Complete Prose Works Part 30

Great as all its manifold train, circling round it, and stretching into the future for many a century, in the politics, history, art, &c., of the New World, in point of fact the main thing, the actual murder, transpired with the quiet and simplicity of any commonest occurrence--the bursting of a bud or pod in the growth of vegetation, for instance. Through the general hum following the stage pause, with the change of positions, came the m.u.f.fled sound of a pistol-shot, which not one-hundredth part of the audience heard at the time--and yet a moment's hush--somehow, surely, a vague startled thrill--and then, through the ornamented, draperied, starr'd and striped s.p.a.ce-way of the President's box, a sudden figure, a man, raises himself with hands and feet, stands a moment on the railing, leaps below to the stage, (a distance of perhaps fourteen or fifteen feet,) falls out of position, catching his boot-heel in the copious drapery, (the American flag,) falls on one knee, quickly recovers himself, rises as if nothing had happen'd, (he really sprains his ankle, but unfelt then)--and so the figure, Booth, the murderer, dress'd in plain black broadcloth, bare-headed, with full, glossy, raven hair, and his eyes like some mad animal's flas.h.i.+ng with light and resolution, yet with a certain strange calmness, holds aloft in one hand a large knife--walks along not much back from the footlights--turns fully toward the audience his face of statuesque beauty, lit by those basilisk eyes, flas.h.i.+ng with desperation, perhaps insanity--launches out in a firm and steady voice the words _Sic semper tyrannis_--and then walks with neither slow nor very rapid pace diagonally across to the back of the stage, and disappears. (Had not all this terrible scene--making the mimic ones preposterous--had it not all been rehears'd, in blank, by Booth, beforehand?)

A moment's hush--a scream--the cry of _murder_--Mrs. Lincoln leaning out of the box, with ashy cheeks and lips, with involuntary cry, pointing to the retreating figure, _He has kill'd the President._ And still a moment's strange, incredulous suspense--and then the deluge!--then that mixture of horror, noises, uncertainty--(the sound, somewhere back, of a horse's hoofs clattering with speed)--the people burst through chairs and railings, and break them up--there is inextricable confusion and terror--women faint--quite feeble persons fall, and are trampl'd on--many cries of agony are heard--the broad stage suddenly fills to suffocation with a dense and motley crowd, like some horrible carnival--the audience rush generally upon it, at least the strong men do--the actors and actresses are all there in their play-costumes and painted faces, with mortal fright showing through the rouge--the screams and calls, confused talk--redoubled, trebled--two or three manage to pa.s.s up water from the stage to the President's box--others try to clamber up--&c., &c.

In the midst of all this, the soldiers of the President's guard, with others, suddenly drawn to the scene, burst in--(some two hundred altogether)--they storm the house, through all the tiers, especially the upper ones, inflam'd with fury, literally charging the audience with fix'd bayonets, muskets and pistols, snouting _Clear out! clear out!

you sons of_----.... Such the wild scene, or a suggestion of it rather, inside the play-house that night.

Outside, too, in the atmosphere of shock and craze, crowds of people, fill'd with frenzy, ready to seize any outlet for it, come near committing murder several times on innocent individuals. One such case was especially exciting. The infuriated crowd, through some chance, got started against one man, either for words he utter'd, or perhaps without any cause at all, and were proceeding at once to actually hang him on a neighboring lamp-post, when he was rescued by a few heroic policemen, who placed him in their midst, and fought their way slowly and amid great peril toward the station house. It was a fitting episode of the whole affair. The crowd rus.h.i.+ng and eddying to and fro--the night, the yells, the pale faces, many frighten'd people trying in vain to extricate themselves--the attack'd man, not yet freed from the jaws of death, looking like a corpse--the silent, resolute, half-dozen policemen, with no weapons but their little clubs, yet stern and steady through all those eddying swarms--made a fitting side-scene to the grand tragedy of the murder. They gain'd the station house with the protected man, whom they placed in security for the night, and discharged him in the morning.

