The Last Harvest Part 4

There is certainly no over-valuation in this sentence, made when he was sixty-two: "In the acceptance that my papers find among my thoughtful countrymen, in these days, I cannot help seeing how limited is their reading. If they read only the books that I do, they would not exaggerate so wildly." Two years before that he had said, "I often think I could write a criticism of Emerson that would hit the white."

Emerson was a narrow-chested, steeple-shouldered man with a tendency to pulmonary disease, against which he made a vigorous fight all his days. He laments his feeble physical equipment in his poem, "Terminus":

"Curse, if thou wilt, thy sires, Bad husbands of their fires, Who, when they gave thee breath, Failed to bequeath The needful sinew stark as once, The Baresark marrow to thy bones, But left a legacy of ebbing veins, Inconstant heat and nerveless reins,-- Amid the Muses, left thee deaf and dumb, Amid the gladiators, halt and numb."

And yet, looking back near the end of his life, he says that considering all facts and conditions he thinks he has had triumphant health.

XIII

Emerson's wisdom and catholicity of spirit always show in his treatment of the larger concerns of life and conduct. How remarkable is this pa.s.sage written in Puritanic New England in 1842:

I hear with pleasure that a young girl in the midst of rich, decorous Unitarian friends in Boston is well-nigh persuaded to join the Roman Catholic Church. Her friends, who are also my friends, lamented to me the growth of this inclination.

But I told them that I think she is to be greatly congratulated on the event. She has lived in great poverty of events. In form and years a woman, she is still a child, having had no experiences, and although of a fine, liberal, susceptible, expanding nature, has never yet found any worthy object of attention; has not been in love, nor been called out by any taste, except lately by music, and sadly wants adequate objects. In this church, perhaps, she shall find what she needs, in a power to call out the slumbering religious sentiment. It is unfortunate that the guide who has led her into this path is a young girl of a lively, forcible, but quite external character, who teaches her the historical argument for the Catholic faith. I told A. that I hoped she would not be misled by attaching any importance to that. If the offices of the church attracted her, if its beautiful forms and humane spirit draw her, if St. Augustine and St. Bernard, Jesus and Madonna, cathedral music and ma.s.ses, then go, for thy dear heart's sake, but do not go out of this icehouse of Unitarianism, all external, into an icehouse again of external. At all events, I charged her to pay no regard to dissenters, but to suck that orange thoroughly.

And this on the Church and the common people written the year before:

The Church aerates my good neighbors and serves them as a somewhat stricter and finer ablution than a clean s.h.i.+rt or a bath or a shampooing. The minister is a functionary and the meeting-house a functionary; they are one and, when they have spent all their week in private and selfish action, the Sunday reminds them of a need they have to stand again in social and public and ideal relations beyond neighborhood,--higher than the town-meeting--to their fellow men. They marry, and the minister who represents this high public, celebrates the fact; their child is baptized, and again they are published by his intervention. One of their family dies, he comes again, and the family go up publicly to the church to be publicised or churched in this official sympathy of mankind. It is all good as far as it goes. It is homage to the Ideal Church, which they have not: which the actual Church so foully misrepresents. But it is better so than nohow. These people have no fine arts, no literature, no great men to boswellize, no fine speculation to entertain their family board or their solitary toil with. Their talk is of oxen and pigs and hay and corn and apples. Whatsoever liberal aspirations they at any time have, whatsoever spiritual experiences, have looked this way, and the Church is their fact for such things. It has not been discredited in their eyes as books, lectures, or living men of genius have been. It is still to them the accredited symbol of the religious Idea. The Church is not to be defended against any spiritualist clamoring for its reform, but against such as say it is expedient to shut it up and have none, this much may be said. It stands in the history of the present time as a high school for the civility and mansuetude of the people.

(I might prefer the Church of England or of Rome as the medium of those superior ablutions described above, only that I think the Unitarian Church, like the Lyceum, as yet an open and uncommitted organ, free to admit the ministrations of any inspired man that shall pa.s.s by: whilst the other churches are committed and will exclude him.)

