[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

celebrities like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Thoreau, and Bronson Alcott. Louisa May Alcott relates that
when eight years old she was sent to the Emerson home to inquire about the health of his oldest son, a boy of
five. Emerson answered her knock, and replied, "Child, he is dead!" Years later she wrote, "I never have
forgotten the anguish that made a familiar face so tragical, and gave those few words more pathos than the
sweet lamentation of the _Threnody_" Like Milton and Tennyson, Emerson voiced his grief in an elegy, to
which he gave the title Threnody. In this poem the great teacher of optimism wrote:--
"For this losing is true dying; This is lordly man's down-lying, This his slow but sure reclining, Star by star
his world resigning."
Aside from domestic incidents, his life at Concord was uneventful. As he was by nature averse to contests, he
never took an extreme part in the antislavery movement, although he voiced his feelings against slavery, even
giving antislavery lectures, when he thought the occasion required such action. His gentleness and tenderness
were inborn qualities. Oliver Wendell Holmes said that Emerson removed men's "idols from their pedestals so
tenderly that it seemed like an act of worship."
He widened his influence by substituting the platform for the pulpit, and year after year he enlarged his circle
of hearers. He lectured in New England, the South, and the West. Sometimes these lecture tours kept him
away from home the entire winter. In 1847 he lectured in England and Scotland. He visited Carlyle again, and
for four days listened to "the great and constant stream" of his talk. On this second trip abroad, Emerson met
men like De Quincey, Macaulay, Thackeray, and Tennyson. Emerson gained such fame in the mother country
that, long after he had returned, he was nominated for the Lord Rectorship of Glasgow University and
received five hundred votes against seven hundred for Disraeli, one of England's best known statesmen.
Something of his character and personality may be learned from the accounts of contemporary writers. James
Russell Lowell, who used to go again and again to hear him, even when the subject was familiar, said, "We do
not go to hear what Emerson says so much as to hear Emerson." Hawthorne wrote, "It was good to meet him
in the wood paths or sometimes in our avenue with that pure intellectual gleam diffusing about his presence
like the garment of a shining one." Carlyle speaks of seeing him "vanish like an angel" from his lonely Scotch
home.
CHAPTER IV 78
Emerson died in 1882 and was buried near Hawthorne, in Sleepy Hollow cemetery at Concord, on the "hilltop
hearsed 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.
[Illustration: EMERSON'S GRAVE, CONCORD]
In 1836 he published a small volume entitled 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 Assyria; 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 God" 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
CHAPTER IV 79
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 God 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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]