Part 10
Out of the eternal conflict between abstractionist and materialist arises another type of mind, one that laughs at both philosophies for being out of their depth and pushing too far. He is the sceptic, Montaigne, for example. The type was peculiarly grateful to Emerson, admiring as he did a man who talked with shrewdness, was not literary, who knew the world, used the positive degree, never shrieked, and had no wish to annihilate time and space.
Shakespeare meets our conception of the Poet, ‘a heart in unison with his time and country,’ whose production comes ‘freighted with the weightiest convictions and pointed with the most determined aims which any man or class knows of in his times.’ He demonstrated the possibility of translating things into song. The ear is ravished by the beauty of his lines, ‘yet the sentence is so loaded with meaning and so linked with its foregoers and followers, that the logician is satisfied.’ And he had the royal trait of cheerfulness.
In Napoleon we have ‘the strong and ready actor’ who in the ‘universal imbecility, indecision, and indolence of men’ knows how to take occasion by the beard. His life is an answer to cowardly doubts. Emerson calls Napoleon ‘the agent or attorney of the middle class of modern society.’ It was he who showed what could be done by the use of common virtues. His experiment failed because he had a selfish and sensual aim. In the last analysis Napoleon was not a gentleman.
Goethe is the other phase of the genius of the age. There is a provision for the writer in the scheme of things. Nature insists on being reported. To Man the universe is something to be recorded. The instinct exists in different degrees. One has the power to ‘see connection where the multitude sees fragments.’ Lift this faculty to a high degree and you have the great German poet who well-nigh restored literature to its primal significance. ‘There must be a man behind the book.’ ‘The old Eternal Genius who built the world has confided himself more to this man than any other.’ Goethe is the type of culture. Here, too, is his defect. For his devotion is not to pure truth, but to truth for the sake of culture.
_Representative Men_ was succeeded by _English Traits_, a volume in which Emerson taught his countrymen more about England than they had hitherto known or fancied. Histories, statistical reports, treatises on British art and British manufactures, are useful and sometimes dreary reading; they give us facts heaped on facts. It is a relief to put them down and take up _English Traits_ in order to learn what we have been reading about.
Through Emerson’s eyes we can see this little island ‘a prize for the best race,’ its singular people, chained to their logic, willing ‘to kiss the dust before a fact,’ strong in their sense of brotherhood, yet fond each of his own way, incommunicable, ‘in short every one of these islanders an island in himself.’ They have a ‘superfluity of self-regard’--which is a secret of their power; they are assertive, crotchety, wholly forgetful of ‘a cardinal article in the bill of social rights,’ that every man ‘has a right to his own ears;’ nevertheless Emerson concludes (and an Englishman would assure him no other conclusion was possible) they are the best stock in the world. Here is the typical islander as Emerson paints him. ‘He is a churl with a soft place in his heart, whose speech is a brash of bitter waters, but who loves to help you at a pinch. He says no, and serves you, and your thanks disgust him.’
There are paragraphs and chapters on the Aristocracy, the Universities, Religion, Literature, and the Press, that is, the ‘Times.’ Every page glitters with wit. Every apothegm contains the full proportion of truth and untruth which sayings of that sort are wont to contain. Says Emerson: ‘The gospel the Anglican church preaches is, ‘“By taste are ye saved.”’ Yet the more one reflects on this monstrous statement, the more is he astonished at the amount of truth in it.
The volume entitled _Conduct of Life_ has a fine rough vigor. Here are displayed to advantage Emerson’s robust habit of mind, searching analysis, vivacity and picturesqueness of expression, epigrammatic skill, homely plain sense, and lofty idealism. The first essay, ‘Fate,’ is an energetic and striking performance. One needs the optimism of its last paragraphs to counteract the grim terror of the earlier ones. Seldom has the relentless ferocity of Circumstance, Fate, Environment, been set forth in terms equally emphatic. The companion essay, ‘Power,’ is a study of the influence of brute force (and its compensations) in life and history. Emerson shows the value of the ‘bruiser’ in politics, trade, and in society. This leads to the third subject, ‘Wealth.’ Money must be had if only to buy bread. Nature insults the man who will not work. ‘She starves, taunts, and torments him, takes away warmth, laughter, sleep, friends and daylight, until he has fought his way to his own loaf.’ But what men of sense want is power, mastery, not candy; they esteem wealth to be ‘the assimilation of nature to themselves.’
