Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography/Emerson, Ralph Waldo
|
EMERSON, Ralph Waldo, author, b. in Boston, Mass., 25 May, 1803; d. in Concord, Mass., 27 April, 1882. He was the second of five sons of the Rev. William Emerson, minister of the 1st church, Boston. His grandfather at the sixth remove, Rev. Joseph Emerson, of Mendon, Mass., married the granddaughter of Rev. Peter Bulkeley, who was one of the founders of Concord, Mass., and minister of the first church there. Joseph's grandson, of the same name, was pastor at Malden, and married a daughter of the Rev. Samuel Moody, of York, Me., and three of the sons of this union were clergymen; among them William, Ralph Waldo's grandfather, who presided over the church in Concord at the time of the first battle of the Revolutionary war, which took place close by the minister's manse. This grandfather also had married the daughter of a minister, the Rev. Daniel Bliss, his predecessor in the pulpit at Concord. Thus the tendency and traditions of Ralph Waldo Emerson's ancestry were strong in the direction of scholarly pursuits and religious thought. His family was one of those that constitute, as Dr. Holmes says, the “academic races” of New England. His father (see Emerson, William) was a successful but not popular preacher, whose sympathies were far removed from Calvinism. He published several sermons, and was editor of the “Monthly Anthology” from 1805 till 1811, a periodical that had for contributors John Thornton Kirkland, Joseph S. Buckminster, John S. J. Gardiner, William Tudor, and Samuel C. Thacher. It was largely instrumental in developing a taste for literature in New England, and led to the establishment of the “North American Review.” The mother of Waldo was a woman “of great patience and fortitude, of the serenest trust in God, of a discerning spirit, and the most courteous bearing.” He strongly resembled his father. His aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, a woman of high intellectual attainments, was one of his early companions; and in some printed extracts from her journals a mode of thought and expression remarkably similar to that of the now celebrated essayist is traceable. His youngest brother, Charles Chauncey, who died young, in 1834, was distinguished by a singularly pure and sweet character, and contributed to the “Harvard Register” three articles in which there are passages strikingly like portions of the essays afterward produced by Ralph Waldo. The latter concentrated in himself the spiritual and intellectual tendencies of several generations. He entered the grammar-school at the age of eight, and the Latin-school, under Master Gould, in 1815; but neither here nor at Harvard did he show unusual ability. After leaving college he engaged in teaching, and began the study of theology under the direction of Dr. Channing, although not regularly enrolled at the Cambridge divinity-school. He read Plato, Augustine, Tillotson, Jeremy Taylor, and had from boyhood been an enthusiast regarding Montaigne's essays, of which he said: “It seems to me as if I had myself written the book in some former life.” In 1826 he was “approbated to preach” by the Middlesex association of ministers; but his health forced him to pass the winter in South Carolina and Florida. He was ordained in March, 1829, as colleague of Rev. Henry Ware. Jr., in the pastorate of the 2d church, Boston, and succeeded to Ware's place within eighteen months. His preaching was eloquent, simple, and effective. He took part actively in the city's public affairs, and showed a deep interest in philanthropic movements, opening his church, also, to the anti-slavery agitators. In 1832, however, he resigned his pastorate, and did not thereafter regularly resume ministerial labors. Having decided that the use of the elements in the communion was a mistaken formality — the true communion, as he thought, being purely spiritual — he refused to make the compromise proposed, that he should put his own construction on the Lord's supper, leaving his congregation to retain their view. The parting with his flock was friendly, and, although long misunderstood in certain quarters, he always maintained a strong sympathy with Christianity. For several years he had been writing poetry, but he published no literary work during the term of his pastorate. The poem “Good-bye, Proud World,” incorrectly attributed to the date of his resignation, was written before he entered the ministry. Excepting this piece, little poetry of his early period has been given to the world. He had married, in 1829, Miss Ellen Louisa