Kitabı oku: «A History of American Literature», sayfa 15

BOOK LIST

General References

Bibliography

In Goddard, H. C. Studies in New England Transcendentalism. 1908. See also Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. I, pp. 546–549.

History and Criticism

Cooke, G. W. Poets of Transcendentalism: an Anthology with Introductory Essay. 1903.

Emerson, R. W. The Transcendentalist, in Nature, Addresses and Lectures.

Frothingham, O. B. Transcendentalism in New England, a History. 1876.

Goddard, H. C. Studies in New England Transcendentalism. 1908.

Parker, Theodore. Transcendentalism: a Lecture. 1876.

Special Biographies

Alcott, A. B.

Sanborn, F. B. Bronson Alcott at Alcott House, England, and Fruitlands, New England, 1842–1844. 1908.

Sanborn, F. B. and Harris, Wm. T. A. Bronson Alcott: his Life and Philosophy. 1893. 2 vols.

Emerson, R. W.

See Book List, chap. xiv.

Fuller, Margaret

Emerson, R. W., Channing, W. H., and Clarke, J. F. Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli. 1852. 2 vols.

Higginson, T. W. Margaret Fuller Ossoli. 1884.

Howe, Julia Ward. Margaret Fuller (Marchesa Ossoli). 1883.

Parker, Theodore

Frothingham, O. B. Theodore Parker: a Biography. 1874.

Weiss, John. Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker. 1864. 2 vols.

Ripley, George

Frothingham, O. B. George Ripley. (A.M.L. Ser.) 1882.

Thoreau, Henry David

See Book List, chap. xiv.

The Dial

The standard work is by G. W. Cooke. An Historical and Biographical Introduction to accompany The Dial as reprinted in Numbers for the Rowfant Club, Cleveland. 1902. 2 vols.

The Dial: a Magazine for Literature, Philosophy, and Religion, Vols. I–IV. 1840–1844. Reprinted by the Rowfant Club of Cleveland, 1900–1903.

Brook Farm

The standard work is by Lindsay Swift. Brook Farm: its Members, Scholars, and Visitors. 1900. (Contains bibliography.)

Codman, J. T. Brook Farm: Historic and Personal Memoirs. 1894.

Cooke, G. W. John Sullivan Dwight, Brook-Farmer, Editor, and Critic of Music. 1898.

Frothingham, O. B. George Ripley. 1882. (A. M. L. Ser.)

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Blithedale Romance. 1852.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Passages from the American Notebooks. 1868. 2 vols.

CHAPTER XIV
RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) was born in Boston. He came from old Puritan stock, several of his direct ancestors being clergymen. He was one of eight children, of whom six were living when his father, the Reverend William Emerson, died in 1811. Mr. Emerson had been so beloved by his parishioners that they continued to pay his salary for seven years, and for three years gave the use of the parish house to the family. The nature of these years is presented in the essay on “Domestic Life”:

Who has not seen, and who can see unmoved, under a low roof, the eager, blushing boys discharging as they can their household chores, and hastening into the sitting-room to the study of to-morrow’s merciless lesson, yet stealing time to read one chapter more of the novel hardly smuggled into the tolerance of father and mother – atoning for the same by some passages of Plutarch or Goldsmith; the warm sympathy with which they kindle each other in school-yard, or barn, or wood-shed, with scraps of poetry or song, with phrases of the last oration or mimicry of the orator; the youthful criticism, on Sunday, of the sermons; the school declamation, faithfully rehearsed at home… Ah, short-sighted students of books, of nature, and of man, too happy could they know their advantages, they pine for freedom from that mild parental yoke; they sigh for fine clothes, for rides, for the theatre, and premature freedom and dissipation which others possess. Woe to them if their wishes were crowned. The angels that dwell with them, and are weaving laurels of life for their youthful brows, are Toil, and Want, and Truth, and Mutual Faith.

There was a great deal of work for the young Emersons in the day, but the spirit of play and playfulness survived it all, as this bit of verse shows. It was written by Ralph to his brother Edward.

 
So erst two brethren climb’d the cloud-capp’d hill,
Ill-fated Jack, and long-lamented Jill,
Snatched from the crystal font its lucid store,
And in full pails the precious treasure bore.
But ah, by dull forgetfulness oppress’d
(Forgive me, Edward) I’ve forgot the rest.
 

