Sketches from Concord and Appledore Part 5

He liked the society of statesmen, scientists, business men, railroad managers, of all who could tell him about what was going on in the world--something, he complained, that the newspapers would not do for him. He preferred their society to that of other poets and scholars.

Though an unlimited reader of books he was not properly a scholar himself, and perhaps he felt his own limitation too much in their company.

He studied little at college and it is doubtful if he afterwards made a thorough and systematic investigation of any subject. He was called a philosopher, but he knew little more than the outlines of metaphysics.

He could read French fairly, but Latin was the only language with which he was well acquainted. Carlyle tried to persuade him to study German.

He did not believe in study, but in the inspiration of nature. This did well enough for him, but he made a mistake in applying the same principle to others.

He was wont to excuse Alcott's rambling rhapsodical conversations on the ground that it was the only talent the man had, that he must do that or nothing; but many people considered that Emerson was more to blame in the matter than Alcott himself. A person who makes a profession of philosophy, as Alcott certainly did, ought to be well acquainted with the writings of other philosophers of his own time; and it surely would have done no harm for Emerson to have suggested this to him. When the Boston Radical Club was formed Emerson thought it would be a good opportunity for Alcott to place his ideas before the public, but Alcott found himself at a disadvantage among the scholarly minds he encountered there.

At the close of his essay on Plato Emerson says, "I am sorry to see him after so many fine thoughts throwing a little mathematical dust in our eyes." Does he partially expose here a peculiarity in his literary procedure? Other people do not read Plato for his fine thoughts, though there are many such, but for the charm of his discourse and his beautiful exposition of Greek Philosophy. From this and from hints let fall in conversation we may suspect that he read books not so much for what was in them as for ideas which they suggested to him, and which he might make use of in his essays and lectures. Alcott said that he carried slips of paper with him on which to jot down these considerations by the way. Thus he came to value books too much from a single point of view, and his friends were sometimes surprised at what he recommended them to read. He would estimate a second-rate novel like "Christie Johnstone" above Thackeray's "Newcomes."

However, it may generally be said that the greater and more high-minded an author might be the better was Emerson a judge of him. He liked in a writer what he called the eternal spirit, that is, what makes his work valuable for all time. He prized Plato, Shakespeare, and Goethe above others; and gave the next place to Homer, Dante, and Swedenborg. He gave Carlyle a very high rank: considered his history of Frederick the Second even better than Thucydides. During the last year of his life, when he had almost lost his memory for names and people, he said to a visitor who called on him, "I have lately been reading a most interesting book about--" he hesitated for some time, "the greatest man that has lived for more than two centuries." Then he walked across the room and pointing to a long row of books added, "About that man." His friend looked and saw it was an edition of Goethe's forty volumes. Grimm's lectures on Goethe had lately been published.

The colored students of Howard University requested Emerson to give them a conversation on books, and tell them what they had better read; and he, remembering his own maxim, that the greatest prudence lies in concentration, limited himself purposely to a very few. He recommended Shakespeare and Milton of course; Gibbon's "Decline and Fall"; Boswell's "Life of Johnson"; Goethe's conversations with Eckermann and Goethe's autobiography. "Faust" he spoke of in rather a slighting manner; he did not think it possessed the eternal spirit. That so much of a puritan as Emerson should have admired Goethe is as remarkable as Goethe's admiration for so stanch an old puritan as Milton. The English writers of his own time, with the exception of Carlyle and possibly Tennyson, he did not like. He met Macaulay at one of Lady Holland's celebrated show dinners, and conceived a decided aversion for him. Such severely critical writers as Froude, Ruskin, and Matthew Arnold he never could like. He once had an interview with Ruskin, but it did not prove to be satisfactory. They differed on all points, and Ruskin complained that Emerson did not understand him. Six months afterwards Emerson remarked with his most amiable smile, "I expect Mr. Ruskin is still miserable because I could not understand him." But Ruskin's province lay outside of Emerson's, who cared little either for painting, sculpture, or music, or even for literature considered as an art. He had in his study a copy of Giotto's portrait of Dante which he evidently prized; and also Raphael Morghen's engraving of Guido's Aurora: but these were presents from his friends, and it is doubtful if he ever purchased a picture himself.

