Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Title:     Ralph Waldo Emerson
Author: George William Curtis [More Titles by Curtis]

"The beauty of Israel has fallen in its high place," said the voice of Emerson's friend and neighbor, Judge Hoar, trembling and almost hushed in emotion, and everybody who heard felt the singular felicity of the words. The plain little country church was crowded, and a vast throng stood outside in the peaceful April sunshine. Before the pulpit--the eyes forever closed, the voice forever silent--lay the man whose aspect of sweet and majestic serenity Death had not touched, and which recalled his own words: "Even the corpse that has lain in the chambers has added a solemn ornament to the house." It was the man who was beloved of his neighbors and honored by the world, whose modest counsel in grave affairs guided the village, and whose thought led the thought of Christendom. "He belonged to all men, but he is peculiarly ours," said Judge Hoar truly, speaking for the quiet historic town of which Emerson's grandfather had been the minister, and in which he lived during the larger part of his life, and to which his memory will lend an imperishable charm.

Concord when he first knew it was already famous. A hundred years ago, at the bridge over the placid river, the Middlesex farmers, hastening as minute men from all the neighboring country, had obeyed the first military summons to fire upon the king's regulars; and the red-coated regulars, turning, had begun, amid the blazing patriot volley of twenty miles, their long retreat to Yorktown and over the sea. At the point where the highway by which the soldiers marched enters the village, under the hill along whose ridge the hurrying countrymen pressed to cut off the soldiers' retreat, lived for more than forty years the scholar who belongs to Concord as Shakespeare belongs to Stratford.

"Nature," said Emerson in his first book, written in the old Manse at Concord, which Hawthorne afterwards inhabited, and which he has so beautifully commemorated--"Nature stretcheth out her arms to embrace man: only let his thoughts be of equal greatness. Willingly does she follow his steps with the rose and the violet, and bend her lines of grandeur and grace to the decoration of her darling child. Only let his thoughts be of equal scope, and the frame will suit the picture. A virtuous man is in unison with her works, and makes the central figure of the visible sphere. Homer, Pindar, Socrates, Phocion, associate themselves fitly in our memory with the geography and climate of Greece. The visible heavens and the earth sympathize with Jesus. And in common life whoever has seen a person of powerful character and happy genius will have remarked how easily he took all things along with him, the persons, the opinions, and the day, and nature became auxiliary to a man." So is Emerson associated with the tranquil landscape of the old Middlesex town--the gentle hills, the long sweep of meadowland, the winding river, the woodland, and the pastures under the ample sky. The broad horizon and rural repose were the fitting home of the lofty and beneficent genius whose life and word perpetually illustrated the supreme worth and beauty of truth, purity, and morality. Whoever saw him there or elsewhere, saw the "sweet and virtuous soul" which George Herbert likened to seasoned timber that never gives.

The sincerity and serenity of Emerson's character were unsurpassed. The freshness and glow of his interest in life were perennial. With a sober tenderness of regret he said to a friend who congratulated him upon his seventieth birthday, "Yet it is a little sad to me, for I count to-day the end of youth." In no other sense than the lapse of years, however, was it true. That auroral freshness of soul which is the distinctive charm of youth lingered when even memory somewhat failed. "How long it is since I have seen you!" he said at Longfellow's funeral to a friend whom he had accosted just before. But he said it with all that heartiness of sympathy and expectation which, in the golden prime of his life, when he was in many ways the most striking and original figure in his country, made him greet every comer as if he expected to hear from him a wiser word than had yet been spoken. A youth, fascinated by this simple graciousness of manner, declared that Emerson greeted the most ordinary persons like a King of Spain receiving an ambassador from the Great Mogul. The expectancy of his manner implied that every man had some message to deliver, and he bent himself to hear.

But his shrewdness of perception was exquisite. He did not take dross because he hoped for gold. His reproof was as sure and incisive as the stroke of a delicate Damascus blade. When a young man, hearing Emerson say that everybody ought to read Plato, followed his advice, and read, he thought, with the audacity of youth, that he detected faults in Plato, and wrote an essay to set them forth. He asked Emerson to read it, and when he returned it to the youth, Emerson said, pleasantly, "My boy, when you strike at the king, you must kill him." One day he sat at dinner with a distinguished company of statesmen. He was by far the most famous man at the table; but he modestly followed the conversation, turning from each guest who spoke, to the next, with the old sweet gravity of earnest expectation. When all the notable company had gone, a guest who remained said to him: "I saw you talking with the English Minister. He is a brilliant man, and I hope that you found him agreeable." "A very pleasant gentleman," replied Emerson; "but he does not represent the England that I know."