In due time Emerson went to Harvard, entering the class of 1821. Here he earned part of his expenses and profited by scholarships, which must have been given him more on account of his character than because of his actual performance as a student, for he stood only in the middle of his class. He was almost hopelessly weak in mathematics, but he won three prizes in essay-writing and declamation. He was a regular member of one of the debating societies, crossing swords with his opponents on the vague and impossible subjects which lure the minds of youth. His appointment as class poet at graduation argues no special distinction, for it was conferred on him after seven others had refused it. All the while, however, his mind had been active, and he came out from college with the fruits of a great amount of good reading which had doubtless somewhat distracted him from the assigned work. Emerson’s experience at college should not be confused with that of many budding geniuses who showed their originality by mere eccentricity. With Emerson, as with Hawthorne and Thoreau too, the independence appeared simply in his choosing the things at which he should do his hardest work. He was full of ambition. An entry in the Journal of 1822 proves that at this age he was more like the Puritan Milton than the care-free Cooper: “In twelve days I shall be nineteen years old, which I count a miserable thing. Has any other educated person lived so many years and lost so many days?” He blamed himself for dreaming of greatness and doing little to achieve it, but he decided not yet to give up hope of belonging to the “family of giant minds.” Already, too, he was in thought joining his own future with the future of the country in such jottings as these. “Let those who would pluck the lot of immortality from Fate’s urn, look well to the future of America.” “To America, therefore, monarchs look with apprehension and the people with hope.” If his countrymen could boast no great accomplishment in the arts, “We have a government and a national spirit that is better than persons or histories.” The judges of his own future utterances were to be a nation of free minds, “for in America we have plucked down Fortune and set up Nature in his room.” These comments, of course, reveal the sentiment and the lofty rhetoric of the commencement orator, for they were all written before he was twenty-two. In later years he wrote more simply and less excitedly, but he never forgot that his own life was always part of the life of the nation.

The five years just after graduation were not encouraging. He taught in his brother’s school for a while, but loathed it because he taught so badly. Ill-health harassed him. While he was studying in the Divinity School his eyes failed him, so that he was excused from the regular examinations at the end. And a month after he was admitted to the ministry his doctor advised him to spend the winter in the South. It was not until 1829, when he was twenty-six years old, that he was settled in a pastorate. Then the future seemed assured for him. The church was an old and respected one, the congregation made up of “desirable” people. If the young preacher was able to prepare acceptable sermons and make friends among his parishioners, he could be sure of a permanent and dignified position in his native city. But although the flock were perfectly satisfied with their shepherd, in three years he resigned. He had found that certain of the forms of church worship embarrassed him because he could not always enter into the spirit of them. Sometimes when the moment for the “long prayer” came, he did not feel moved to utter it, and he felt that to “deliver” it as a piece of elocution was dishonest and irreverent. Administering the holy communion troubled him still more, because he felt afraid that to the literal Yankee mind this symbolical ceremony was either meaningless or tinged with superstition. So he expressed his honest doubts to his congregation, explaining that if these features of worship were necessary he could no longer continue to be their pastor, and they reluctantly let him go.

Two years were yet to pass in the preparatory stage of Emerson’s life. For the first seven months of 1833 he was abroad, traveling slowly from Italy up to England. In reading his daily comments on what he saw, one finds no trace of the eager zest for the novelties of travel enjoyed by Irving and Cooper; he seems rather to have gone through with the tour as a sober and conscientious process of education. His most vivid experiences were not in seeing places but in meeting English authors, and with one of these, Thomas Carlyle, he made the beginning of a lifelong friendship. It was like Emerson to be especially attracted to Carlyle, who was almost unknown at the time, to seek him out on his lonely Scotch farm, and to feel a deeper sympathy and admiration for him than for famous men like Wordsworth and Coleridge and De Quincey. No single man and no amount of public opinion ever made up this young American’s mind for him. When, after a year of preaching and lecturing in America he went late in 1834 to settle in Concord, the richest memory he treasured from his travel was the founding of this new companionship. In the fabric of the long life that remained to him no two threads are more important than those of Concord and Carlyle – the place he loved most and the greatest of his friends.

Rightly considered, these thirty-one years are a piece not only of Emerson’s life; they are a piece of American history. They exhibit the life in Boston of a boy and young man with a fine Puritan inheritance. Among all the traits which came down to him from the past, none were more dominant than his rectitude and his independence. Like the boys of earliest Pilgrim families, he was trained at home in “the uses of adversity,” given a careful schooling, and sent to college to be prepared for the ministry. His mind, like that of his ancestors, “derived a peculiar character from the daily contemplation of superior beings and eternal interests”; but like some of the strongest of these – like Roger Williams, for example (p. 11), he was bent on arriving at his own conclusions. Fortunately men were no longer persecuted for their religious beliefs in the old savage ways. Emerson’s withdrawal from the pulpit did not forfeit him the love of the people whom he had been serving. Though men could still feel bitterly on the subject of religious differences, the new century was more generous than the old had been. Travel along the Atlantic seaboard and in Europe enriched his knowledge of the world, but only deepened his love of the home region; and here as a full-grown man he settled down with his books and among an increasing circle of congenial friends to think about life and to record what he had thought.

