History of American Literature Part 19

Emerson died in 1882 and was buried near Hawthorne, in Sleepy Hollow cemetery at Concord, on the "hilltop hea.r.s.ed with pines." Years before he had said, "I have scarce a daydream on which the breath of the pines has not blown and their shadow waved." The pines divide with an unhewn granite boulder the honor of being his monument.

EARLY PROSE.--Before he was thirty-five, Emerson had produced some prose which, so far as America is concerned, might be considered epoch-making in two respects: (1) in a new philosophy of nature, not new to the world, but new in the works of our authors and fraught with new inspiration to Americans; and (2) in a new doctrine of self-reliance and intellectual independence for the New World.

[Ill.u.s.tration: EMERSON'S GRAVE, CONCORD]

In 1836 he published a small volume ent.i.tled _Nature_, containing fewer than a hundred printed pages, but giving in embryo almost all the peculiar, idealistic philosophy that he afterwards elaborated. By "Nature" he sometimes means everything that is not his own soul, but he also uses the word in its common significance, and talks of the beauty in cloud, river, forest, and flower. Although _Nature_ is written in prose, it is evident that the author is a poet. He says:--

"How does Nature deify us with a few and cheap elements! Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.

The dawn is my a.s.syria; the sunset and moonrise my Paphos, and unimaginable realms of faerie; broad noon shall be my England of the senses and the understanding; the night shall be my Germany of mystic philosophy and dreams."

Emerson tried to make men feel that the beauty of the universe is the property of every individual, but that the many divest themselves of their heritage. When he undertook to tell Americans how to secure a warranty deed to the beauties of nature, he specially emphasized the moral element in the process. The student who fails to perceive that Emerson is one of the great moral teachers has studied him to little purpose. To him all the processes of nature "hint or thunder to man the laws of right and wrong, and echo the Ten Commandments." In _Nature_, he says:--

"All things with which we deal, preach to us. What is a farm but a mute gospel? The chaff and the wheat, weeds and plants, blight, rain, insects, sun,--it is a sacred emblem from the first furrow of spring to the last stack which the snow of winter overtakes in the fields."

In _Nature_, Emerson sets forth his idealistic philosophy. "Idealism sees the world in G.o.d" is with him an axiom. This philosophy seems to him to free human beings from the tyranny of materialism, to enable them to use matter as a mere symbol in the solution of the soul's problems, and to make the world conformable to thought. His famous sentence in this connection is, "The sensual man conforms thoughts to things; the poet conforms things to his thoughts."

In _The American Scholar_, an address delivered at Cambridge in 1837, Emerson announced what Oliver Wendell Holmes calls "our intellectual Declaration of Independence." Tocqueville, a gifted Frenchman who visited America in 1831, wrote: "I know no country in which there is so little independence of opinion and freedom of discussion as in America.... If great writers have not existed in America, the reason is very simply given in the fact that there can be no literary genius without freedom of opinion, and freedom of opinion does not exist in America." Harriet Martineau, an English woman, who came to America in 1830, thought that the subservience to opinion in and around Boston amounted to a sort of mania.

We have already seen how Cooper in his early days deferred to English taste (p. 127), and how Andrew Jackson in his rough way proved something of a corrective (p. 148).

Emerson proceeded to deal such subserviency a staggering blow. He denounced this "timid, imitative, tame spirit," emphasized the new importance given to the single person, and asked, "Is it not the chief disgrace in the world not to be a unit;--not to be reckoned one character;--not to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear; but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand, of the party, the section, to which we belong, and our opinion predicted geographically, as the North, or the South?" Then followed his famous declaration to Americans, "We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds."

No American author has done more to exalt the individual, to inspire him to act according to his own intuitions and to mold the world by his own will.

Young Americans especially listened to his call, "O friend, never strike sail to a fear! Come into port greatly, or sail with G.o.d the seas."

ESSAYS.--The bulk of Emerson's work consists of essays, made up in large part from lectures. In 1841 he published a volume, known as _Essays, First Series_, and in 1844, another volume, called _Essays, Second Series_. Other volumes followed from time to time, such as _Miscellanies_ (1849), _Representative Men_ (1850), _English Traits_ (1856), _The Conduct of Life_ (1860), _Society and Solitude_ (1870). While the _First Series_ of these _Essays_ is the most popular, one may find profitable reading and even inspiring pa.s.sages scattered through almost all of his works, which continued to appear for more than forty years.

When we examine his _Essays, First Series_, we find that the volume is composed of short essays on such subjects as _History_, _Self-Reliance_, _Friends.h.i.+p_, _Heroism_, and the _Over-Soul_. If we choose to read _Self-Reliance_, one of his most typical essays, we shall find that the sentences, or the clauses which take the place of sentences, are short, vigorous, and intended to reach the attention through the ear. For instance, he says in this essay:--

"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion."

Before we have finished _Self-Reliance_, he has made us feel that, with the exercise of self-trust, new powers will appear; that a man should not postpone his life, but live now; that a man is weak if he expects aid from others; that discontent is want of self-reliance.