He was a frequent visitor at the Boston Athenaeum, and seized upon every new book of value as soon as it appeared: was the first to read translations of the Zendavesta and Confucius. He read almost every readable book in the English language as well as translations from all languages. He said he would as soon think of swimming across Charles River when he might make use of a bridge as to read a foreign book in the original if he could obtain a good translation.

This statement contains a good deal of truth, though it has been often traversed by those who learn languages easily and think because they get the literal meaning of Tacitus or Rousseau that they know all about the matter. The full significance, however, of any good writer can only be obtained by reflecting while we read, and the continuous exertion required to decipher a foreign tongue interferes with this not a little.

If the reader can think in the language before him well and good, but few are so fortunate; and of those few not more than one in ten will be able to think in three or four different languages. Any person who has merely a conversational knowledge of Italian, for instance, would do much better to read the excellent translation we now have of Machiavelli than to read the original; and no one except a Greek professor would think of stumbling over Thucydides instead of using Jowett's version of it. So it is with Taine's "English Literature" and Von Hoist's history of American politics. On the other hand it may be said that no translation of the "Odes" of Horace has any value at all; and a faithful study of one book of the "Iliad" is worth all the translations from Homer that have ever been made. But the subject is an extensive one.

The tendency of pure democracy to Caesarism or imperialism has often been noticed, and the frequent change from one to the other has now become an established historical fact. Of this principle there is a curious ill.u.s.tration in Emerson's political opinions. He was in theory a pure democratist, but he would now and then make a remark which showed that he also believed in the rule of the strong hand. In his prose writings may be found two distinct lines of political thought emanating from these opposite views. He wrote a poem on Cromwell, and an essay on Napoleon, and evidently admired them both. In his "Boston Hymn" and in several other poems he comes very close to socialism. In "Woodnotes" he says:

"The lord is the peasant that was; The peasant the lord that shall be, The lord is the hay, the peasant the gra.s.s; One dry, and one the living tree."

Democracy is limited in America by the conservative structure of our government and the good sense of the community. During Jackson's administration we came rather close to pure democracy, and nearly as close also to absolute despotism. Emerson was far from knowing this, but he felt that something was wrong. He wrote to Carlyle, "We have a most unfit man for President." On another occasion he wrote, "Politics are now in such a condition that the best principles are in one party, and the best men in the other." He appears to have voted with the best men.

Again he would say, "If we can only once get the best man at the head of affairs we should be only too glad to turn everything over to him."

Emerson, however, did not allow these theories to affect his practice.

He always voted the whig ticket till 1844, and after that the free-soil and republican tickets.

It was the same with his doctrine of living according to nature. He never thought of doing this himself, except so far as a sensible mode of life and unaffected behavior may be considered so. He was the most conventional man in Concord, and as scrupulous of etiquette as an English clergyman. He was oftener seen with a silk-hat--what Mr. Howells calls a cylinder-hat--than any other person in the town. In his later years he declined to wear a wig, because it was not according to nature; but neither had he formerly worn a beard, which was quite as little according to nature.

In his earlier writings he celebrates the advantages of living in the country, but at sixty he concludes that the city is after all the best, if one has sufficient means,--especially for women, who require a current of human life to keep their minds healthy and cheerful. This reminds one of Thorwaldsen's four seasons; in which spring and summer are represented by an out-of-door life, in autumn the corner of a house appears, and winter is wholly within doors. We expect a certain change of opinion in the course of years: it is the sign of a veracious character. Neither is it inconsistent for a practical man to sometimes deviate from the rules he has laid down for himself.

Emerson's real fault, if he may be said to have had one, was his optimism. Because he had been born with genius and was otherwise fortunate he thought every one else might succeed as easily as he had.

In this way he often did people great injustice. If they were unfortunate he concluded that it must be their own fault. "Wherever there is failure," he said, "there is some giddiness, some lack of adaptation of means to ends." If he heard of anyone who could not obtain work he would say there is always plenty to do for willing hands. Those who were incapacitated by nature from earning their own living fared no better. He thought there was something which every one could do better than anybody else--which might possibly be true if there were as many professions as individuals. When some one spoke of a young German poet, whom it was thought but for his untimely death might have been the rival of Schiller, he said, "Yes, but he died: that was against him."