It was therefore no accident that in three successive years – 1836, 1837, and 1838 – Emerson made three statements in summary of his chief ideas on men and things. In all of them there was a central thought – that life had become too much a matter of unconsidered routine and that people must stop long enough to make up their minds what it was all about. He offered no “system.” He pleaded only that people begin to think again, so that if they followed in the footsteps of their fathers they should do so with their eyes open, or if they decided to strike off into new paths they should not be blind men led by the blind.

The first of the trio¹³ was the essay on “Nature,” published as a slender little book in 1836. He opened with an appeal for his readers to look at the wonders around them. “If the stars should appear but one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown.” He went on to discuss nature as Commodity, or source of all the things man may use or own; as Beauty, or source of delight to body, spirit, and mind; as Language, or source of the images and comparisons by means of which man attempts to express abstract ideas; and as a Discipline, or source of training to the intellect in understanding nature’s laws and to the moral sense in obeying and interpreting them. In all these respects he contended that the man who will truly understand nature must combine the exactness of observation which belongs to science with the reverence of feeling which is the basis of religion.

No man ever prayed heartily without learning something. But when a faithful thinker, resolute to detach every object from personal relations, and see it in the light of thought, shall, at the same time, kindle science with the fire of the holiest affections, then will God go forth anew into the creation… So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes… The kingdom of man over nature, which cometh not with observation, – a dominion such as now is beyond his dream of God, – he shall enter into without more wonder than the blind man feels who is gradually restored to perfect sight.

Such was Emerson’s gospel of beauty. It did not attract any wide attention; but across the sea it was hailed with admiration by Carlyle, who showed it to his friends, and it attracted the attention of Harvard College, so that Emerson was invited to speak before the Phi Beta Kappa society in the following summer.

The result of this invitation was his famous address on “The American Scholar.” It was an appeal this time for independence in the realm of the intellect. It has frequently been described as the American Declaration of Intellectual Independence; and the comparison to Jefferson’s document stands in the fact that it did not contain a new idea in America, but that it stated memorably what had been uttered again and again by other Americans. “Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions that around us are rushing into life, cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests.” To make his point, Emerson held that the American scholar must not continue to be “a delegated intellect” but must become Man Thinking. Unlike most of the later essays the address is clear and orderly in structure. After a brief introduction the scholar is discussed in terms of the chief influences which surround him. The first is nature, and this section is brief because of its full treatment in the essay of the preceding year. The second is the spirit of the past as it is best recorded in books. Emerson accepted without qualification the books which contain the story of history and the explanation of exact science. Yet, as science is ever advancing and the interpretations of history are continually changing, he might have said of these what he said of books which attempt to explain life: “Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this.” The third great influence on the scholar is participation in life.

Only so much do I know as I have lived… If it were only for a vocabulary, the scholar would be covetous of action. Life is our dictionary. Years are well spent in country labors; in town; in the insight into trades and manufactures; in frank intercourse with many men and women; in science; in art; to the one end of mastering in all their facts a language by which to illustrate and embody our perceptions… Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of to-day.

With these influences affecting him the scholar must perform his duties without thought of reward in money or praise. He must feel all confidence in himself. “Let him not quit his belief that a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom.” Signs of the interest that the scholar is showing in life (as a combination of all sorts of people with common interests but diverse fortunes) comfort Emerson. These will redeem scholarship. And so he concludes to the young college men:

We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds. The study of letters shall be no longer a name for pity, for doubt, and for sensual indulgence. The dread of man and the love of man shall be a wall of defence and a wreath of joy around all. A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the divine soul which also inspires all men.

