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Ralph Waldo Emerson, a non-fiction book by Oliver Wendell Holmes |
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CHAPTER XII |
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_ CHAPTER XII 1873-1878. AET. 70-75. Publication of "Parnassus."--Emerson Nominated as Candidate for the Office of Lord Rector of Glasgow University.--Publication of "Letters and Social Aims." Contents: Poetry and Imagination.--Social Aims.--Eloquence.--Resources.--The Comic.--Quotation and Originality.--Progress of Culture.--Persian Poetry.--Inspiration.-- Greatness.--Immortality.--Address at the Unveiling of the Statue of "The Minute-Man" at Concord.--Publication of Collected Poems. In December, 1874, Emerson published "Parnassus," a Collection of Poems by British and American authors. Many readers may like to see his subdivisions and arrangement of the pieces he has brought together. They are as follows: "Nature."--"Human Life."--"Intellectual." --"Contemplation."--"Moral and Religious."--"Heroic."--"Personal." --"Pictures."--"Narrative Poems and Ballads."--"Songs."--"Dirges and Pathetic Poems."--"Comic and Humorous."--"Poetry of Terror."--"Oracles and Counsels." I have borrowed so sparingly from the rich mine of Mr. George Willis Cooke's "Ralph Waldo Emerson, His Life, Writings, and Philosophy," that I am pleased to pay him the respectful tribute of taking a leaf from his excellent work. "This collection," he says, "was the result of his habit, pursued for many years, of copying into his commonplace book any poem which specially pleased him. Many of these favorites had been read to illustrate his lectures on the English poets. The book has no worthless selections, almost everything it contains bearing the stamp of genius and worth. Yet Emerson's personality is seen in its many intellectual and serious poems, and in the small number of its purely religious selections. With two or three exceptions he copies none of those devotional poems which have attracted devout souls.--His poetical sympathies are shown in the fact that one third of the selections are from the seventeenth century. Shakespeare is drawn on more largely than any other, no less than eighty-eight selections being made from him. The names of George Herbert, Herrick, Ben Jonson, and Milton frequently appear. Wordsworth appears forty-three times, and stands next to Shakespeare; while Burns, Byron, Scott, Tennyson, and Chaucer make up the list of favorites. Many little known pieces are included, and some whose merit is other than poetical.--This selection of poems is eminently that of a poet of keen intellectual tastes. I not popular in character, omitting many public favorites, and introducing very much which can never be acceptable to the general reader. The Preface is full of interest for its comments on many of the poems and poets appearing in these selections." I will only add to Mr. Cooke's criticism these two remarks: First, that I have found it impossible to know under which of his divisions to look for many of the poems I was in search of; and as, in the earlier copies at least, there was no paged index where each author's pieces were collected together, one had to hunt up his fragments with no little loss of time and patience, under various heads, "imitating the careful search that Isis made for the mangled body of Osiris." The other remark is that each one of Emerson's American fellow-poets from whom he has quoted would gladly have spared almost any of the extracts from the poems of his brother-bards, if the editor would only have favored us with some specimens of his own poetry, with a single line of which he has not seen fit to indulge us. In 1874 Emerson received the nomination by the independent party among the students of Glasgow University for the office of Lord Rector. He received five hundred votes against seven hundred for Disraeli, who was elected. He says in a letter to Dr. J. Hutchinson Sterling:-- "I count that vote as quite the fairest laurel that has ever fallen on me; and I cannot but feel deeply grateful to my young friends in the University, and to yourself, who have been my counsellor and my too partial advocate." Mr. Cabot informs us in his Prefatory Note to "Letters and Social Aims," that the proof sheets of this volume, now forming the eighth of the collected works, showed even before the burning of his house and the illness which followed from the shock, that his loss of memory and of mental grasp was such as to make it unlikely that he would in any case have been able to accomplish what he had undertaken. Sentences, even whole pages, were repeated, and there was a want of order beyond what even he would have tolerated:-- "There is nothing here that he did not write, and he gave his full approval to whatever was done in the way of selection and arrangement; but I cannot say that he applied his mind very closely to the matter." This volume contains eleven Essays, the subjects of which, as just enumerated, are very various. The longest and most elaborate paper is that entitled "Poetry and Imagination." I have room for little more than the enumeration of the different headings of this long Essay. By these it will be seen how wide a ground it covers. They are "Introductory;" "Poetry;" "Imagination;" "Veracity;" "Creation;" "Melody, Rhythm, Form;" "Bards and Trouveurs;" "Morals;" "Transcendency." Many thoughts with which we are familiar are reproduced, expanded, and illustrated in this Essay. Unity in multiplicity, the symbolism of nature, and others of his leading ideas appear in new phrases, not unwelcome, for they look fresh in every restatement. It would be easy to select a score of pointed sayings, striking images, large generalizations. Some of these we find repeated in his