This line of thought logically resulted also in a kind of pessimism. He seemed at times to despise human nature. Somewhere about 1860 he wrote to a friend, "There is not one man in twenty that is worth the ground he stands on"; and speaking of Napoleon he affirms that, in the well-nigh universal negligence and inefficiency of mankind, we cannot be too thankful for this prompt and ready actor. No one who realizes the hard and bitter struggle for daily bread with which three-fourths of the human race are constantly occupied, would have written such a sentence.

The transition from optimism to pessimism is very much like that from democracy to imperialism. [Footnote: The peculiar type of Emerson's optimism is ill.u.s.trated in his poem called "Sea Sh.o.r.e" where he makes a fine catalogue of the gifts and advantages which the ocean brings to mankind, but says nothing of the terrible destructive power of the sea.

He forgot that his old friend the Greek represented Neptune as even more cruel than the G.o.d of war. Did this man of heroic nature lack the courage to face tragedy?]

We regret to see him deciding the discovery of etherization in favor of his brother-in-law, Dr. Jackson; a question which a Congressional committee found itself unable to determine.

He had one trait of character which his biographers have not mentioned, and which might pa.s.s by the name of incredulity. He was the most difficult of men to persuade of any strange and remarkable event.

Neither did he take the least pains to conceal his disbelief; and when you were telling him the living truth this was rather difficult to bear.

When we said that a woodp.e.c.k.e.r had been seen in Walden woods nearly as large as a crow and quite as black, he shook his head and looked up at the pine trees. That was not according to his idea of a woodp.e.c.k.e.r.

Neither did he like to hear anything which tended to prove the depravity of human nature. Stories of fraud and corruption in commercial or political life were not pleasant to his ears; and if the perpetrators escaped punishment he was evidently much annoyed. He liked to tell the truth better than he did to hear it.

When nearly sixty years of age both Emerson and Alcott fell in love with a charming young school-teacher of the transcendental sort, and it is rather pleasant to think that there was so much human nature still left in those grave old philosophers.

He was the most famous American of his time; not so celebrated perhaps in his own country as President Lincoln, but in foreign countries he surpa.s.sed all others,--such is the deep impression which a great writer makes on the minds of men. In Europe he was looked upon as the best representative of our Western Hemisphere. Carlyle celebrated him in England, and Grimm in Germany. The latter said, "There is no other living writer to whom I feel that I owe so much."

He had no public receptions in foreign cities, but everywhere the finest people united to honor him. On his second visit to England he complained that his time was almost consumed in answering letters of invitation. An English guest at the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa dinner said that when he returned home he would be asked two questions,--if he had seen Niagara Falls, and if he had met Emerson. He was a particular favorite with the English n.o.bility, and whenever we saw a glittering carriage rolling down Concord turn-pike we felt sure it contained some earl or viscount who was paying his compliments to the poet of the pines. Emerson liked to entertain these distinguished visitors in his modest little parlor, but he never slighted his old friends for them; for he lived the wisdom that he taught, and the final virtue of this man was the religious humility of his nature.

MATTHEW ARNOLD'S LECTURE.

During the earlier part of Emerson's career his religious philosophy met with such decided opposition that his friends were, very properly, all the more enthusiastic in his defence; and when the tide turned in his favor, and his fame rose continually higher and higher, the enthusiasm of his admirers reached a climax, and, like Webster before him, he became a veritable subject of idolization. His opponents, finding the current too strong for them, retreated into smooth water, waiting, like a defeated political party, for a favorable change of the tide. When, therefore, Matthew Arnold came to America in the autumn of 1883 expressly to lecture on Emerson, as a writer and thinker, there was great expectation on both sides, and both were equally disappointed. His friends who knew that he liked Emerson, thought he had found too much fault with him, and the other party considered he had praised him too highly.

Few men have ever done so much good in England as Matthew Arnold.

Somewhere about the year 1830 Goethe remarked, that Englishmen, as such, were without reflection; party politics and the interests of trade interfered to prevent it; but they were great as practical men. This continued to be the order of the day, in spite of an occasional warning from Macaulay, for thirty years more, until finally Matthew Arnold came forward and said, "Do not be blinded any longer by the prejudices of self-interest, but endeavor to see things as they actually are." This was the continual chant of his life, repeated in a hundred different forms. He made use of the popularity he had gained by his fine, cla.s.sic poetry, to teach his countrymen a lesson in culture. [Footnote: Lowell also made an excellent point when he warned Englishmen, at the Coleridge memorial, that if they were to regain the intellectual alt.i.tude of their ancestors, they must give up the adoration of common-sense, and pay more respect to imagination and ideality.]