Despite this sharp apprehension, however, Emerson was sometimes unable to find any charm in writings which have apparently taken a permanent place in literature. He could see nothing interesting or valuable in Shelley. "When I read Shelley," he once said, "I am like a man who thinks that he sees gold at the bottom of a stream. He reaches for it, but his hands come up cold, with a little common sand in them." The waywardness and disorder of Shelley's life may have troubled him. But this would not have affected his intellectual judgment. His acute intellect was supremely independent and absolutely courageous. "He must embrace solitude as a bride," he said of the scholar; "he must have his glees and his glooms alone." When as a young man he quietly closed his pulpit door, and declined to preach any more, because he no longer felt any value in certain religious rites, there was no protest, nor ostentation, nor newspaper "sensation." It was simply the closing of a book that he had read, and the amazement and censure and grief of others could not possibly persuade him to do, or to say, or to affect, the thing that was not true. Emerson's moral and intellectual integrity was transparently simple, but it was sublime. It was not expressed in stormy self-assertion nor cynical contempt. It spoke in tranquil and beautiful affirmation, perfectly courteous, but absolutely sincere.

But no man more charitably and diligently sought to understand others, and to be just to what was obscure and foreign to him. He listened patiently to music. But it did not charm him. He was punctual in the duties of a citizen. But he had no proper political tastes. Yet for the true politics, the application of the moral law to the control of public affairs, no man was more perceptive or uncompromising. He was always on the right side of great public questions. His hospitable sympathy entertained every good cause, and in all our antislavery literature there is no nobler or more permanent work than his address upon the anniversary of West India emancipation in 1844. The only cloud that ever arose upon his regard for Carlyle was his displeasure with Carlyle's contemptuous and cynical sneers at our civil war. He was deeply impatient of doubtful and half-hearted Americans during the war. "They call themselves gentlemen, I believe," he said of certain persons, and in a tone which showed that his lofty and patriotic honor instinctively and utterly repudiated the pinchbeck claims of educated feebleness to bear "the grand old name of gentleman."

Those who recall Emerson when he was a clergyman in Boston remember a singular spiritual beauty in the man, and an indescribable charm of manner in his public speech. But apparently he impressed his earlier associates with the purity and refinement of his mind and life, his lofty intellectual tastes and sympathy, and his literary accomplishment, rather than by the peculiar force of a genius which was to give the most powerful spiritual impulse of the generation to American thought. This is the more singular because there was always something breezy and heroic in his tone, which might have led to the suspicion of the fact that he was from the first a fond reader of Plutarch, from whose "Lives" he draws so many illustrations. As in a mountain walk the traveller is suddenly aware of wafts of perfumed air, now of the wild-grape blossom, now of the azalea or sweet-brier, so the strain of Emerson suggests his sympathy with Plutarch and Montaigne, the Oriental poets and the Platonists.

But no one could describe accurately his "system" of philosophy, nor fit him into a "school" of poetry. He was content to call himself a scholar, and no name was more significant and precious to him. He shunned notoriety, but he had the instinctive desire of every artist and of all genius for an audience. When a friend asked him of a young man whose literary talent had seemed to him to promise great achievement, Emerson said: "He does nothing; and I doubted his genius when I saw that he did not seek a hearing." When his own first slight volume, "Nature," was published, they were but a few, a very few, who perceived in it the ripe and beautiful work of a master in literature and thought. The richness and originality and picturesque simplicity of this book, its subtle perception, its tone of jubilant power, and the soft glimmering light of lofty imagination which irradiates every page, do not lose by familiarity, and are as charming, although of course not so surprising, as when they first took captive the readers of nearly fifty years ago. With the eagerness of classification which characterizes many active minds, Emerson was immediately labelled a Berkeleyan, an idealist, and a mystic. But he eluded the precise classification as noiselessly and surely as a cloud changes its form. Astonishment, satire, indignation, contradiction, spent themselves in vain. Like a rose-tree in June, which blossoms sweetly whether the air be chilly or sunny, his thought quietly flowered into exquisite expression. You might like it or leave it. But the rose would be still a rose.