I should add that, although this is the real account to be given of the church-going of the farmers and villagers, yet it is not known to them, only felt. Do you not suppose that it is some benefit to a young villager who comes out of the woods of New Hamps.h.i.+re to Boston and serves his apprentices.h.i.+p in a shop, and now opens his own store, to hang up his name in bright gold letters a foot long? His father could not write his name: it is only lately that he could: the name is mean and unknown: now the sun s.h.i.+nes on it: all men, all women, fairest eyes read it. It is a fact in the great city. Perhaps he shall be successful and make it wider known: shall leave it greatly brightened to his son. His son may be head of a party: governor of the state: a poet: a powerful thinker: and send the knowledge of this name over the habitable earth. By all these suggestions, he is at least made responsible and thoughtful by his public relation of a seen and aerated name.

Let him modestly accept those hints of a more beautiful life which he meets with; how to do with few and easily gotten things: but let him seize with enthusiasm the opportunity of doing what he can, for the virtues are natural to each man and the talents are little perfections.

Let him hope infinitely with a patience as large as the sky.

Nothing is so young and untaught as time.

How wise is his saying that we do not turn to the books of the Bible--St. Paul and St. John--to start us on our task, as we do to Marcus Aurelius, or the Lives of the philosophers, or to Plato, or Plutarch, "because the Bible wears black clothes"! "It comes with a certain official claim against which the mind revolts. The Bible has its own n.o.bilities--might well be charming if left simply on its merits, as other books are, but this, 'You must,' 'It is your duty,'

in connection with it, repels. 'T is like the introduction of martial law into Concord. If you should dot our farms with picket lines, and I could not go or come across lots without a pa.s.s, I should resist, or else emigrate. If Concord were as beautiful as Paradise, it would be as detestable to me."

In his essays and letters Emerson gives one the impression of never using the first words that come to mind, nor the second, but the third or fourth; always a sense of selection, of deliberate choice. To use words in a novel way, and impart a little thrill of surprise, seemed to be his aim. This effort of selection often mars his page. He is rarely carried away by his thought, but he snares or captures it with a word. He does not feel first and think second; he thinks first, and the feeling does not always follow. He dearly loved writing; it was the joy of his life, but it was a conscious intellectual effort. It was often a kind of walking on stilts; his feet are not on the common ground. And yet--and yet--what a power he was, and how precious his contributions!

He says in his Journal, "I have observed long since that to give the thought a full and just expression I must not prematurely utter it."

This hesitation, this studied selection robs him of the grace of felicity and spontaneity. The compensation is often a sense of novelty and a thrill of surprise. Moreover, he avoids the commonplace and the cheap and tedious. His product is always a choice one, and is seen to have a quality of its own. No page has more individuality than his, and none is so little like the page of the ordinary professional writer.

'Tis a false note to speak of Emerson's doctrines, as Henry James did.

He had no doctrines. He had leading ideas, but he had no system, no argument. It was his att.i.tude of mind and spirit that was significant and original. He would have nothing to do with stereotyped opinions.

What he said to-day might contradict what he said yesterday, or what he might say to-morrow. No matter, the spirit was the same. Truth is a sphere that has opposite poles. Emerson more than any other writer stood for the contradictory character of spiritual truth. Truth is what we make it--what takes the imprint of one's mind; it is not a definite something like gold or silver, it is any statement that fits our mental make-up, that comes home to us. What comes home in one mood may not come home in another.

Emerson had no creed, he had no definite ideas about G.o.d. Personality and impersonality might both be affirmed of Absolute Being, and what may not be affirmed of it in our own minds?

The good of such a man as Emerson is not in his doctrines, but in his spirit, his heroic att.i.tude, his consonance with the universal mind.

His thought is a tremendous solvent; it digests and renders fluid the hard facts of life and experience.

XIV

Emerson records in his Journal: "I have been writing and speaking what were once called novelties, for twenty-five or thirty years, and have not now one disciple. Why? Not that what I said was not true; not that it has not found intelligent receivers; but because it did not go from any wish in me to bring men to me, but to themselves. I delight in driving them from me. What could I do, if they came to me?--they would interrupt and enc.u.mber me. This is my boast that I have no school follower. I should account it a measure of the impurity of insight, if it did not create independence."