Never did Demosthenes expose their faults to the Athenians more frankly and fearlessly, and with such manliness that at the time of his death there was no person in the British Islands more generally respected. On a trial vote that was taken by a London newspaper for members.h.i.+p to a proposed British Academy, Gladstone received the largest number of ballots, Tennyson the next and Matthew Arnold came third. He was considered the best literary critic in England, and if he had outlived Tennyson he would have succeeded him as laureate. He showed a dignified reserve in only publis.h.i.+ng a very few books. Two small volumes of poetry, his "Essays in Criticism", which has become a standard work, and his American essays, are all that I know of. For all that, few writers were more celebrated in his own time, and it may be said that he fully deserved his monument in Westminster Abbey.

However, it must be admitted that as a critic he had certain peculiarities. He was, perhaps, too sensitive and impressible; too easily thrown off his guard by qualities in a writer for which he had an aversion. He would not only mention them once, but again and again. He ignored Schiller, who was at least one of the world's greatest dramatists; he was dissatisfied with Tennyson and could not endure Sh.e.l.ley at all. His attack on Francis Newman's translation of the "Iliad" was so severe that he finally discovered the fact himself. His preference for the cla.s.sic style in literature was rather too decided; for we must never forget that Shakespeare himself was chiefly romantic.

He liked poetry which was like his own, and seems to have unconsciously judged other poets by that standard. He had no patience with idiomatic writing like that of Carlyle or Jean Paul; and he made incessant warfare on the subjective method. It is true that subjectivity may be called the peculiar vice of the nineteenth century, and yet it is a vice like the self-consciousness of the early Christians, that ought finally to end in virtue. There are thousands of readers whose minds cannot be reached in any other way.

Allowances must sometimes be made also for the physical condition of a writer. Not always; for Carlyle wrote the greatest of dramatic histories while he was suffering from dyspepsia in the most distressing manner.

However, I think in Matthew Arnold's case something may be conceded to him. He came to lecture in America for a double purpose--to tell the truth and to repair his fortunes. It was a sad story. His son had failed in business; his father, of course, had endorsed his notes, and he found himself at the threshold of old age as poor as in the beginning. Such a shock is felt severely enough by tough, hard-fisted men of the world, but to the tender sensibility of a poet it must have been a crus.h.i.+ng blow. There can be as little doubt that it brought on the malady that abbreviated his life, as that it gave a melancholic tone to his thought and filled his mind with gloomy forebodings.

The opening of his address was very beautiful. He recalls the impression made upon him in his youth by the writing of Carlyle, Goethe, Emerson and Francis Newman, and says:

"Forty years ago, when I was an undergraduate at Oxford, voices were in the air which haunt my memory still. Happy the man who in that susceptible season of youth hears such voices! they are a possession to him forever. No such voices are there now. Oxford has more criticism now, more knowledge, more light; but such voices as those of our youth it has no longer. The name of Cardinal Newman is a great name to the imagination still; his genius and his style are things of power..... A greater voice still,--the greatest voice of the century,--came to us in those youthful years through Carlyle: the voice of Goethe. To this day,--such is the force of youthful a.s.sociations,--I read his 'Wilhelm Meister' with more pleasure in Carlyle's translation than in the original. The large, liberal view of human life in 'Wilhelm Meister,'

how novel it was to the Englishman in those days! and it was salutary, too, and educative for him, doubtless, as well as novel..... And besides those voices, there came to us in that old Oxford time a voice also from this side of the Atlantic,--a clear and pure voice, which for my ear, at any rate, brought a strain as new, and moving, and unforgettable, as the strain of Newman, or Carlyle, or Goethe.... He was your Newman, your man of soul and genius visible to you in the flesh, speaking to your bodily ears, a present object for your heart and imagination. That is surely the most potent of all influences!"

I confess I enjoy these clear cla.s.sic sentences so full of tenderness, and yet with the latent fire of manhood in them, much better than Emerson's weird, concentrated epigrams, wonderful as those sometimes are. Comparatively speaking it is like the difference between a living elm and oak timber. But the writer does not long maintain this elevated tone. He soon becomes despondent, and his glorious sunrise, like that in Shakespeare's sonnet, is lost to him again.