Tucker, who died in February, 1832. In 1833 he went to Europe for his health, visiting Sicily, Italy, and France, and preaching in London and Edinburgh. At this time he met Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Thomas Carlyle, forming with the last-named writer an enduring friendship, which is one of the most interesting in literary annals. It resulted in a correspondence, which was continued for thirty-six years, and has been published under the editorship of Charles Eliot Norton (Boston, 1883). Returning to the United States in 1834, Mr. Emerson preached in New Bedford, declined a call to settle there, and went to Concord, where he remained. In the next winter he began lecturing, the subjects of his choice being, curiously enough, “Water” and “The Relation of Man to the Globe.” But he soon found themes better suited to his genius, in a course of biographical lectures given in Boston, discussing Luther, Milton, Burke, Michael Angelo, and George Fox. Two of these were published in the “North American Review.” This course was followed by ten lectures on English literature in 1835, twelve on the philosophy of history in 1836, and in 1837 ten on human culture. Much of the matter embraced in them was afterward remoulded and brought out in his later volumes of essays, or condensed into the rhythmic form of poems. Mr. Emerson married, in September, 1835, Miss Lidian Jackson, of Plymouth, Mass. He then left the “Old Manse,” where he had been staying with Dr. Ripley, and moved into a house on the old Lexington road, along which the British had retreated from Concord in 1775. In this “plain, square, wooden house,” surrounded by horse-chestnut and pine trees, with pleasant garden-grounds attached, he made his home for the rest of his life; and, through his presence there, the village became “the Delphi of New England.” On 19 April, 1836, the anniversary of the Concord fight, Emerson's hymn, composed for the occasion and containing those lines which have since resounded almost as widely as the fame of the deed,
| “ | Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world,” |
was sung at the dedication of the battle-monument.
In September of the same year his first
book, “Nature,” an idealistic prose essay in eight
chapters — which had been written in the same
room of the “Old Manse” in which Hawthorne
afterward wrote his “Mosses” — was published
anonymously in Boston. During the summer he
had supplied the pulpit of the Concord Unitarian
church for three months, and in the autumn he
preached a while for a new society at East Lexington;
but he refused to become its pastor, saying:
“My pulpit is the lyceum platform.” Doubts
had arisen in his mind as to the wisdom of public
prayer, the propriety of offering prayer for others,
and the rightfulness of adhering to any formal
worship. From this time his career became
distinctively that of a literary man, although for
several years he confined himself mainly to lecturing,
and most of his prose writings were first given
to the public orally. Carlyle had said to
Longfellow that when Emerson came to Craigenputtock
it was “like the visit of an angel.” In 1836 he
edited early sheets of Carlyle's “Sartor Resartus,”
and in 1838 three volumes of the same author's
essays, all of these appearing in book-form in this
country before they did so in England, and netting
a comfortable sum for Carlyle. “Nature,” similarly,
met with considerable appreciation in England,
but in the United States it took twelve years to sell
500 copies. The character of the book was both
methodical and rhapsodical. It taught that the
universe consists of nature and the soul, and that
external nature serves four purposes — viz.: commodity,
beauty, language, and discipline. It ministers
to the senses; then to the love of beauty; then it
gives us language — i. e., supplies words as the signs
of natural facts, by which we interpret our own
spirits. Natural laws applied to man become moral
laws; and thus we perceive the highest use of
nature, which is discipline. It trains reason, develops
the intellect, and becomes the means of moral culture.
Thus nature speaks always of spirit, suggests
the idea of the absolute, teaches worship of God,
whom we cannot describe, and shows us that nature
itself is only an apparition of God. “The mind
is a part of the nature of things,” and God is
revealed directly to the soul, spirit being present all
through nature, but acting upon us through
ourselves and not from without. In verbal style this
treatise has great beauty, and rises to the plane of
a prose poem; but the contents perplexed theologians.