It is never easy to stray far from the master in high moral, aesthetic, and literary matters and be on the safe side; we are only to try to escape his individual bias, to break over his limitations and "brave the landscape's look" with our own eyes. We are to be more on guard against his affinities, his unconscious attractions and repulsions, than against his ethical and intellectual conclusions, if one may make that distinction, which I know is hazardous business. We readily impose our own limitations upon others and see the world as old when we are old.

Emerson criticized Carlyle because Carlyle was not Emerson, just as Carlyle criticized Emerson because he was not Carlyle. We are all poor beggars in this respect; each of us is the victim of his own demon.

Beware of the predilection of the master! When his temperament impels him he is no longer a free man.

We touch Emerson's limitations in his failure to see anything in Hawthorne's work; they had "no inside to them"; "it would take him and Alcott together to make a man"; and, again, in his rather contemptuous disposal of Poe as "the jingle man" and his verdict upon Sh.e.l.ley as "never a poet"! The intellectual content of Sh.e.l.ley's work is not great; but that he was not a poet, in fact that he was anything else but a poet, though not of the highest order, is contrary to the truth, I think. Limitations like this are not infrequent in Emerson.

Yet Emerson was a great critic of men and of books. A highly interesting volume showing him in this character could be compiled from the Journals.

Emerson and Hawthorne were near neighbors for several years. Emerson liked the man better than his books. They once had a good long walk together; they walked to Harvard village and back, occupying a couple of days and walking about twenty miles a day. They had much conversation--talked of Scott and Landor and others. They found the bar-rooms at the inns cold and dull places. The Temperance Society had emptied them. Hawthorne tried to smoke a cigar in one of them, but "was soon out on the piazza." Hawthorne, Emerson said, was more inclined to play Jove than Mercury. It is a pleasing picture--these two men, so unlike, but both typical of New England and both men of a high order of genius, walking in friendly converse along the country roads in the golden September days over seventy years ago. Emerson always regretted that he never succeeded in "conquering a friends.h.i.+p"

with Hawthorne, mainly because they had so few traits in common. To the satisfaction of silent intercourse with men Emerson was clearly a stranger. There must be an interchange of ideas; the feeling of comrades.h.i.+p, the communion of congenial souls was not enough.

Hawthorne, shy, silent, rather gloomy, yet there must have been a charm about his mere presence that more than made up for his want of conversation. His silence was golden. Emerson was a transcendental Yankee and was always bent on driving sharp bargains in the interchange of ideas with the persons he met. He did not propose to swap horses or watches or jack-knives, but he would swap ideas with you day in and day out. If you had no ideas to swap, he lost interest in you.

The wisdom of a great creative artist like Hawthorne does not necessarily harden into bright epigrammatic sayings or rules for the conduct of life, and the available intellectual content of his works to the Emersonian type of mind may be small; but his interior, his emotional and imaginative richness may much more than make it up. The scholar, the sayer of things, must always rank below the creator, or the maker of things.

Philosophers contradict themselves like other mortals. Here and there in his Journals Emerson rails against good nature, and says "tomahawks are better." "Why should they call me good-natured? I, too, like puss, have a tractile claw." And he declares that he likes the sayers of No better than the sayers of Yes, and that he preferred hard clouds, hard expressions, and hard manners. In another mood, or from another point of view, he says of a man, "Let him go into his closet and pray the Divinity to make him so great as to be good-natured." And again, "How great it is to do a little, as, for instance, to deserve the praise of good nature, or of humility, or of punctuality."

Emerson's characterization of himself as always a painter is interesting. People, he said, came to his lectures with expectation that he was to realize the Republic he described, and they ceased to come when they found this reality no nearer: "They mistook me. I am and always was a painter. I paint still with might and main and choose the best subject I can. Many have I seen come and go with false hopes and fears, and dubiously affected by my pictures. But I paint on." "I portray the ideal, not the real," he might have added. He was a poet-seer and not a historian. He was a painter of ideas, as Carlyle was a painter of men and events. Always is there an effort at vivid and artistic expression. If his statement does not kindle the imagination, it falls short of his aim. He visualizes his most subtle and abstract conceptions--sees the idea wedded to its correlative in the actual world. A new figure, a fresh simile gave him a thrill of pleasure. He went hawking up and down the fields of science, of trade, of agriculture, of nature, seeking them. He thinks in symbols, he paints his visions of the ideal with pigments drawn from the world all about him. To call such men as Emerson and Carlyle painters is only to emphasize their artistic temperaments. Their seriousness, their devotion to high moral and intellectual standards, only lift them, as they do Whitman, out of the world of mere decorative art up to the world of heroic and creative art where art as such does not obtrude itself.