We pick up another volume of essays, _Society and Solitude_, and wonder whether we shall read _Success_, or _Books_, or _Civilization_, or any one of nine others. While we are turning the pages, we see this sentence:--

"Hitch your wagon to a star,"

and we decide to read _Civilization_.

"Now that is the wisdom of a man, in every instance of his labor, to hitch his wagon to a star, and see his ch.o.r.e done by the G.o.ds themselves. ... We cannot bring the heavenly powers to us, but, if we will only choose our jobs in directions in which they travel, they will undertake them with the greatest pleasure.... Let us not lie and steal. No G.o.d will help. We shall find all their teams going the other way."

The youth is to be pitied if this does not quicken his determination to choose his work in the direction in which the aiding forces of the universe are traveling.

Some of Emerson's best social philosophy may be found in the essay, _Considerations by the Way_, published in the volume called _The Conduct of Life_. His _English Traits_ records in a vigorous, interesting, common-sense way his impressions from his travels in the mother country.

The English find in this volume some famous sentences, which they love to quote, such as,--

"That which lures a solitary American in the woods with the wish to see England, is the moral peculiarity of the Saxon race,--its commanding sense of right and wrong,--the love and devotion to that,--this is the imperial trait which arms them with the sceptre of the globe."

POETRY.--Emerson's verse is noteworthy for its exposition (1) of nature and (2) of his transcendental philosophy. He produced a comparatively small amount of poetry, but much more than he is popularly supposed to have written. Some of his verse is of a high degree of excellence; in fact, his nature poetry deserves to be ranked with the best that America has produced. Like Bryant, Emerson loves the forest. He says:--

"I go to the G.o.d of the wood To fetch his word to men."

In _The Poet_, we see how great he thought the poet's debt to communion with nature:--

"The G.o.ds talk in the breath of the woods, They talk in the shaken pine, And fill the long reach of the old seash.o.r.e With dialogue divine; And the poet who overhears Some random word they say Is the fated man of men Whom the ages must obey."

Hawthorne saw Emerson one August day, wandering in Sleepy Hollow near Concord, and wrote, "He appeared to have had a pleasant time; for he said there were Muses in the woods to-day and whispers to be heard in the breezes." When Emerson was twenty-four years old, he wrote the following lines, which show the new feeling of mystic companions.h.i.+p with nature:--

"These trees and stones are audible to me, These idle flowers, that tremble in the wind, I understand their faery syllables."

His verses make us feel how nature enriches human life, increases its joys, and lessens its sorrows. What modern lover of nature has voiced a more heartfelt, unaffected appreciation of her ministrations than may be found in these lines from Emerson's _Musketaquid_?--

"All my hurts My garden spade can heal. A woodland walk, A quest of river grapes, a mocking thrush, A wild rose or rock-loving columbine, Salve my worst wounds."

From reading his best nature poem, _Woodnotes_, first published in The Dial, an appreciative person may find it easy to become

"Lover of all things alive, Wonderer at all he meets,"

to feel that in the presence of nature, every day is the best day of the year, and possibly even to sing with Emerson of any spring or summer day:--

"'Twas one of the charmed days When the genius of G.o.d doth flow; The wind may alter twenty ways, A tempest cannot blow; It may blow north, it still is warm; Or south, it still is clear; Or east, it smells like a clover farm; Or west, no thunder fear."

All who love nature or who wish to become interested in her should read at least his _Woodnotes_, _The Humble Bee_, _The Rhodora_, _Each and All_, _The Snow Storm,_ and _To Ellen at the South_.

Some of his philosophy may be found in poems like _The Problem_ (1839), _The Sphinx_ (1841), and _Brahma_ (1857). The immanence of G.o.d in everything, in the sculptor's hand, for instance, is well expressed in _The Problem_:--

"The hand that rounded Peter's dome And groined the aisles of Christian Rome Wrought in a sad sincerity; Himself from G.o.d he could not free; He builded better than he knew;-- The conscious stone to beauty grew."

_The Sphinx_ thus expresses one of Emerson's favorite thoughts:--

"To vision profounder, Man's spirit must dive,"

and concludes with the Sphinx's thought-provoking statement:-

"Who telleth one of my meanings, Is master of all I am."

This line in _Brahma_:--

"I am the doubter and the doubt,"

shows his belief in the unity of all things, his conviction that all existence and action result from one underlying force. His own personal philosophy, that which actuated him in dealing with his fellow-men, is expressed in the following lines, which are worthy a place in the active memory of every American:--

"Life is too short to waste In critic peep or cynic bark, Quarrel or reprimand: 'Twill soon be dark."

While we are enjoying his poetry, we feel its limitations. Having slight ear for music, he often wrote halting lines. Sometimes his poetic flight is marked by too sudden a descent, but we shall often find in his verse rare jewels, such as:--

"When Duty whispers low, '_Thou must_,'

The youth replies, '_I can._'"

These lines seemed to Oliver Wendell Holmes, the moment he saw them, as if they had been "carved on marble for a thousand years." Emerson's poetry does not pulsate with warm human feeling, but it "follows the s.h.i.+ning trail of the ethereal," the ideal, and the eternal. His prose overshadows his poetry, but no one without natural poetical ability of a high order could have written the lines:--