verse. Thus:-- "Michael Angelo is largely filled with the Creator that made and makes men. How much of the original craft remains in him, and he a mortal man!" And so in the well remembered lines of "The Problem":-- "Himself from God he could not free." "He knows that he did not make his thought,--no, his thought made him, and made the sun and stars." "Art might obey but not surpass. Hope is at the bottom of every Essay of Emerson's as it was at the bottom of Pandora's box:-- "I never doubt the riches of nature, the gifts of the future, the immense wealth of the mind. O yes, poets we shall have, mythology, symbols, religion of our own. --"Sooner or later that which is now life shall be poetry, and every fair and manly trait shall add a richer strain to the song." Under the title "Social Aims" he gives some wise counsel concerning manners and conversation. One of these precepts will serve as a specimen--if we have met with it before it is none the worse for wear:-- "Shun the negative side. Never worry people with; your contritions, nor with dismal views of politics or society. Never name sickness; even if you could trust yourself on that perilous topic, beware of unmuzzling a valetudinarian, who will give you enough of it." We have had one Essay on "Eloquence" already. One extract from this new discourse on the same subject must serve our turn:-- "These are ascending stairs,--a good voice, winning manners, plain speech, chastened, however, by the schools into correctness; but we must come to the main matter, of power of statement,--know your fact; hug your fact. For the essential thing is heat, and heat comes of sincerity. Speak what you know and believe; and are personally in it; and are answerable for every word. Eloquence is _the power to_ _translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak_." The italics are Emerson's. If our learned and excellent John Cotton used to sweeten his mouth before going to bed with a bit of Calvin, we may as wisely sweeten and strengthen our sense of existence with a morsel or two from Emerson's Essay on "Resources":-- "A Schopenhauer, with logic and learning and wit, teaching pessimism,--teaching that this is the worst of all possible worlds, and inferring that sleep is better than waking, and death than sleep,--all the talent in the world cannot save him from being odious. But if instead of these negatives you give me affirmatives; if you tell me that there is always life for the living; that what man has done man can do; that this world belongs to the energetic; that there is always a way to everything desirable; that every man is provided, in the new bias of his faculty, with a key to nature, and that man only rightly knows himself as far as he has experimented on things,--I am invigorated, put into genial and working temper; the horizon opens, and we are full of good-will and gratitude to the Cause of Causes." The Essay or Lecture on "The Comic" may have formed a part of a series he had contemplated on the intellectual processes. Two or three sayings in it will show his view sufficiently:-- "The essence of all jokes, of all comedy, seems to be an honest or well-intended halfness; a non-performance of what is pretended to be performed, at the same time that one is giving loud pledges of performance. "If the essence of the Comic be the contrast in the intellect between the idea and the false performance, there is good reason why we should be affected by the exposure. We have no deeper interest than our integrity, and that we should be made aware by joke and by stroke of any lie we entertain. Besides, a perception of the comic seems to be a balance-wheel in our metaphysical structure. It appears to be an essential element in a fine character.--A rogue alive to the ludicrous is still convertible. If that sense is lost, his fellow-men can do little for him." These and other sayings of like purport are illustrated by well-preserved stories and anecdotes not for the most part of very recent date. "Quotation and Originality" furnishes the key to Emerson's workshop. He believed in quotation, and borrowed from everybody and every book. Not in any stealthy or shame-faced way, but proudly, royally, as a king borrows from one of his attendants the coin that bears his own image and superscription. "All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands.--We quote not only books and proverbs, but arts, sciences, religion, customs, and laws; nay, we quote temples and houses, tables and chairs by imitation.-- "The borrowing is often honest enough and comes of magnanimity and stoutness. A great man quotes bravely, and will not draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word as good. "Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it."-- --"The Progress of Culture," his second Phi Beta Kappa oration, has already been mentioned. --The lesson of self-reliance, which he is never tired of inculcating, is repeated and enforced in the Essay on "Greatness." "There are certain points of identity in which these masters agree. Self-respect is the early form in which greatness appears.--Stick to your own; don't inculpate yourself in the local, social, or national crime, but follow the path your genius traces like the galaxy of heaven for you to walk in. "Every mind has a new compass, a new direction of its own, differencing its genius and aim from every other mind.--We call this specialty the _bias_ of each individual. And none of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone." If to follow this native bias is the first rule, the second is concentration.--To the bias of the individual mind must be added the most catholic receptivity for the genius of others. "Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: Every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him."