And in the midst of that pandemonium, infuriated soldiers, the audience and the crowd, the stage, and all its actors and actresses, its paint-pots, spangles, and gas-lights--the life blood from those veins, the best and sweetest of the land, drips slowly down, and death's ooze already begins its little bubbles on the lips.

Thus the visible incidents and surroundings of Abraham Lincoln's murder, as they really occur'd. Thus ended the attempted secession of these States; thus the four years' war. But the main things come subtly and invisibly afterward, perhaps long afterward--neither military, political, nor (great as those are,) historical. I say, certain secondary and indirect results, out of the tragedy of this death, are, in my opinion, greatest. Not the event of the murder itself. Not that Mr. Lincoln strings the princ.i.p.al points and personages of the period, like beads, upon the single string of his career. Not that his idiosyncrasy, in its sudden appearance and disappearance, stamps this Republic with a stamp more mark'd and enduring than any yet given by any one man--(more even than Was.h.i.+ngton's;)--but, join'd with these, the immeasurable value and meaning of that whole tragedy lies, to me, in senses finally dearest to a nation, (and here all our own)--the imaginative and artistic senses--the literary and dramatic ones. Not in any common or low meaning of those terms, but a meaning precious to the race, and to every age. A long and varied series of contradictory events arrives at last at its highest poetic, single, central, pictorial denouement. The whole involved, baffling, multiform whirl of the secession period comes to a head, and is gather'd in one brief flash of lightning-illumination--one simple, fierce deed. Its sharp culmination, and as it were solution, of so many b.l.o.o.d.y and angry problems, ill.u.s.trates those climax-moments on the stage of universal Time, where the historic Muse at one entrance, and the tragic Muse at the other, suddenly ringing down the curtain, close an immense act in the long drama of creative thought, and give it radiation, tableau, stranger than fiction. Fit radiation--fit close! How the imagination--how the student loves these things! America, too, is to have them. For not in all great deaths, nor far or near--not Caesar in the Roman senate-house, or Napoleon pa.s.sing away in the wild night-storm at St. Helena--not Paleologus, falling, desperately fighting, piled over dozens deep with Grecian corpses--not calm old Socrates, drinking the hemlock--outvies that terminus of the secession war, in one man's life, here in our midst, in our own time--that seal of the emanc.i.p.ation of three million slaves--that parturition and delivery of our at last really free Republic, born again, henceforth to commence its career of genuine h.o.m.ogeneous Union, compact, consistent with itself.

Nor will ever future American Patriots and Unionists, indifferently over the whole land, or North or South, find a better moral to their lesson.

The final use of the greatest men of a Nation is, after all, not with reference to their deeds in themselves, or their direct bearing on their times or lands. The final use of a heroic-eminent life--especially of a heroic-eminent death--is its indirect filtering into the nation and the race, and to give, often at many removes, but unerringly, age after age, color and fibre to the personalism of the youth and maturity of that age, and of mankind. Then there is a cement to the whole people, subtler, more underlying, than any thing in written const.i.tution, or courts or armies--namely, the cement of a death identified thoroughly with that people, at its head, and for its sake. Strange, (is it not?) that battles, martyrs, agonies, blood, even a.s.sa.s.sination, should so condense--perhaps only really, lastingly condense--a Nationality.

I repeat it--the grand deaths of the race--the dramatic deaths of every nationality--are its most important inheritance-value--in some respects beyond its literature and art--(as the hero is beyond his finest portrait, and the battle itself beyond its choicest song or epic.) Is not here indeed the point underlying all tragedy? the famous pieces of the Grecian masters--and all masters? Why, if the old Greeks had had this man, what trilogies of plays--what epics--would have been made out of him! How the rhapsodes would have recited him! How quickly that quaint tall form would have enter'd into the region where men vitalize G.o.ds, and G.o.ds divinify men! But Lincoln, his times, his death--great as any, any age--belong altogether to our own, and our autochthonic.

(Sometimes indeed I think our American days, our own stage--the actors we know and have shaken hands, or talk'd with--more fateful than anything in Eschylus--more heroic than the fighters around Troy--afford kings of men for our Democracy prouder than Agamemnon--models of character cute and hardy as Ulysses--deaths more pitiful than Priam's.)