XV

Emerson wonders why it is that man eating does not attract the imagination or attract the artist: "Why is our diet and table not agreeable to the imagination, whilst all other creatures eat without shame? We paint the bird pecking at fruit, the browsing ox, the lion leaping on his prey, but no painter ever ventured to draw a man eating. The difference seems to consist in the presence or absence of the world at the feast. The diet is base, be it what it may, that is hidden in caves or cellars or houses.... Did you ever eat your bread on the top of a mountain, or drink water there? Did you ever camp out with lumbermen or travellers in the prairie? Did you ever eat the poorest rye or oatcake with a beautiful maiden in the wilderness? and did you not find that the mixture of sun and sky with your bread gave it a certain mundane savour and comeliness?"

I do not think Emerson hits on the true explanation of why man feeding is not an attractive subject for the painter. It is not that the diet is base and is hidden in caves and cellars, or that the world is not present at the feast. It is because eating is a purely selfish animal occupation; there is no touch of the n.o.ble or the idyllic or the heroic in it. In the act man confesses his animal nature; he is no longer an Emerson, a Dante, a Plato--he is simply a physiological contrivance taking in nutriment. The highest and the lowest are for the moment on the same level. The lady and her maid, the lord and his lackey are all one. Eating your bread on a mountain-top or in the camp of lumbermen or with a beautiful maiden in the wilderness adds a new element. Here the picture has all nature for a background and the imagination is moved. The rye and the oatcake now become a kind of heavenly manna, or, as Fitzgerald has it, under such conditions the wilderness is Paradise enow. The simple act of feeding does not now engross the attention. a.s.sociate with the act of eating any worthy or n.o.ble idea, and it is at once lifted to a higher level. A mother feeding her child, a cook pa.s.sing food to the tramp at the door or to other hungry and forlorn wayfarers, or soldiers pausing to eat their rations in the field, or fishermen beside the stream, or the haymakers with their lunch under a tree--in all such incidents there are pictorial elements because the least part of it all to the looker-on is the act of eating.

In Da Vinci's "Last Supper" the mere animal act of taking food plays no part; the mind is occupied with higher and more significant things.

A suggestion of wine or of fruit in a painting may be agreeable, but from a suggestion of the kitchen and the cook we turn away. The incident of some of Was.h.i.+ngton's officers during the Revolution entertaining some British officers (an historical fact) on baked potatoes and salt would appeal to the artistic imagination. All the planting and reaping of the farmers is suggestive of our animal wants, as is so much of our whole industrial activity; but art looks kindly upon much of it, shows us more or less in partners.h.i.+p with primal energies. People surrounding a table after all signs of the dinner have been removed hold the elements of an agreeable picture, because that suggests conversation and social intercourse--a feast of reason and a flow of soul. We are no longer animals; we have moved up many degrees higher in the scale of human values.

Emerson's deep love and admiration for Carlyle come out many times in the Journals. No other literary man of his times moved and impressed him so profoundly. Their correspondence, which lasted upwards of forty years, is the most valuable correspondence known to me in English literature. It is a history of the growth and development of these two remarkable minds.

I lately reread the Correspondence, mainly to bring my mind again in contact with these n.o.ble spirits, so much more exalted than any in our own time, but partly to see what new light the letters threw upon the lives of these two men.

There is little of the character of intimate and friendly letters in these remarkable doc.u.ments. It is not Dear Tom or Dear Waldo. It is Dear Emerson or Dear Carlyle. They are not letters, they are epistles, like Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians, or to the Thessalonians, or to the Romans. Each of them contains the fragments of a gospel that both were preaching, each in his own way, but at bottom the same--the beauty and majesty of the moral law. Let the heavens fall, the moral law and our duty to G.o.d and man will stand. These two men, so different in character and temperament, were instantly drawn together by that magnet--the moral sentiment. Carlyle's works were occupied almost entirely with men--with history, biography, political events, and government; Emerson's with ideas, nature, and poetry; yet the bed rock in each was the same. Both preached an evangel, but how different!