The author was accused of pantheism,
though it is hard to see how the belief so named
differs from the professed Christian doctrine of
the omnipresence of God. Most of the practical
people in the community regarded Emerson as
crazy, revolutionary, or a fool who did not know
his own meaning. Ex-president John Quincy
Adams wrote concerning him in 1840: “After
failing in the every-day vocations of a Unitarian
preacher and school-master, he starts a new
doctrine of transcendentalism, declares all the old
revelations superannuated and worn out, and
announces the approach of new revelations.”
The term transcendentalists was somewhat vaguely applied to a number of writers, among whom Emerson was the chief; but they did not constitute a regularly organized group, and had no very well-defined aims in common that could warrant the classification. Emerson himself disclaimed it later, saying “there was no concert of doctrinaires to establish certain opinions or to inaugurate some movement in literature, philosophy, or religion . . . but only two or three men and women, who read alone, with some vivacity. Perhaps all of these were surprised at the rumor that they were a school or a sect, but more especially at the name of 'Transcendentalism.'” Nevertheless, the scholars and writers of the period under notice, who numbered considerably more than two or three, finally adopted the name that had been forced upon them by changing the name of a periodical gathering held by them from the “Symposium” to “The Transcendental Club.” A period of new intellectual activity had begun about 1820, on the return of Edward Everett from Europe, laden with treasures of German thought, which he put into circulation. Gradually his influence, and that of Coleridge and Carlyle in England, produced a reaction against the philosophy of Locke and Bentham, which, denying all innate ideas, and insisting upon purely mechanical revelation, had hitherto ruled Unitarians in Old and New England. The reactionists affirmed the existence of innate ideas, and a faculty in man that transcends the senses and the understanding. Supported by Goethe's deep love of nature as a companion of man, and Wordsworth's conception of it as interfused with spirit, Emerson made a new advance, reiterated the idea of a transcendent faculty, intuitive religion, and perception of God, and embodied in an original form the spiritual interpretation of nature. The Symposium, or Transcendental Club, began to meet in 1836, first at the house of Dr. George Ripley. Among the members were Emerson, Frederic H. Hedge, James Freeman Clarke, Convers Francis, Theodore Parker, Bronson Alcott, Rev. Cyrus A. Bartol, Orestes A. Brownson, Margaret Fuller, and Miss Elizabeth P. Peabody. Dr. Channing once attended, and was in sympathy with the club, which discussed religion, impersonality, justice, truth, mysticism, pantheism, and the development of American genius. In this last theme perhaps lay the germ of Emerson's oration, “The American Scholar,” delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa society at Cambridge in August, 1837. This has been well called “our intellectual Declaration of Independence,” an event without any former parallel in our literary annals. After eloquently describing the education and duties of the scholar, it protested against the prevailing subserviency to European taste, suspected the American freeman of being “timid, imitative, tame,” and demanded that the individual man “plant himself indomitably on his instincts and there abide. . . . We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds. . . . A nation of freemen will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which inspires all men.” His friend, Bronson Alcott, having set up a school in Boston for teaching young children by methods based on a new theory of education, published in 1837 a book reporting his own conversations with the children on the gospels, which excited severe criticism, and Emerson defended him in the Boston “Courier.” He was destined to rouse a much greater hostility himself by his address to the senior class in the Divinity college, Cambridge, 15 July, 1838. With great force and beauty of language he attacked the formalism of contemporary religion, and the traditional limited way of using the mind of Christ. “Men have come to speak of the revelation as somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were dead. . . . The soul is not preached. . . . It is the office of a true teacher to show us that God is, not was; that he speaketh, not spake. The true Christianity — a faith like Christ's in the infinitude of man — is lost.” To each of the graduates he said: “Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost, cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hands