When, centuries hence, (as it must, in my opinion, be centuries hence before the life of these States, or of Democracy, can be really written and ill.u.s.trated,) the leading historians and dramatists seek for some personage, some special event, incisive enough to mark with deepest cut, and mnemonize, this turbulent Nineteenth century of ours, (not only these States, but all over the political and social world)--something, perhaps, to close that gorgeous procession of European feudalism, with all its pomp and caste-prejudices, (of whose long train we in America are yet so inextricably the heirs)--something to identify with terrible identification, by far the greatest revolutionary step in the history of the United States, (perhaps the greatest of the world, our century)--the absolute extirpation and erasure of slavery from the States--those historians will seek in vain for any point to serve more thoroughly their purpose, than Abraham Lincoln's death.

Dear to the Muse--thrice dear to Nationality--to the whole human race--precious to this Union--precious to Democracy--unspeakably and forever precious--their first great Martyr Chief.

TWO LETTERS

I

TO -- -- -- LONDON, ENGLAND

_Camden, N.J., U.S. America, March 17th, 1876._ DEAR FRIEND:--Yours of the 28th Feb. receiv'd, and indeed welcom'd. I am jogging along still about the same in physical condition--still certainly no worse, and I sometimes lately suspect rather better, or at any rate more adjusted to the situation. Even begin to think of making some move, some change of base, &c.: the doctors have been advising it for over two years, but I haven't felt to do it yet. My paralysis does not lift--I cannot walk any distance--I still have this baffling, obstinate, apparently chronic affection of the stomachic apparatus and liver: yet I get out of doors a little every day--write and read in moderation--appet.i.te sufficiently good--(eat only very plain food, but always did that)--digestion tolerable--spirits unflagging. I have told you most of this before, but suppose you might like to know it all again, up to date. Of course, and pretty darkly coloring the whole, are bad spells, prostrations, some pretty grave ones, intervals--and I have resign'd myself to the certainty of permanent incapacitation from solid work: but things may continue at least in this half-and-half way for months, even years.

My books are out, the new edition; a set of which, immediately on receiving your letter of 28th, I have sent you, (by mail, March 15,) and I suppose you have before this receiv'd them. My dear friend, your offers of help, and those of my other British friends, I think I fully appreciate, in the right spirit, welcome and acceptive--leaving the matter altogether in your and their hands, and to your and their convenience, discretion, leisure, and nicety. Though poor now, even to penury, I have not so far been deprived of any physical thing I need or wish whatever, and I feel confident I shall not in the future. During my employment of seven years or more in Was.h.i.+ngton after the war (1865-'72) I regularly saved part of my wages: and, though the sum has now become about exhausted by my expenses of the last three years, there are already beginning at present welcome dribbles. .h.i.therward from the sales of my new edition, which I just job and sell, myself, (all through this illness, my book-agents for three years in New York successively, badly cheated me,) and shall continue to dispose of the books myself. And that is the way I should prefer to glean my support. In that way I cheerfully accept all the aid my friends find it convenient to proffer.

To repeat a little, and without undertaking details, understand, dear friend, for yourself and all, that I heartily and most affectionately thank my British friends, and that I accept their sympathetic generosity in the same spirit in which I believe (nay, know) it is offer'd--that though poor I am not in want--that I maintain good heart and cheer; and that by far the most satisfaction to me (and I think it can be done, and believe it will be) will be to live, as long as possible, on the sales, by myself, of my own works, and perhaps, if practicable, by further writings for the press.

W. W.

I am prohibited from writing too much, and I must make this candid statement of the situation serve for all my dear friends over there.

II

TO -- -- -- DRESDEN, SAXONY

_Camden, New Jersey, U.S.A., Dec. 20, '81._ DEAR SIR:--Your letter asking definite endors.e.m.e.nt to your translation of my "Leaves of Gra.s.s"

into Russian is just received, and I hasten to answer it. Most warmly and willingly I consent to the translation, and waft a prayerful G.o.d speed to the enterprise.