"For out alack, he was but one hour mine; The region cloud hath veiled him from me now."

He remembers that Francis Newman is now Cardinal Newman; that Carlyle's career had ended with his furious "Latter-day Pamphlets," and even in Emerson he had found a certain kind of disappointment.

Yet there may be a deeper reason in this;--the reason that sometimes underlies a coincidence. We too in early life were strengthened and filled with enthusiasm by the earnest voice of Emerson, the trenchant eloquence of Wendell Phillips, and the brilliant wit and penetrating humor of Lowell; but the public activity of Emerson soon afterwards ceased; Phillips became a socialist and ultimately a demagogue; while Lowell changed his verses for foreign missions and after-dinner speeches. There is a prevalent feeling that the nineteenth century, which was ushered in to the sound of Napoleon's cannon and is now going rather tamely out in a discussion of the laws of economics, has not more than half accomplished the work that was a.s.signed it. There is everywhere among thinking men a feeling of distrust and half disappointment. Lowell felt it here, George Eliot in England; and Herman Grimm in Germany, a sanguine man, speaks of the deep-seated unrest which almost drives us to despair.

As I turn from my desk to the morning's newspaper I find in it the following extract from one of Emerson's earlier essays:

"Trust the time. What a fatal prodigality to condemn our age--we cannot overvalue it--it is our all. As the wandering sea-bird which, crossing the ocean, alights on some rock or islet to rest for a moment its wings, and to look back on the wilderness of waves behind, and onward to the wilderness of waters before--so stand we perched on this rock or shoal of time, arrived out of the immensity of the past, bound and road-ready to plunge into immensity again. Not for nothing it dawns out of everlasting peace, this great discontent, this self-accusing reflection.

The very time sees for us, thinks for us. It is a microscope such as philosophy never had. Insight is for us which was never for any, and doubt not, the moment and the opportunity are divine. Wondering we come into this lodge of watchmen, this office of espial; let us not retreat astonished and ashamed. Let us go out of the hall door, and doubt never but a good genius brought us in and will carry us out."

Now this is a prose poem, so beautiful that it seems hardly to need the help of rhyme and metre to make it sing; and, as high art always must, it covers a profound truth,--truth that lies at the foundation of all tragedy,--namely, that we are obliged to trust time though time destroys us; that we must trust our fellow men though they often deceive us; that we must trust the ground we stand on though the earthquake devour us.

But Emerson does not say this, and I doubt if he anywhere says it. He was too much of an optimist to perceive it. He wished all the stories he read to turn out fortunately, and if they did not so much the worse for them. Gladstone is the same kind of a man. He believes that the right will always finally conquer; and so it may when the day of judgment arrives and the affairs of the universe are at last wound up. It gives him, as it did Emerson, a tremendous energy,--almost like fanaticism, but it must in the nature of things affect his political judgment. The lives of these two stretch nearly across the nineteenth century, and their popularity is evidence that they represent their own time better than most others.

What does Emerson intend by trusting the time? Does he mean the spirit of the age? If we replace the word time by Divine Providence, the pa.s.sage becomes intelligible and notably significant; but if he meant the prevailing spirit of the time, the earlier part of Emerson's career is a perfect contradiction of it. If in his youth he had trusted the prevailing tendency of his time he would have become a conservative formalist, and never heard of as an independent thinker. It might even be said that few men have ever trusted their own time less. Like Gladstone, he was dissatisfied with the present and looked toward the future. They both exerted themselves with all their might to revolutionize public opinion and give to the future the stamp of their own ideas. The old Hebrew prophets whom Emerson so much resembled did not trust their own time, but were constantly complaining of it. So Cicero cried out, "O tempora, O mores!" and Savonarola, and many others.

It would seem as if in this poetic rhapsody the writer had lost sight of his subject almost immediately upon stating it, and had subst.i.tuted Providence for it in his mind. This was not unfrequently the case with him, and may account for those vague aerial flights which his commentators have referred to. Hawthorne says, "Mr. Emerson is a great searcher for facts, but they seem to melt away and become unsubstantial in his grasp." However, it was not facts but ideas that he was in quest of.