Emerson makes a note of the days on which he received a letter from, or wrote one to, his great Scottish friend. Both were important events with him. It is evident that Emerson makes more of an effort to write his best in these letters than does Carlyle. Carlyle tosses his off with more ease and unconscious mastery. The exchange is always in favor of the Scot. Carlyle was, of course, the more prodigious personality, and had the advantage in the richness and venerableness of the Old World setting. But Emerson did not hesitate to discount him in his letters and in his Journals, very wisely sometimes, not so wisely at others.

"O Carlyle, the merit of gla.s.s is not to be seen, but to be seen through; but every crystal and lamina of the Carlyle gla.s.s is visible." Of course Carlyle might reply that stained gla.s.s has other merits than transparency, or he might ask: Why should an author's style be compared to gla.s.s anyhow, since it is impossible to dissociate it from the matter of his discourse? It is not merely to reveal truth; it is also to enhance its beauty. There is the charm and witchery of style, as in Emerson's own best pages, as well as the worth of the subject-matter. Is it not true that in the description of any natural object or scene or event we want something more than to see it through a perfectly transparent medium? We want the added charm or illusion of the writer's own way of seeing it, the hue of his own spirit.

I think we may admit all this--doubtless Emerson would admit it--and yet urge that Carlyle's style had many faults of the kind Emerson indicated. It thrusts itself too much upon the reader's attention. His prose is at the best, as in the "Life of Stirling," when it is most transparent and freest from mannerisms. Carlyle's manner at its best is very pleasing; at its worst it becomes a wearisome mannerism. When a writer's style gets into a rut his reader is not happy. Ease, flexibility, transparency, though it be colored transparency, are among the merits we want.

The most just and penetrating thing Emerson ever said about Carlyle is recorded in his Journal in 1847: "In Carlyle, as in Byron, one is much more struck with the rhetoric than with the matter. He has manly superiority rather than intellectuality, and so makes good hard hits all the time. There is more character than intellect in every sentence, herein strongly resembling Samuel Johnson." Criticism like this carries the force and conviction of a scientific a.n.a.lysis.

The Journals abound in similar illuminating bits of criticism directed to nearly all the more noted authors of English literature, past and present. In science we do want an absolutely colorless, transparent medium, but in literature the personality of the writer is everything.

The born writer gives us facts and ideas steeped in his own quality as a man. Take out of Carlyle's works, or out of Emerson's, or out of Arnold's, the savor of the man's inborn quality--the savor of that which acts over and above his will--and we have robbed them of their distinctive quality. Literature is always truth of some sort, plus a man. No one knew this better than Emerson himself. Another remark of Emerson's, made when he was twenty-seven years old, has high literary value:

"There is no beauty in words except in their collocation."

It is not beautiful words that make beautiful poetry, or beautiful prose, but ordinary words beautifully arranged. The writer who hopes by fine language to invoke fine ideas is asking the tailor to turn him out a fine man. First get your great idea, and you will find it is already fitly clothed. The image of the clothes in this connection is, of course, a very inadequate and misleading one, since language is the thought or its vital integument, and not merely its garment. We often praise a writer for his choice of words, and Emerson himself says in the same paragraph from which I quote the above: "No man can write well who thinks there is no choice of words for him." There is always a right word and every other than that is wrong. There is always the best word, or the best succession of words to give force and vividness to the idea. All painters use the same colors, all musicians use the same notes, all sculptors use the same marble, all architects use the same materials and all writers use essentially the same words, their arrangement and combination alone making the difference in the various products. Nature uses the same elements in her endless variety of living things; their different arrangement and combinations, and some interior necessity which we have to call the animating principle, is the secret of the individuality of each.

Of course we think in words or images, and no man can tell which is first, or if there is any first in such matters--the thought or the word--any more than the biochemist can tell us which is first in the living body, the carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and so on, or the living force that weaves itself a corporeal garment out of these elements.