You Russians and we Americans! Our countries so distant, so unlike at first glance--such a difference in social and political conditions, and our respective methods of moral and practical development the last hundred years;--and yet in certain features, and vastest ones, so resembling each other. The variety of stock-elements and tongues, to be resolutely fused in a common ident.i.ty and union at all hazards--the idea, perennial through the ages, that they both have their historic and divine mission--the fervent element of manly friends.h.i.+p throughout the whole people, surpa.s.s'd by no other races--the grand expanse of territorial limits and boundaries--the unform'd and nebulous state of many things, not yet permanently settled, but agreed on all hands to be the preparations of an infinitely greater future--the fact that both Peoples have their independent and leading positions to hold, keep, and if necessary, fight for, against the rest of the world--the deathless aspirations at the inmost centre of each great community, so vehement, so mysterious, so abysmic--are certainly features you Russians and we Americans possess in common. As my dearest dream is for an internationality of poems and poets binding the lands of the earth closer than all treaties and diplomacy--as the purpose beneath the rest in my book is such hearty comrades.h.i.+p, for individuals to begin with, and for all the nations of the earth as a result--how happy I should be to get the hearing and emotional contact of the great Russian peoples.

To whom, now and here, (addressing you for Russia and Russians and empowering you, should you see fit, to print the present letter, in your book, as a preface,) I waft affectionate salutation from these sh.o.r.es, in America's name.

W. W.

NOTES LEFT OVER

NATIONALITY--(AND YET) It is more and more clear to me that the main sustenance for highest separate personality, these States, is to come from that general sustenance of the aggregate, (as air, earth, rains, give sustenance to a tree)--and that such personality, by democratic standards, will only be fully coherent, grand and free, through the cohesion, grandeur and freedom of the common aggregate, the Union. Thus the existence of the true American continental solidarity of the future, depending on myriads of superb, large-sized, emotional and physically perfect individualities, of one s.e.x just as much as the other, the supply of such individualities, in my opinion, wholly depends on a compacted imperial ensemble. The theory and practice of both sovereignties, contradictory as they are, are necessary. As the centripetal law were fatal alone, or the centrifugal law deadly and destructive alone, but together forming the law of eternal kosmical action, evolution, preservation, and life--so, by itself alone, the fullness of individuality, even the sanest, would surely destroy itself.

This is what makes the importance to the ident.i.ties of these States of the thoroughly fused, relentless, dominating Union--a moral and spiritual idea, subjecting all the parts with remorseless power, more needed by American democracy than by any of history's. .h.i.therto empires or feudalities, and the _sine qua non_ of carrying out the republican principle to develop itself in the New World through hundreds, thousands of years to come.

Indeed, what most needs fostering through the hundred years to come, in all parts of the United States, north, south, Mississippi valley, and Atlantic and Pacific coasts, is this fused and fervent ident.i.ty of the individual, whoever he or she may be, and wherever the place, with the idea and fact of AMERICAN TOTALITY, and with what is meant by the Flag, the stars and stripes. We need this conviction of nationality as a faith, to be absorb'd in the blood and belief of the People everywhere, south, north, west, east, to emanate in their life, and in native literature and art. We want the germinal idea that America, inheritor of the past, is the custodian of the future of humanity. Judging from history, it is some such moral and spiritual ideas appropriate to them, (and such ideas only,) that have made the profoundest glory and endurance of nations in the past. The races of Judea, the cla.s.sic cl.u.s.ters of Greece and Rome, and the feudal and ecclesiastical cl.u.s.ters of the Middle Ages, were each and all vitalized by their separate distinctive ideas, ingrain'd in them, redeeming many sins, and indeed, in a sense, the princ.i.p.al reason-why for their whole career.