This address was inspiring to all who heard it. The young scholars went out with a new feeling for the dignity of learning as an equipment toward leadership, and the older Harvard professors felt in Emerson’s words some reward for a college that had helped to produce such a man as he. An immediate consequence of the address was a further invitation to speak the next year before the students of the Divinity School; and in 1838 he talked in a similar vein to the budding clergymen. This address in a way rounded out his “philosophy” by applying the rule of self-reliance to the third aspect of man’s life; after beauty in “Nature” and truth in “The American Scholar” came the moral sense in “The Divinity School Address.” He started, as in the former two, with a kind of prose poem on the wonder of life. He went on to speak of the need of religion that was fresh, vivid, and personal. Then he referred to the defects of “historical Christianity,” which was his name for the church embodiment of Christ’s teaching. These, in his opinion, were two: that modern Christianity was a system of belief very different from the simple teachings of Jesus and that this system was dangerous because it had become fixed. “Men have come to speak of the revelation as somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were dead.” The remedy for these defects was the same as for the deadened attitude toward Nature and Truth – that man should be self-reliant. To the young divinity student he declared, “Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost, cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity.” Christianity has given mankind two great gifts: the Sabbath and the institution of preaching.

What hinders that now, everywhere, in pulpits, in lecture-rooms, in houses, in fields, wherever the invitation of men or your own occasions lead you, you speak the very truth, as your life and conscience teach it, and cheer the waiting, fainting hearts of men with new hope and revelation?

Although the Harvard authorities might have foreseen that he would speak as frankly as this, they were shocked when he presumed to advocate independence in religion. Two hundred years earlier he would have been banished from Massachusetts for saying less. As it was, however, Harvard closed its lecture rooms to him for nearly thirty years, and the conservative clergy expressed their outraged feelings in speech and print. Emerson was undisturbed. To one of them, his friend the Reverend Henry Ware, he wrote a seldom-quoted letter that completely represents him. It deserves careful study.

Concord, October 8, 1838.

My dear Sir: —

I ought sooner to have acknowledged your kind letter of last week, and the Sermon it accompanied. The latter was right manly and noble. The Sermon, too, I have read with great attention. If it assails any doctrines of mine – perhaps I am not so quick to see it as writers generally – certainly I did not feel any disposition to depart from my habitual contentment, that you should say your thought, whilst I say mine.

I believe I must tell you what I think of my new position. It strikes me very oddly, that good and wise men at Cambridge and Boston should think of raising me into an object of criticism. I have always been – from my very incapacity of methodical writing – “a chartered libertine” free to worship and free to rail, – lucky when I could make myself understood, but never esteemed near enough to the institution and mind of society to deserve the notice of the masters of literature and religion. I have appreciated fully the advantages of my position; for I well know, that there is no scholar less willing or less able to be a polemic. I could not give account of myself, if challenged. I could not possibly give you one of the “arguments” you cruelly hint at, on which any doctrine of mine stands. For I do not know what arguments mean, in reference to any expression of thought. I delight in telling what I think; but if you ask me how I dare say so, or, why it is so, I am the most helpless of mortal men. I do not even see, that either of these questions admits of an answer. So that, in the present droll posture of my affairs, when I see myself suddenly raised into the importance of a heretic, I am very uneasy when I advert to the supposed duties of such a personage, who is to make good his thesis against all comers.

I certainly shall do no such thing. I shall read what you and other good men write, as I have always done, – glad when you speak my thoughts, and skipping the page that has nothing for me. I shall go on, just as before, seeing whatever I can, and telling what I see; and, I suppose, with the same fortune that has hitherto attended me; the joy of finding, that my abler and better brothers, who work with the sympathy of society, loving and beloved, do now and then unexpectedly confirm my perceptions, and find my nonsense is only their own thought in motley.

And so I am,

Your affectionate servant,

Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Thus far it is clear that Emerson’s message to the world was almost unqualifiedly personal: an attempt to shake men out of their lazy ways of drifting with the current into active swimming – with the current if they thought best, but usually against it. The whole problem was summarized in his single defiant essay on “Self-Reliance,”¹⁴– defiant because in this protest he was almost entirely concerned with telling men what they should not do. They should not pray, not be consistent, not travel, not imitate, not conform to society; but should be Godlike, independent, searching their own hearts, and behaving in accord with the truth they found there. It is an anarchy he was preaching, an elevated lawlessness. And the first reaction to such teaching is to ask with shocked disapproval, “What would happen to the world if all men followed his advice?” There are two very simple answers. The first is that if all men followed Emerson’s advice, completely as he gave it, the world would be peopled with saints, for what he asked was that men should disregard the laws of society only that they might better observe the laws of God. And the second answer is that such a query sets an impossible condition, for the pressure of custom is so strong and the human inclination to do as others do is so prevailing that counsel like Emerson’s will never be adopted, at the most, by more than a very small and courageous minority.

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.”