There was a fashion of calling Emerson obscure. But there is no style in literature of more poetic precision than his. It is full of surprises of beauty and aptness. His central doctrine of the identity of men, the grandeur of every man's opportunity, and the essential poetry of the circumstances of common life, was a living faith. "The great man," he said, "makes the great thing." "In the sighing of these woods; in the quiet of these gray fields; in the cool breeze that sings out of these Northern mountains; in the workmen, the boys, the maidens you meet; in the hopes of the morning, the ennui of noon, and sauntering of the afternoon; in the disquieting comparisons; in the regrets at want of vigor; in the great idea and the puny execution--behold Charles the Fifth's day; another, yet the same; behold Chatham's, Hampden's, Bayard's, Alfred's, Scipio's, Pericles's day--day of all that are born of women. The difference of circumstance is merely costume. I am tasting the self-same life--its sweetness, its greatness, its pain--which I so admire in other men." The temptation to complete the splendid passage is almost irresistible. But in every page you are drawn on as in a stately symphony of winning music.

This passage is from the Dartmouth College address, and it has all the flowing cadence of a discourse written to be spoken. Yet Emerson had little of the orator's temperament save the desire of an audience, and an earnestness which was pure and not passionate. But no orator in the country has exercised a deeper or more permanent influence. His discourses were but essays, but their thought was so noble, their form so symmetrical, their tone so lofty, and they were spoken with such alluring rhythm, that they threw over young minds a spell which no other eloquence could command. Emerson himself was very susceptible to the power of fine oratory. No man ever praised more warmly the charm of Everett in his earlier day. When Webster delivered his eulogy upon Adams and Jefferson in Faneuil Hall, Emerson was teaching in Cambridge, and Richard H. Dana, Jun., was one of his pupils. The day before Webster spoke, the teacher announced that there would be no school upon the morrow, and he earnestly exhorted his pupils not to lose the memorable opportunity of hearing the great orator. Dana was of an age to prefer fishing to oratory, and strolled off with his line to the river, where he passed the day. When school was resumed, Mr. Emerson with sympathetic interest asked him if he had heard Webster. The fisher, half ashamed, reluctantly owned his absence. Emerson looked at him with regret and almost pain, and said to him, gravely: "My boy, I am very sorry; you have lost what you can never recover, and what you will regret to the last day of your life."

But those who heard his own Divinity School address, or the Cambridge or Dartmouth oration, or the Emancipation address, would not exchange that recollection even to have heard the Olympian orator in Faneuil Hall. "Tell me," said a Senator famous for his oratory, to a friend in Washington, "what do you call eloquence? Repeat to me an eloquent passage." The friend quoted from Emerson the unequalled passage from the Dartmouth College address in which the scholar appeals to the young men to be true to the ideals of their youth--a passage which no generous youth can read to-day without deep emotion and a thrill of high resolve. The Senator listened with an air of perplexed incredulity. "Do you call that eloquent? Now see what I call eloquence," and he declaimed a glowing piece of rhetoric with ardent feeling. It was a passage from Charles Sprague's Fourth-of-July oration in Boston sixty years ago. But effective as it was, his friend reminded the Senator that if the test of eloquence be glow of feeling and splendor and sincerity of expression, with an inner power of appeal which searches the heart and moulds the life, no really greater results in this country could be traced to any speech than to that of Emerson, who read the greater part of his essays as addresses, and who sometimes reached a lyrical strain which not the magnificent Burke nor any other great orator surpasses.

--To talk of Emerson, even if the talker were not of the circle of his intimate friends, is to raise the flood-gate of happy and inspiring recollections. It is one of the tenderest of the thoughts that hover around his memory, as the low winds sigh through the pine-trees over his grave, that, as with Longfellow, there are no excuses to be made for grotesque eccentricities of genius, nor for a life at any point unworthy of so great a soul. He said of his friend Thoreau, who is buried near him, that he was like the Alpine climber who gathers the edelweiss, the flower that blooms at the very edge of the glacier. He too lived at those pure heights, and taught us how to tread them undazzled and undismayed. Happy teacher, whose long and lovely life illustrated the dignity and excellence of the truth, old as the morning and as ever fresh, that fidelity to the divine law written upon the conscience is the only safe law of life for every man. Noble and beneficent preacher, who, in a sense that the pensive Goldsmith did not intend,

"Allured to brighter worlds, and led the way."

[The end]
George William Curtis's essay: Ralph Waldo Emerson

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