Then, in the thought of nationality especially for the United States, and making them original, and different from all other countries, another point ever remains to be considered. There are two distinct principles--aye, paradoxes--at the life-fountain and life-continuation of the States; one, the sacred principle of the Union, the right of ensemble, at whatever sacrifice--and yet another, an equally sacred principle, the right of each State, consider'd as a separate sovereign individual, in its own sphere. Some go zealously for one set of these rights, and some as zealously for the other set. We must have both; or rather, bred out of them, as out of mother and father, a third set, the perennial result and combination of both, and neither jeopardized. I say the loss or abdication of one set, in the future, will be ruin to democracy just as much as the loss of the other set. The problem is, to harmoniously adjust the two, and the play of the two. [Observe the lesson of the divinity of Nature, ever checking the excess of one law, by an opposite, or seemingly opposite law--generally the other side of the same law.] For the theory of this Republic is, not that the General government is the fountain of all life and power, dispensing it forth, around, and to the remotest portions of our territory, but that THE PEOPLE are, represented in both, underlying both the General and State governments, and consider'd just as well in their individualities and in their separate aggregates, or States, as consider'd in one vast aggregate, the Union. This was the original dual theory and foundation of the United States, as distinguish'd from the feudal and ecclesiastical single idea of monarchies and papacies, and the divine right of kings. (Kings have been of use, hitherto, as representing the idea of the ident.i.ty of nations. But, to American democracy, _both_ ideas must be fulfill'd, and in my opinion the loss of vitality of either one will indeed be the loss of vitality of the other.)

EMERSON'S BOOKS, (THE SHADOWS OF THEM)

In the regions we call Nature, towering beyond all measurement, with infinite spread, infinite depth and height--in those regions, including Man, socially and historically, with his moral-emotional influences--how small a part, (it came in my mind to-day,) has literature really depicted--even summing up all of it, all ages. Seems at its best some little fleet of boats, hugging the sh.o.r.es of a boundless sea, and never venturing, exploring the unmapp'd--never, Columbus-like, sailing out for New Worlds, and to complete the orb's rondure. Emerson writes frequently in the atmosphere of this thought, and his books report one or two things from that very ocean and air, and more legibly address'd to our age and American polity than by any man yet. But I will begin by scarifying him--thus proving that I am not insensible to his deepest lessons. I will consider his books from a democratic and western point of view. I will specify the shadows on these sunny expanses. Somebody has said of heroic character that "wherever the tallest peaks are present, must inevitably be deep chasms and valleys." Mine be the ungracious task (for reasons) of leaving unmention'd both sunny expanses and sky-reaching heights, to dwell on the bare spots and darknesses. I have a theory that no artist or work of the very first cla.s.s may be or can be without them.

First, then, these pages are perhaps too perfect, too concentrated. (How good, for instance, is good b.u.t.ter, good sugar. But to be eating nothing but sugar and b.u.t.ter all the time! even if ever so good.) And though the author has much to say of freedom and wildness and simplicity and spontaneity, no performance was ever more based on artificial scholars.h.i.+ps and decorums at third or fourth removes, (he calls it culture,) and built up from them. It is always a _make_, never an unconscious _growth_. It is the porcelain figure or statuette of lion, or stag, or Indian hunter--and a very choice statuette too--appropriate for the rosewood or marble bracket of parlor or library; never the animal itself, or the hunter himself. Indeed, who wants the real animal or hunter? What would that do amid astral and bric-a-brac and tapestry, and ladies and gentlemen talking in subdued tones of Browning and Longfellow and art? The least suspicion of such actual bull, or Indian, or of Nature carrying out itself, would put all those good people to instant terror and flight.

Emerson, in my opinion, is not most eminent as poet or artist or teacher, though valuable in all those. He is best as critic, or diagnoser. Not pa.s.sion or imagination or warp or weakness, or any p.r.o.nounced cause or specialty, dominates him. Cold and bloodless intellectuality dominates him. (I know the fires, emotions, love, egotisms, glow deep, perennial, as in all New Englanders--but the facade, hides them well--they give no sign.) He does not see or take one side, one presentation only or mainly, (as all the poets, or most of the fine writers anyhow)--he sees all sides. His final influence is to make his students cease to wors.h.i.+p anything--almost cease to believe in anything, outside of themselves. These books will fill, and well fill, certain stretches of life, certain stages of development--are, (like the tenets or theology the author of them preach'd when a young man,) unspeakably serviceable and precious as a stage. But in old or nervous or solemnest or dying hours, when one needs the impalpably soothing and vitalizing influences of abysmic Nature, or its affinities in literature or human society, and the soul resents the keenest mere intellection, they will not be sought for.