with the Deity.” The address, pronounced with strong conviction, led to lively controversy, in which Emerson took no part. Ten lectures were given by him, in the winter of 1838-'9, on “The Doctrine of the Soul,” “Home,” “The School,” “Love,” etc., followed later by “Man the Reformer,” “The Method of Nature,” and a “Lecture on the Times.” In these he treated some of the reforms then agitated — temperance, anti-slavery, non-resistance, no government, and equal labor. Having come to hold the position of a religious reformer, he was looked to for sympathy with other reforms; but he dealt with them in the same spirit as with religion, and proceeded to reform the reformers. He pointed out that “reforms have their higher origin in an ideal justice, but they do not retain the purity of an idea.” Their work “is done profanely, not piously; by management, by tactics, and by clamor.” Any end pursued for itself, by the practical faculty, must become an offence. The end should be “inapprehensible to the senses”; then it would always be a good, always giving health. Briefly, it was Emerson's mission not to do practical work for reforms, but to supply impulses and a high inspiration to the workers. In 1841 he lectured on “The Conservative,” and the next year on " The Transcendentalist," saying that “transcendentalism ” was simply modern idealism, and that the “new views” were the oldest of thoughts cast in a new mould. Yet, seven years before, he had consulted with others about establishing a journal to be known as “The Transcendentalist,” and in July. 1840, it was begun, under the name of “The Dial.” Emerson succeeded Margaret Fuller as the editor, and during its continuance, until April, 1844, published more than forty of his own pieces, prose and verse, in its columns. The poems included such famous ones as “The Problem,” “Wood-notes,” “The Sphinx,” and “Fate.” This periodical contained much delicate and valuable writing, but failed of pecuniary support. Associated as he was with the idealists, in the capacity of chief intellectual leader, he took a cordial interest in the semi-socialistic experiment at Brook Farm (1840 to 1847), with which some of the brightest New England men and women of that day were connected; but he did not join the community. Hawthorne, who was actually a member and lost money in the undertaking, has been much criticised for having viewed it independently; but Emerson, outside, held a similar neutral attitude, and wrote an account of the affair, in which, touching it humorously at points, he called it “a French Revolution in small, an Age of Reason in a patty-pan.” In 1841 appeared the first volume of his essays, made up from lectures. It embraced “History,” “Compensation,” “Self-Reliance,” “Heroism,” “The Over-Soul,” “Spiritual Laws,” “Love,” “Friendship,” “Prudence,” “Intellect,” “Circles,” and “Art.” A second series was published in 1844, containing “Character,” “Gifts,” “Manners,” “The Poet,” “Politics,” “New England Reformers,” and a new one on “Nature.” These made a favorable impression in France and England, and laid the basis of his lofty reputation in this country as a prose-writer. Two years later he collected in a volume of “Poems” his scattered metrical pieces, many of which had been printed in periodicals. He did not escape sharp criticism, but the circle of his admirers rapidly widened. A new periodical, “The Massachusetts Quarterly Review,” began its career at Boston in 1847, edited by Theodore Parker, a disciple of Emerson, who expounded the “new views” in a more combative way; and Emerson wrote for it an “Editor's Address,” inculcating a wise and sincere spirit in meeting the problems of the state, of slavery, and socialism. In October of that year he sailed to England on a lecturing tour, repeated a course on “Representative Men” in various places, read a special series in London on “The Mind and Manners in the Nineteenth Century,” and lectured frequently in Scotland. He was enthusiastically received by large audiences, met a great number of the foremost men and women of the time, and was a guest in many private houses. In 1849 he returned home and published “Representative Men” (1850). Here he contributed to the “Memoirs” of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1852) an account of her conversations in Boston and her Concord life. He also, having visited Paris while abroad, gave a lecture on “France,” which has never been printed; and at the Woman's Rights convention in 1856 delivered an address that took advanced ground, for that date, in favor of larger liberty for women. In this year the result of his observations in England was published in the volume entitled “English Traits,” which gained