To all this there must be a corrective; it is discussed in the essay on ‘Culture.’ Nature ruins a man to gain her ends, makes him strong in things she wants done, weak otherwise, and then robs him of his sense of proportion so that he becomes an egotist. Culture restores the balance. Culture rescues a man from himself, ‘kills his exaggeration.’ The simpler means to it are books, travel, society, solitude; and there are nobler ones, not the least of which is adversity. The discussion is continued in the practical essay on ‘Behavior’ and lifted to the highest plane in the essay on ‘Worship.’ The whole state of man is a state of culture, ‘and its flowering and completion may be described as Religion or Worship.’ For all its beauty this chapter will not please many people. They may take refuge in ‘Considerations by the Way,’ which shows the ‘good of evil,’ or in the fine essay on ‘Beauty’ or the ironical little closing piece called ‘Illusions.’
VI
THE POEMS
Many paragraphs in _Nature_ and the _Essays_ struggle in their prose environment as if seeking a higher medium of expression. Emerson’s command of poetic materials was extraordinary, though it fails to justify the claims sometimes made for him. He could be wilfully careless in respect to technique. There are moments when no cacophonous combination terrifies him. Then will he say his say though the language creak.
He had published freely in ‘The Dial,’ where he met his own little audience, but when the question arose of putting his verses in the pretentious form of a book Emerson hesitated. Only after much deliberation, continued through four years, did he come finally to a decision.
His capital theme is Nature, ‘the inscrutable and mute.’ ‘Woodnotes,’ ‘Monadnock,’ ‘May-Day,’ ‘My Garden,’ ‘Sea-Shore,’ ‘Song of Nature,’ ‘Nature,’ ‘The Snow Storm,’ ‘Waldeinsamkeit,’ ‘Musketaquit,’ ‘The Adirondacs,’ are varied renderings of the subject. Among the lines which haunt the memory, take for example this description of the sea:--
The opaline, the plentiful and strong, Yet beautiful as is the rose in June,
* * * * *
Purger of earth, and medicine of men; Creating a sweet climate by my breath, Washing out harms and griefs from memory, And, in my mathematic ebb and flow, Giving a hint of that which changes not.
Splendid imagery and rich coloring mark the fine passages in ‘May-Day’ describing the advance of summer:--
As poured the flood of the ancient sea Spilling over mountain chains, Bending forests as bends the sedge, Faster flowing o’er the plains,-- A world-wide wave with a foaming edge That rims the running silver sheet,-- So pours the deluge of the heat Broad northward o’er the land, Painting artless paradises, Drugging herbs with Syrian spices, Fanning secret fires which glow In columbine and clover-blow,
* * * * *
The million-handed sculptor moulds Quaintest bud and blossom folds, The million-handed painter pours Opal hues and purple dye; Azaleas flush the island floors, And the tints of heaven reply.
Leaving to one side the mere external shows of the world, and calling in science to aid imagination, the poet strikes out stanzas like these from the ‘Song of Nature:’--
I wrote the past in characters Of rock and fire the scroll, The building in the coral sea, The planting of the coal.
And thefts from satellites and rings And broken stars I drew, And out of spent and aged things I formed the world anew;
What time the gods kept carnival, Tricked out in star and flower, And in cramp elf and saurian forms They swathed their too much power.
‘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:--
Far or forgot to me is near; Shadow and sunlight are the same; The vanished gods to me appear; And one to me are shame and fame.
‘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:--
The hand that rounded Peter’s dome And groined the aisles of Christian Rome Wrought in a sad sincerity; Himself from God he could not free; He builded better than he knew;-- The conscious stone to beauty grew.
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:--
The foe long since in silence slept; Alike the conqueror silent sleeps; And Time the ruined bridge has swept Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.
For the Concord celebration of 1857 Emerson wrote the ‘Ode’ beginning
O tenderly the haughty day Fills his blue urn with fire;
and for the ‘Jubilee Concert’ in Music Hall, on the day Emancipation went into effect, the ‘Boston Hymn,’ with the bold stanzas:--
God said, I am tired of kings, I suffer them no more; Up to my ear the morning brings The outrage of the poor.