-- "The man whom we have not seen, in whom no regard of self degraded the adorer of the laws,--who by governing himself governed others; sportive in manner, but inexorable in act; who sees longevity in his cause; whose aim is always distinct to him; who is suffered to be himself in society; who carries fate in his eye;--he it is whom we seek, encouraged in every good hour that here or hereafter he shall he found." What has Emerson to tell us of "Inspiration?" "I believe that nothing great or lasting can be done except by inspiration, by leaning on the secret augury.-- "How many sources of inspiration can we count? As many as our affinities. But to a practical purpose we may reckon a few of these." I will enumerate them briefly as he gives them, but not attempting to reproduce his comments on each:-- 1. Health. 2. The experience of writing letters. 3. The renewed sensibility which comes after seasons of decay or eclipse of the faculties. 4. The power of the will. 5. Atmospheric causes, especially the influence of morning. 6. Solitary converse with nature. 7. Solitude of itself, like that of a country inn in summer, and of a city hotel in winter. 8. Conversation. 9. New poetry; by which, he says, he means chiefly old poetry that is new to the reader. "Every book is good to read which sets the reader in a working mood." What can promise more than an Essay by Emerson on "Immortality"? It is to be feared that many readers will transfer this note of interrogation to the Essay itself. What is the definite belief of Emerson as expressed in this discourse,--what does it mean? We must tack together such sentences as we can find that will stand for an answer:-- "I think all sound minds rest on a certain preliminary conviction, namely, that if it be best that conscious personal life shall continue, it will continue; if not best, then it will not; and we, if we saw the whole, should of course see that it was better so." This is laying the table for a Barmecide feast of nonentity, with the possibility of a real banquet to be provided for us. But he continues:-- "Schiller said, 'What is so universal as death must be benefit.'" He tells us what Michael Angelo said, how Plutarch felt, how Montesquieu thought about the question, and then glances off from it to the terror of the child at the thought of life without end, to the story of the two skeptical statesmen whose unsatisfied inquiry through a long course of years he holds to be a better affirmative evidence than their failure to find a confirmation was negative. He argues from our delight in permanence, from the delicate contrivances and adjustments of created things, that the contriver cannot be forever hidden, and says at last plainly:-- "Everything is prospective, and man is to live hereafter. That the world is for his education is the only sane solution of the enigma." But turn over a few pages and we may read:-- "I confess that everything connected with our personality fails. Nature never spares the individual; we are always balked of a complete success; no prosperity is promised to our self-esteem. We have our indemnity only in the moral and intellectual reality to which we aspire. That is immortal, and we only through that. The soul stipulates for no private good. That which is private I see not to be good. 'If truth live, I live; if justice live, I live,' said one of the old saints, 'and these by any man's suffering are enlarged and enthroned.'" Once more we get a dissolving view of Emerson's creed, if such a word applies to a statement like the following:-- --"I mean that I am a better believer, and all serious souls are better believers in the immortality than we can give grounds for. The real evidence is too subtle, or is higher than we can write down in propositions, and therefore Wordsworth's 'Ode' is the best modern essay on the subject." Wordsworth's "Ode" is a noble and beautiful dream; is it anything more? The reader who would finish this Essay, which I suspect to belong to an early period of Emerson's development, must be prepared to plunge into mysticism and lose himself at last in an Oriental apologue. The eschatology which rests upon an English poem and an Indian fable belongs to the realm of reverie and of imagination rather than the domain of reason. On the 19th of April, 1875, the hundredth anniversary of the "Fight at the Bridge," Emerson delivered a short Address at the unveiling of the statue of "The Minute-Man," erected at the place of the conflict, to commemorate the event. This is the last Address he ever wrote, though he delivered one or more after this date. From the manuscript which lies before me I extract a single passage:-- "In the year 1775 we had many enemies and many friends in England, but our one benefactor was King George the Third. The time had arrived for the political severance of America, that it might play its part in the history of this globe, and the inscrutable divine Providence gave an insane king to England. In the resistance of the Colonies, he alone was immovable on the question of force. England was so dear to us that the Colonies could only be absolutely disunited by violence from England, and only one man could compel the resort to violence. Parliament wavered, Lord North wavered, all the ministers wavered, but the king had the insanity of one idea; he was immovable, he insisted on the impossible, so the army was sent, America was instantly united, and the Nation born." There is certainly no mark of mental failure in this paragraph, written at a period when he had long ceased almost entirely from his literary labors. Emerson's collected "Poems" constitute the ninth volume of the recent collected edition of his works. They will be considered in a following chapter. _ |
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