cordial recognition both at home and abroad, and has been translated into several foreign languages. It is certainly the best analysis of the English people that has been written by an American, and probably the best produced in any country. The style is succinct and exact, sown with epigram, as in most of Emerson's writings; but, the purpose being more objective than that of his essays, the saving common sense that underlies all of his thinking is here brought constantly and predominantly into view. Previously to this publication he had given seven lectures in Freeman place chapel, Boston, and another in New York, and had also made addresses before the Anti-slavery society in both cities. While in the ministry he alone had opened a church to abolition speakers, and his sympathies were always on the side of emancipation. In 1835 he countenanced Harriet Martineau in her outspoken condemnation of slavery, and in the height of her unpopularity invited her to his house. Again, in 1844, he spoke stirringly on the anniversary of West Indian emancipation, and scourged his countrymen for tolerating negro servitude. His own plan was to buy the slaves, at a cost of $2,000,000,000, and he put faith in moral and spiritual influences to remove the evil, rather than in legislation. He never formally united with the abolition party, but he encouraged it, and his influence was great. As the contest grew warmer, he rose to the emergency and took a more active part, even making campaign speeches for John G. Palfrey, who, having missed re-election to congress on account of his anti-slavery course in that body, was nominated as free-soil candidate for governor of Massachusetts. The assault on Charles Sumner by Preston S. Brooks called forth another vigorous speech. In November, 1859, he said before the Parker fraternity that John Brown, were he to be hanged, would “make the gallows glorious, like the cross.” A few days afterward he spoke at a John Brown meeting at Tremont temple, with Wendell Phillips, and took part in another at Concord, and in still a third at Salem, Mass. In Januuary, 1861, also, he addressed the Anti-slavery society at Boston, in the face of disturbance by a mob. Though he was not a chief agitator of the cause, these efforts, so alien to his retired habits as a student, poet, and meditative writer, made him a marked advocate of freedom.
The “Atlantic Monthly” made its first appearance in November, 1857, with James Russell Lowell as the editor, and Emerson became, a contributor, printing in all twenty-eight poems and prose articles in the first thirty-seven volumes. “The Romany Girl,” “Days,” “Brahma,” “Waldeinsamkeit,” “The Titmouse,” “Boston Hymn,” “Saadi,” and “Terminus,” which are among his best-known poems, belong to this period; and in the “Atlantic” in 1858 appeared his essay on Persian poetry, which is instructive as to the influence of oriental verse upon Emerson's. He continued to lecture in different parts of the country, and at the Burns festival in Boston in January. 1859, made an after-dinner speech which is described as imbued with a passion uncommon in his utterances. Its effect on the assembly was said, by a competent judge who had heard the chief orators of the time, to have surpassed anything accomplished by them, and it seems to have indicated a reserve power in Emerson seldom suspected. In 1860 and 1862 he lost by death his friend Theodore Parker and his intimate companion Thoreau, both of whom he celebrated in memorial addresses. The “Conduct of Life” was published in the former year — a series of essays on fate, power, wealth, culture, behavior, worship, considerations by the way, beauty, and illusions. With a diminished admixture of mysticism, it offered a larger proportion of practical philosophy, and stated the limitations of fate in life, while but reaffirming the liberty of the individual. Hitherto Emerson's books had sold very slowly; but of the “Conduct of Life” the whole edition, 2,500 copies, was sold in two days. This is an index of the great change that had occurred in the popular estimate of him since the issuing of his first volume, “Nature,” twenty-seven years before. He who had been feared as a revolutionist, or laughed at as erratic, was now, at the age of fifty-seven, accepted as a veritable prophet and sage. The people and the times had, in a measure, grown up to him. A new “Dial” having been established in Cincinnati about this time, he wrote for its pages. During the civil war he delivered a lecture on “American Civilization” at the Smithsonian institution in February, 1862; an address in Boston on the emancipation proclamation, September of the same year; and at Concord, 19 April, 1865, he pronounced a brief eulogy on Abraham Lincoln.