Think ye I made this ball A field of havoc and war, Where tyrants great and tyrants small Might harry the weak and poor?
The best of Emerson’s patriotic poems is the ‘Voluntaries,’ containing the often quoted and perfect lines:--
So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When Duty whispers low, _Thou must_, The youth replies, _I can_.
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.
FOOTNOTES:
[19] Ellen (Tucker) Emerson was but twenty years of age at the time of her death. Emerson first saw her in December, 1827. They were married about two years later.
[20] Cabot: _Emerson_, i, 244.
[21] G. W. Cooke: _An Historical and Biographical Introduction to accompany_ THE DIAL _as reprinted in numbers for The Rowfant Club_ [Cleveland], 1902.
[22] Emerson to Carlyle, Oct. 30, 1840.
[23] ‘The Poet,’ printed in the appendix of the definitive edition of Emerson’s _Poems_.
[24] Richard Garnett.
VII
_Edgar Allan Poe_
REFERENCES:
=R. W. Griswold=: ‘Memoir of the Author’ prefixed to the _Works of Edgar A. Poe_, vol. iii, 1850.
=E. C. Stedman=: _Edgar Allan Poe_, 1881.
=J. H. Ingram=: _Edgar Allan Poe, his Life, Letters, and Opinions_, 1880.
=G. E. Woodberry=: _Edgar Allan Poe_, ‘American Men of Letters,’ fourth edition, 1888.
=J. A. Harrison=: _Life and Letters of Edgar Allan Poe_ [1902–03].
=Emile Lauvrière=: _Edgar Poe, sa Vie et son Œuvre, étude de psychologie pathologique_, 1904.
I
HIS LIFE
Poe was of Irish extraction. His great-grandfather, John Poe, came to America about 1745 and settled near Lancaster, Pennsylvania. John Poe’s son David (known in the annals of Baltimore as ‘old General Poe’) rendered notable services to his country during the Revolution. Lafayette remembered him well and during a visit to Baltimore in 1824 asked to be taken to the place where Poe was buried. ‘Ici repose un cœur noble,’ said Lafayette as he knelt and kissed the old patriot’s grave.
Of General Poe’s six children, the eldest, David, was to have been bred to the law, but his tastes led him first to the amateur and then to the professional stage. He married a young English actress, Mrs. Elizabeth (Arnold) Hopkins. They had three children, William, Edgar, and Rosalie. Edgar (afterwards known as Edgar Allan) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 19, 1809.
The young family suffered the petty miseries incident to the life of strolling players, and became at one time very poor. The circumstances of David Poe’s death and the place of his burial are unknown. When Mrs. Poe died at Richmond, Virginia, in December, 1811, Edgar was taken by Mrs. John Allan, the wife of a highly respected merchant of that city, and was brought up as a child of the house.
The Allans were in England from 1815 to 1820. During this time Poe was placed at Manor House School, Stoke Newington. He afterwards attended the English and Classical School in Richmond and on February 14, 1826, matriculated at the University of Virginia. His connection with the University ceased in December of the same year. He left behind him a reputation for marked abilities, but he is said to have lost caste by his recklessness in card playing. Allan positively refused to pay the youth’s gambling debts, which amounted to twenty-five hundred dollars.
Placed in Allan’s counting-house, Poe was unhappy and rebellious, and finally disappeared. He declared in after years that he went abroad to offer his services to the Greeks. What he really did was to enlist in the United States army under the name of Edgar A. Perry. During the summer of 1827 he was with Battery H of the First Artillery at Fort Independence, Boston. In August of that year he published _Tamerlane and Other Poems, by a Bostonian_. The edition was small and the pamphlet has become one of the rarest of bibliographical curiosities.
Battery H was sent to Fort Moultrie, South Carolina, in October, 1827, and a year later to Fortress Monroe, Virginia. At some time during this period Poe must have made his whereabouts known to the Allans. Mrs. Allan, who was tenderly attached to Poe, may have succeeded in bringing about an understanding between the youth and his foster father. When she died (in February, 1829) Poe lost his best friend.