosophy. The Genius and Character of Emerson. Lectures at the Concord School of Philosophy. F. B. Sanborn, editor. 1885.

Emerson, Edward Waldo. Emerson in Concord. A Memoir. 1889.

Firkins, O. W. Ralph Waldo Emerson. 1915.

Garnett, Richard. Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson. 1888.

Higginson, T. W. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Contemporaries. 1899.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell. Ralph Waldo Emerson. 1885. (A. M. L. Ser.)

James, Henry. Emerson. Partial Portraits. 1888.

Lowell, J. R. Mr. Emerson’s New Course of Lectures, in My Study Windows. 1871.

Maeterlinck, Maurice. Emerson, in Sept Essais d’Emerson. 1894.

More, Paul Elmer. The Influence of Emerson, in Shelburne Essays. Ser. 1. 1904. Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. I, Bk. II, chap. ix.

Payne, W. M. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Leading American Essayists. 1910.

Sanborn, F. B. Ralph Waldo Emerson. (Beacon Biographies.) 1901.

Sanborn, F. B. The Personality of Emerson. 1903.

Stedman, E. C. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Poets of America. 1885.

Stephen, Leslie. Emerson, in Studies of a Biographer. Ser. 2. 1902.

Whipple, E. P. Recollections of Eminent Men and Other Papers. 1887.

Willis, N. P. Emerson. Second Look at Emerson, in Hurry-Graphs. 1851.

Woodberry, G. E. Ralph Waldo Emerson. 1907. (E. M. L. Ser.)

TOPICS AND PROBLEMS

Read the introductions and conclusions of the essays of 1836, 1837, and 1838 and note the poetical setting into which the essays are cast. With these in mind read the foregoing comments on Emerson’s poetry (pp. 213–215).

Compare the Emerson and Lowell essays on Shakespeare.

Compare any corresponding sections in Emerson’s “Representative Men” and Carlyle’s “Heroes and Hero Worship.”

Read Emerson’s “English Traits” and Hawthorne’s “Our Old Home” for a comparison in the points of view of the two Americans.

Read any two or three essays for the nature element in them, the kind of things alluded to, and the kind of significances derived from them.

Read any one or two essays for Emerson’s allusions to science and to the sciences, the kinds of allusions made, and the kind of significances derived from them.

Follow the footnote on page 214 for a comparison of Emerson’s treatments of the same theme in prose and verse. Read also his poem “Threnody” and the corresponding passage in the Journal for the winter of 1842.

Read the essay on Goethe and see whether in Emerson’s judgment of Goethe as a German national character he agrees with or dissents from the judgment of the twentieth century. Compare with Santayana’s estimate of Goethe in “Three Philosophical Poets.”

A sense of the ecclesiastical and theological unrest in Emerson’s day can be secured through the reading of Mrs. Stowe’s “Oldtown Folks,” Charles Kingsley’s “Yeast,” Anthony Trollope’s “Barchester Towers”; or in poetry, in the poems of doubt of Arnold and Clough and Tennyson’s “In Memoriam.”

Read “The American Scholar” with reference to the three influences surrounding the scholar, and then read Wells’s “The Education of Joan and Peter.” Are there any points in common? Compare the section on Beauty in Emerson’s “Nature” and Poe’s discussion of beauty in “The Poetic Principle” and “The Philosophy of Composition.”

CHAPTER XV

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Henry D. Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1817. His grandfather, John Thoreau, a Frenchman, had crossed to America in 1773 and had married a woman of Scotch birth in 1781. His mother came from a Connecticut family of much earlier settlement in America, but his more striking traits seem to have passed to him from the father’s side. He was a normal, out-of-door, fun-loving boy, though with more than average fondness for books. At Harvard, where he was a graduate in 1837, he was able but unconventional. He was more or less out of patience with the narrow limits of the course of study and the spirit of rivalry among the boys which made them work quite as much for class ranking as for the value of what they learned. Toward the end of senior year this contempt for college honors came to a head. He had been ill, and on his return, as the wise President Quincy put it, revealed “some notions concerning emulation and college rank, which had a natural tendency to diminish his zeal, if not his exertions.” When the faculty resented this, even to the extent of planning to withdraw scholarship support, the president took up his cause and backed him for his character rather than for his performance. It was appropriate that Emerson should have written in his young townsman’s behalf, for his own experience had not been altogether different.

The story of Thoreau’s remaining years is quickly told. He lived, unmarried, a kind of care-free, independent life that in an uneducated laboring man would be called shiftless. Many of his townsmen disapproved of his eccentricities – his brusque manners, abrupt speech, and radical opinions, and his unwillingness to work for money unless he had an immediate need for it. Yet he was less irregular than he was reputed to be. From 1838 to 1841 he conducted a very successful school in Concord with his brother John, giving it up only with the failure of John’s health, and – in spite of Emerson’s statement to the contrary – he had throughout his life a hand in the family business first of pencil-making and later of preparing fine plumbago for electrotyping. However, he was not an ordinary routine man. Like Crèvecœur, whom he variously suggests, he was a surveyor and a handy man with all sorts of tools. Ten years after graduation he wrote to the secretary of his college class: