American literary masters

‘Hamatreya,’ the exquisite ‘Rhodora,’ and the musical allegory ‘Two Rivers’ are important as showing the part played by Nature in Emerson’s verse.

Certain poems repeat (or anticipate) the ideas of the essays. ‘Brahma,’ for example, is an incomparable setting of the doctrine of the universal soul or ground of all things:—

‘The Sphinx’ announces, in a sphinx-like manner it must be acknowledged, though with rare beauty in individual lines, the doctrine of man’s relation to all existences, comprehending one phase of which man has the key to the whole. ‘Uriel’ is a declaration of the poet’s faith in good out of evil. ‘The Problem’ teaches the imminence of the Infinite:—

Rich in thought and abounding in genuine poetic gold are ‘The World-Soul,’ ‘The Visit,’ ‘Destiny,’ ‘Days’ (Emerson’s perfect poem), ‘Forerunners,’ ‘Xenophanes,’ ‘The Day’s Ration,’ and the ‘Ode to Beauty.’

‘Merlin’ and ‘Saadi’ treat of the poet and his mission. The one is a protest against the tinkling rhyme, an art without substance; the other exalts the calling of the bard, but warns him that while he has need of men and they of him, the true poet dwells alone. Together with these suggestive verses should be read the posthumous fragment originally intended for a masque.23

Of his occasional and patriotic poems the ‘Concord Hymn,’ sung at the dedication of the battle monument in 1837, must be held an imperishable part of our young literature. The winged words of the first stanza are among the not-to-be-forgotten things, and there is rare beauty in the second stanza:—

For the Concord celebration of 1857 Emerson wrote the ‘Ode’ beginning

and for the ‘Jubilee Concert’ in Music Hall, on the day Emancipation went into effect, the ‘Boston Hymn,’ with the bold stanzas:—

The best of Emerson’s patriotic poems is the ‘Voluntaries,’ containing the often quoted and perfect lines:—

The personal poems are ‘Good-Bye,’ ‘Terminus,’ ‘In Memoriam,’ ‘Dirge,’ and ‘Threnody.’ The last of the group is the poet’s lament for his first-born, the ‘hyacinthine boy’ of five years, who died in 1842. It is hardly worth the while to compare these exquisite verses with some other poem born of intense sorrow with a view to determining whether they are greater, or less. Their wondrous beauty is as palpable as it is unresembling.

Comparisons little befit Emerson the poet. His muse was wayward. Extreme eulogists do him injury by applying to him standards that were none of his. They forget how he said of himself that he was ‘not a poet, but a lover of poetry and poets, and merely serving as a writer, etc., in this empty America before the arrival of poets.’ For the extravagancies of the extremists the tempered admirers find themselves regularly lectured, as if they were children who must have it explained to them that Emerson was not a Keats or a Shelley, or a Hugo.

Emerson as frequently gets less than he deserves as more. What niggardly praise is that from the pen of an eminent living English man of letters who can only suppose that Emerson ‘knew what he was about when he wandered into the fairyland of verse, and that in such moments he found nothing better to his hand!’ But the ‘Threnody,’ ‘Monadnock,’ ‘May-Day,’ ‘Voluntaries,’ and ‘The Problem,’ whatever else may be true of them, are not the work of a man who found nothing better to his hand.

VII
LATEST BOOKS

Five volumes remain to be commented on. The first, Society and Solitude (so called after the initial paper), is a group of twelve essays entitled ‘Civilization,’ ‘Art,’ ‘Eloquence,’ ‘Domestic Life,’ ‘Farming,’ ‘Works and Days,’ ‘Books,’ ‘Clubs,’ ‘Courage,’ ‘Success,’ and ‘Old Age.’ They have mostly a practical bent. That on ‘Books’ doubtless gives an account of Emerson’s own reading, adequate as far as it expresses his literary preferences, inadequate respecting completeness. For example, Emerson must have read George Borrow, of an acquaintance with whom he repeatedly gives proof, but these lists contain no mention of Lavengro or Romany Rye. Here too will be found his famous heresy about the value of translations, but not so radically stated by Emerson as it is sometimes stated by those who propose to attack Emerson’s position.

Letters and Social Aims (a volume forced from him by the rumor that an English house proposed to reprint his early papers from ‘The Dial’) covers topics as diverse as, on the one hand, ‘Social Aims,’ ‘Quotation and Originality,’ ‘The Comic,’ and on the other, ‘Poetry and Imagination,’ ‘Inspiration,’ ‘Greatness,’ ‘Immortality.’ There are also essays on ‘Eloquence,’ ‘Resources,’ ‘Progress of Culture,’ and ‘Persian Poetry.’

Lectures and Biographical Sketches consists of nineteen pieces, among which will be found ‘Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England,’ ‘The Superlative,’ and the brilliant sketches of Thoreau, of Ezra Ripley, and of Carlyle.

Miscellanies (not to be confounded with the volume of 1849 bearing the same title) contains a number of papers and addresses on political topics, and is indispensable to the student of Emerson’s life. Here will be found his speeches on John Brown, on the Fugitive Slave Law, on Emancipation in the West Indies, on American Civilization, on Lincoln, and that inspiring lecture, ‘The Fortune of the Republic.’

Natural History of Intellect and Other Papers is made up of lectures from the Harvard University course (1870–71) and earlier courses, and a sheaf of papers from ‘The Dial,’ mostly on ‘Modern Literature.’ He who deplores the curtness of the note on Tennyson in English Traits will be glad to seek comfort in this earlier tribute. Yet the comfort may prove to be less than he would like.

Emerson’s audience is large and varied. Let us consider a few among the varieties of those who are attracted by his genius and the charm of his personality.

To certain hardy investigators Emerson is not a mere man of letters whose thought, radiantly clothed, takes the philosophical form, he is a philosopher almost in the strict sense. They find a place for him in their classification. They know exactly what ideas, derived from what pundits, have come out with what new inflection in his writings. They have done for Emerson more than he could do, or perhaps cared to do, for himself; they have given him a system.

All this is important and valuable. No little praise is due to results worked out with so much courage and critical acumen. Whether the conclusions are quite true is another question.

Doubtless, too, there are readers who, taking their cue from the class just mentioned, find their self-love flattered as they turn the pages of the Essays and the Conduct of Life. Not only, in spite of dark sayings here and there, does ‘philosophy’ prove easier and more delightful than they were wont to think, but their estimate of their own mental powers is immensely enlarged.

There are the critics of letters whose function is interpretative, and whose influence is restraining. Solicitous to do their author justice, they are above all solicitous that injustice shall not be done him by overpraise. They bring proof that Emerson was not a precursor of Darwin, that he was inferior to Carlyle, that he was not a poet, that he was never a great and not always a good writer, that he was apt to impose on his reader as a new truth an old error in ‘a novel and fascinating dress,’ that he was even capable of writing words without ideas.

But the motives which draw and bind to him the great majority of Emerson’s readers are connected with literature rather than philosophy or criticism. A prerogative of the man of letters is to be read both for what he says and for the way he says it. In the case of Emerson his thought may not be divided from the verbal setting. ‘He can never get beyond the English language.’ ‘No merely French, or German, or Italian reader will have the least notion of the magic of his diction.’24

Perhaps in the long run they get the most out of Emerson who read him not for stimulus, for his militant optimism, for the shock his fine-phrased audacities give their humdrum opinions, for his uplifting idealism (all of which they are sure to get and profit by), but who read him for literary pleasure, for downright good-fellowship, and for the humor that is in him. That he attracts a large audience of this (seemingly) unimportant class is enough to show how little danger there is that Emerson will be handed over to the keeping of the merely erudite and bookish part of the public.

It is well to remember that he had no intention of being so disposed of. When he said, ‘My own habitual view is to the well being of students or scholars,’ he was careful immediately to explain that he used the word ‘student’ in no restricted sense. ‘The class of scholars or students ... is a class that comprises in some sort all mankind, comprises every man in the best hours of his life.’ He pictures the newsboy entering a train filled with men going to business. The morning papers are bought, and ‘instantly the entire rectangular assembly, fresh from their breakfast, are bending as one man to their second breakfast.’ This was Emerson’s student body, this was the audience he aimed to reach.

Did he reach this body? It is believed that he did, if not always directly, then vicariously. He was compelled as a matter of course to speak in his own way—the impossible thing for him was to do violence to his genius. Emerson invented the phrase, ‘the man in the street.’ Now it is notorious that the man in the street cares little about the ‘over-soul.’ The mere juxtaposition of the two expressions is comic. But Emerson did not talk of the over-soul all the time. He had a Franklin-like common-sense and a pithiness of speech which are captivating. Perhaps in magnifying his idealism we have neglected to do justice to his mundane philosophy.