For a philosopher, Emerson possesses a singularly dandified theory of manners. He seems to have no notion at all that manners are simply the signs by which the chemist or metallurgist knows his metals. To the profound scientist, all metals are profound, as they really are. The little one, like the conventional world, will make much of gold and silver only. Then to the real artist in humanity, what are called bad manners are often the most picturesque and significant of all. Suppose these books becoming absorb'd, the permanent chyle of American general and particular character--what a well-wash'd and grammatical, but bloodless and helpless, race we should turn out! No, no, dear friend; though the States want scholars, undoubtedly, and perhaps want ladies and gentlemen who use the bath frequently, and never laugh loud, or talk wrong, they don't want scholars, or ladies and gentlemen, at the expense of all the rest. They want good farmers, sailors, mechanics, clerks, citizens--perfect business and social relations--perfect fathers and mothers. If we could only have these, or their approximations, plenty of them, fine and large and sane and generous and patriotic, they might make their verbs disagree from their nominatives, and laugh like volleys of musketeers, if they should please. Of course these are not all America wants, but they are first of all to be provided on a large scale. And, with tremendous errors and escapades, this, substantially, is what the States seem to have an intuition of, and to be mainly aiming at. The plan of a select cla.s.s, superfined, (demarcated from the rest,) the plan of Old World lands and literatures, is not so objectionable in itself, but because it chokes the true plan for us, and indeed is death to it. As to such special cla.s.s, the United States can never produce any equal to the splendid show, (far, far beyond comparison or compet.i.tion here,) of the princ.i.p.al European nations, both in the past and at the present day. But an immense and distinctive commonalty over our vast and varied area, west and east, south and north--in fact, for the first time in history, a great, aggregated, real PEOPLE, worthy the name, and made of develop'd heroic individuals, both s.e.xes--is America's princ.i.p.al, perhaps only, reason for being. If ever accomplish'd, it will be at least as much, (I lately think, doubly as much,) the result of fitting and democratic sociologies, literatures and arts--if we ever get them--as of our democratic politics.

At times it has been doubtful to me if Emerson really knows or feels what Poetry is at its highest, as in the Bible, for instance, or Homer or Shakspere. I see he covertly or plainly likes best superb verbal polish, or something old or odd--Waller's "Go, lovely rose," or Lovelace's lines "to Lucusta"--the quaint conceits of the old French bards, and the like. Of _power_ he seems to have a gentleman's admiration--but in his inmost heart the grandest attribute of G.o.d and Poets is always subordinate to the octaves, conceits, polite kinks, and verbs.

The reminiscence that years ago I began like most youngsters to have a touch (though it came late, and was only on the surface) of Emerson-on-the-brain--that I read his writings reverently, and address'd him in print as "Master," and for a month or so thought of him as such--I retain not only with composure, but positive satisfaction. I have noticed that most young people of eager minds pa.s.s through this stage of exercise.

The best part of Emersonianism is, it breeds the giant that destroys itself. Who wants to be any man's mere follower? lurks behind every page. No teacher ever taught, that has so provided for his pupil's setting up independently--no truer evolutionist.

VENTURES, ON AN OLD THEME

A DIALOGUE--

_One party says_--We arrange our lives--even the best and boldest men and women that exist, just as much as the most limited--with reference to what society conventionally rules and makes right. We retire to our rooms for freedom; to undress, bathe, unloose everything in freedom.

These, and much else, would not be proper in society.

_Other party answers_--Such is the rule of society. Not always so, and considerable exceptions still exist. However, it must be called the general rule, sanction'd by immemorial usage, and will probably always remain so.

_First party_--Why not, then, respect it in your poems?