On 30 May, 1867, he attended at the organization of the Free religious association in Boston, and stated his view as to religion briefly thus: As soon as every man is apprised of the Divine presence in his mind, and sees that the law of duty corresponds with the laws of physical nature — that duty, social order, power of character, wealth of culture, perfection of taste, all draw their essence from this moral sentiment — “then we have a religion that exalts, that commands all the social and all the private action.” Emerson passed many severe criticisms on his countrymen, publicly accused America of wanting in faith, hope, enthusiasm, and in a letter to Carlyle called it an intelligent but sensual, avaricious America. The war, with its heroisms and exhibitions of moral strength, gave him new courage, new belief in the national future. His Phi Beta Kappa oration of 1867 on “The Progress of Culture” expressed even more sanguine expectation than “The American Scholar,” thirty years before. He received the degree of LL. D. from Harvard in 1866, and was elected to the board of overseers in 1867. He began to feel the approach of age, and in 1866 wrote the noble poem “Terminus.”
| “ | It is time to be old, To take in sail; ***** |
“May-Day,” a long poem, the freshest and most youthful in tone of any that he had written, accompanied by many other pieces, some of which had appeared previously. In the next three years, 1868-'70, he read at Harvard a number of lectures on “The Natural History of the Mind,” which have not been collected. The essays entitled “Society and Solitude” were published in 1870. They are noticeable for an easy, almost conversational tone, differing remarkably from the earlier published essays and “English Traits.” The same is true of “Letters and Social Aims” (1875). Emerson's method of composition was to jot down notes from reading and observation, which were entered in a commonplace book, with a memorandum on the margin. From this he drew the material for his lectures, which, heard from the platform, were flowing in style and clear in sequence. When he prepared them for publication, much of the incidental matter and connecting links were struck out. The latest two volumes were arranged for the press when the author, growing old, gave them a less rigorous revision, and relied upon help from others. In 1870 and 1871 he wrote introductions to a translation of Plutarch's “Morals” and W. E. Channing's poem “The Wanderer.” “Parnassus,” a collection of poems by British and American authors, was brought out, with a short introduction, in 1874. Emerson was nominated in the latter year for the lord-rectorship of Glasgow university by the independents, and was defeated by a vote of 500 in his favor against 700 for Benjamin Disraeli. In 1875 he made a short address at the unveiling of French's statue of “The Minute-Man” on the Concord battle-field. He responded to an invitation from two societies of the University of Virginia in 1876 by lecturing to them on “The Scholar.” In March, 1878, he read a paper at the Old South church, Boston, on “The Fortune of the Republic,” in which, commenting with sagacity on current tendencies in the national life, he said: “Let the passion for America cast out the passion for Europe.” The same year he printed in the “North American Review” “The Sovereignty of Ethics”; in 1879 he read “The Preacher” in Divinity college, Cambridge, and an essay on “Superlatives” was published in “The Century” magazine for February, 1882, shortly before his death. Two posthumous volumes of essays and reminiscences have appeared: “Miscellanies,” and “Lectures and Biographical Sketches”; and many brief poems heretofore unpublished have been included in a new edition.
In July, 1872, Emerson's house at Concord was
partly destroyed by fire. This shock hastened the
decline of his mental powers, which had already
set in, and impaired his health. His friends
spontaneously asked to be allowed to rebuild the house,
and deposited in bank for him over $11,000, at
the same time suggesting that he go abroad for
rest and change. With his daughter Ellen he
visited England and the Nile, and returned to
Concord in May, 1873, to find his house rebuilt,
and so perfectly restored to its former state that
few could have discovered any change (see view on
page 346). Welcomed by the citizens in a mass, he
drove to his home, passing beneath a triumphal
arch erected in his honor, amid general rejoicing.
After 1867 Emerson wrote no poems, and little prose, but revised his poetry and arranged the “Selected Poems.” Always inclined to slow speech, sometimes pausing for a word, he succumbed to a gradual aphasia, which made it difficult for him to converse. He forgot the names of persons and things. He had some difficulty in discriminating printed letters, and for the last five years of his life was unable to conduct correspondence. Yet he read through all his own published works “with much interest and surprise,” and tried to arrange his manuscripts, which he examined thoroughly. He also, following his custom of reading a paper annually before the Concord lyceum, gave there, in 1880, his hundredth lecture to the local audience. On that occasion the several hundred people in the hall spontaneously arose at his entrance and remained standing until he had taken his place on the platform. He took an interest in the Concord school of philosophy, organized in 1880, and supplied to its sessions an essay on “Natural Aristocracy.” Most of these later productions were put together from portions of earlier compositions. Throughout this time of decline he retained the perfect courtesy and consideration for others that had always characterized him. He was apparently quite able to comprehend the essence of things around him, and, to a certain extent, ideas; but the verbal means of communication were lost. He had so long regarded language and visible objects as mere symbols, that the symbols at last melted away and eluded him. He continued to read everything in printed form that he found upon his table, whispering the words over like a child, and was fond of pointing out pictures in books. In April, 1882, he took a severe cold, and, attended by his son, Dr. Edward Waldo Emerson, died of pneumonia. He was buried in the cemetery at Concord, near the graves of Hawthorne and Thoreau, in ground over which he had often walked and talked with them and with Margaret Fuller.
Emerson was tall and slender, not of robust physique, rather sallow in the face, with an aquiline nose, brown hair, and eyes of the “strongest and brightest blue.” His head was below the average in circumference, long, narrow, but more nearly equal in anterior and posterior breadth than most heads. His appearance was majestic. He was calm, kindly in expression, and frequently smiled, but seldom laughed. His manners were dignified but exquisitely simple. He was a ready listener, and often seemed to prefer listening, as if he were to be instructed rather than to instruct. He rarely showed irritation. His hospitality was almost unbounded, and he frequently waited upon the humblest of his guests with his own hands. He was never well-to-do until in his latest years. In 1838 he wrote to Carlyle that he possessed about $22,000 at interest, and could earn $800 in a winter by lecturing, but never had a dollar “to spend on a fancy.” He worked hard every summer writing, and every winter travelling and lecturing. His habits were regular and his diet frugal, the only peptic luxury in which he indulged being pie at breakfast. Every morning was spent in his study, and he would go all day without food unless called to eat. His bed-time was ten o'clock, but, if engaged in literary work, he would sit up until one or two, and was able to do this night after night. He fulfilled the duties of a citizen by attending town-meetings punctiliously. Much question has been made whether Emerson was rather a poet than a philosopher, or whether he was a philosopher at all. An exact philosopher he was not; but all that he wrote and said was based upon philosophic ideas. He was an intellectual rather than an emotional mystic, an idealist who insisted upon the application of idealism to the affairs of daily life. He believed that “Nature is the incarnation of a thought. . . . The world is mind orecipitated.” He believed in the Over-Soul as a light guiding man, the light of intuitive perception, in God as the soul of the world, and in the human soul as one with that Over-Soul. He was not able to formulate these or other beliefs of his logically. Writing to his former colleague, Henry Ware, he said: “I could not give an account of myself if challenged. . . . I do not know what arguments are in reference to any expression of a 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.” This continued to be his position to the end. He relied upon intuition, and thought that every one might bring himself into accord with God on that basis. He expressed what he felt at the moment, and some of his sayings, even in a single essay, seem to be mutually opposed. But, if the whole of his works be taken together, a type of thought may be discerned in the conflicting expressions, coherent and suggestive, like that presented by the photographs of several generations of a family superimposed on one plate. In the beginning he seems to have looked somewhat askance at science; but in the 1849 edition of “Nature” he prefixed some verses that said:
| “ | And, striving to be man, the worm Mounts through all the spires of form.” |
This came out ten years before Darwin's “Origin
of Species,” and twenty years sooner than “The
Descent of Man.” Lamarck's theories, however,
had been popularized in 1844. But Emerson here
showed how quick he was to seize upon the newest
thought in science or elsewhere if it seemed to be
true. Eleven years passed, and he declared in the
essay on “Worship,” in “Conduct of Life”: “The
religion which is to guide and fulfil the present and
coming ages must be intellectual. The scientific
mind must have a faith which is science. . . . There
will be a new church founded on moral science, at
first cold and naked . . . but it will have heaven
and earth for its beams and rafters, science for
symbol and illustration. It will fast enough gather
beauty, music, picture, poetry.” While he thus
advanced in viewing science, he advanced also in
viewing all other subjects; but it was from the
point of view of intuition and oneness with what
he called the Over-Soul. Everything that he said
must be looked at in the light of his own remark,
“Life is a train of moods.” But his moods rest
upon the certainty, to him, of his own intuition.
Emerson's presentation of his views is generally in
a large degree poetic. His poems sum up and also
expand his prose. The seeming want of technical
skill in his verse is frequently due to a more
subtile art of natural melody which defied
conventional rules of versification. The irregular lines,
the flaws of metre and rhyme, remind us of the
intermittent breathings of an Æolian harp.
Emerson's poetic instrument may have been a rustic
contrivance, but it answered to every impulse of
the winds and the sighs of human feeling, from
“Monadnoc” to the “Threnody” upon the death
of his child-son. Sometimes he unconsciously so
perfected his poetic lines that, as Dr. Holmes says,
a moment after they were written they “seemed
as if they had been carved on marble for a thousand
years,” as this in “Voluntaries”:
| “ | So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When duty whispers low, Thou must, The youth replies, I can.” |
Matthew Arnold has pronounced his essays “the
most important work done in prose” in this century;
but Prof. C. C. Everett, discussing the qualities
of Emerson in the “Andover Review” for
March, 1887, describes his philosophy as that of a
poet, and adds, “so his ethics is the ethics of a
poet.” He regards the poems as the most
complete and worthy expression of Emerson's genius.
But Dr. Everett's discovery of passion in
Emerson's poetry is not generally accepted by other
critics. As has been well remarked by another
writer, the verse, in general abstractly and
intellectually beautiful, kindles to passion only when
the chosen theme is distinctly American or
patriotic. Emerson constantly preached by life and pen
a new revelation, a new teacher of religion and
morals, putting himself always in the place of a
harbinger, a John crying in the wilderness. Julian
Hawthorne has written of him: “He is our future
living in our present, and showing the world, by
anticipation, what sort of excellence we are
capable of.” His own life conformed perfectly to the
idealism that he taught; but he regarded himself
as a modest link in the chain of progress. He
made his generation turn their eyes forward instead
of backward. He enforced upon them courage,
self-reliance, patriotism, hope. People flocked to
him from all quarters, finally, for advice and guidance.
The influence that he exercised not only
upon persons since grown eminent, such as Prof.
Tyndall, who found a life's inspiration in his
thought, but also upon thousands unknown, is one
of his claims to recognition. Another is that, at
a time when, it is conceded, the people of the
United States were largely materialistic in their
aims, he came forward as the most idealistic writer
of the age, and also as a plain American citizen.
He was greatly indebted to preceding authors. It
has been ascertained that he named in his writings
3,393 quotations from 808 individuals, mostly
writers. “The inventor only knows how to quote,”
said Emerson; and, notwithstanding his drafts
upon the treasury of the past, he is the most original
writer as a poet, seer, and thinker that America
possesses. The doctrine of the “many in one,”
which he incessantly taught, is exemplified in
himself and his works. The best extant accounts of
Emerson are “Ralph Waldo Emerson, his Life,
Writings, and Philosophy,” by George Willis Cooke
(Boston, 1881); “Ralph Waldo Emerson,” by Oliver
Wendell Holmes (Boston, 1884); “Emerson at
Home and Abroad,” by Moncure D. Conway;
“Biographical Sketch,” by Alexander Ireland; “The
Genius and Character of Emerson, Lectures at the
Concord School of Philosophy,” edited by F. B.
Sanborn (Boston, 1885). See, also, F. B. Sanborn's
“Homes and Haunts of Emerson.” J. E. Cabot,
of Boston, has in charge a life authorized by
Emerson's family, which may include extracts from
his diaries and other unpublished matter.