Emerson and Other Essays written by John Jay Chapman
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John Jay Chapman >> Emerson and Other Essays
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11 EMERSON
AND OTHER ESSAYS
BY
JOHN JAY CHAPMAN
AMS PRESS
NEW YORK
_Second Printing 1969_
Reprinted from the edition of 1899, New York
First AMS EDITION published 1965
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 75-108126
SEN: 404-00619-1
CONTENTS
EMERSON 3
WALT WHITMAN 111
A STUDY OF ROMEO 131
MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS 153
THE FOURTH CANTO OF THE INFERNO 173
ROBERT BROWNING 185
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 217
EMERSON
I
"Leave this hypocritical prating about the masses. Masses are rude,
lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need
not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede
anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and
draw individuals out of them. The worst of charity is that the lives
you are asked to preserve are not worth preserving. Masses! The
calamity is the masses. I do not wish any mass at all, but honest
men only, lovely, sweet, accomplished women only, and no
shovel-handed, narrow-brained, gin-drinking million stockingers or
lazzaroni at all. If government knew how, I should like to see it
check, not multiply the population. When it reaches its true law of
action, every man that is born will be hailed as essential. Away
with this hurrah of masses, and let us have the considerate vote of
single men spoken on their honor and their conscience."
This extract from The Conduct of Life gives fairly enough the leading
thought of Emerson's life. The unending warfare between the individual
and society shows us in each generation a poet or two, a dramatist or a
musician who exalts and deifies the individual, and leads us back again
to the only object which is really worthy of enthusiasm or which can
permanently excite it,--the character of a man. It is surprising to find
this identity of content in all great deliverances. The only thing we
really admire is personal liberty. Those who fought for it and those who
enjoyed it are our heroes.
But the hero may enslave his race by bringing in a system of tyranny;
the battle-cry of freedom may become a dogma which crushes the soul; one
good custom may corrupt the world. And so the inspiration of one age
becomes the damnation of the next. This crystallizing of life into death
has occurred so often that it may almost be regarded as one of the laws
of progress.
Emerson represents a protest against the tyranny of democracy. He is the
most recent example of elemental hero-worship. His opinions are
absolutely unqualified except by his temperament. He expresses a form of
belief in the importance of the individual which is independent of any
personal relations he has with the world. It is as if a man had been
withdrawn from the earth and dedicated to condensing and embodying this
eternal idea--the value of the individual soul--so vividly, so vitally,
that his words could not die, yet in such illusive and abstract forms
that by no chance and by no power could his creed be used for purposes
of tyranny. Dogma cannot be extracted from it. Schools cannot be built
on it. It either lives as the spirit lives, or else it evaporates and
leaves nothing. Emerson was so afraid of the letter that killeth that he
would hardly trust his words to print. He was assured there was no such
thing as literal truth, but only literal falsehood. He therefore
resorted to metaphors which could by no chance be taken literally. And
he has probably succeeded in leaving a body of work which cannot be made
to operate to any other end than that for which he designed it. If this
be true, he has accomplished the inconceivable feat of eluding
misconception. If it be true, he stands alone in the history of
teachers; he has circumvented fate, he has left an unmixed blessing
behind him.
The signs of those times which brought forth Emerson are not wholly
undecipherable. They are the same times which gave rise to every
character of significance during the period before the war. Emerson is
indeed the easiest to understand of all the men of his time, because his
life is freest from the tangles and qualifications of circumstance. He
is a sheer and pure type and creature of destiny, and the
unconsciousness that marks his development allies him to the deepest
phenomena. It is convenient, in describing him, to use language which
implies consciousness on his part, but he himself had no purpose, no
theory of himself; he was a product.
The years between 1820 and 1830 were the most pitiable through which
this country has ever passed. The conscience of the North was pledged to
the Missouri Compromise, and that Compromise neither slumbered nor
slept. In New England, where the old theocratical oligarchy of the
colonies had survived the Revolution and kept under its own waterlocks
the new flood of trade, the conservatism of politics reinforced the
conservatism of religion; and as if these two inquisitions were not
enough to stifle the soul of man, the conservatism of business
self-interest was superimposed. The history of the conflicts which
followed has been written by the radicals, who negligently charge up to
self-interest all the resistance which establishments offer to change.
But it was not solely self-interest, it was conscience that backed the
Missouri Compromise, nowhere else, naturally, so strongly as in New
England. It was conscience that made cowards of us all. The white-lipped
generation of Edward Everett were victims, one might even say martyrs,
to conscience. They suffered the most terrible martyrdom that can fall
to man, a martyrdom which injured their immortal volition and dried up
the springs of life. If it were not that our poets have too seldom
deigned to dip into real life, I do not know what more awful subject for
a poem could have been found than that of the New England judge
enforcing the fugitive slave law. For lack of such a poem the heroism of
these men has been forgotten, the losing heroism of conservatism. It was
this spiritual power of a committed conscience which met the new forces
as they arose, and it deserves a better name than these new forces
afterward gave it. In 1830 the social fruits of these heavy conditions
could be seen in the life of the people. Free speech was lost.
"I know no country," says Tocqueville, who was here in 1831, "in which
there is so little independence of mind and freedom of discussion as in
America." Tocqueville recurs to the point again and again. He cannot
disguise his surprise at it, and it tinged his whole philosophy and his
book. The timidity of the Americans of this era was a thing which
intelligent foreigners could not understand. Miss Martineau wrote in her
Autobiography: "It was not till months afterwards that I was told that
there were two reasons why I was not invited there [Chelsea] as
elsewhere. One reason was that I had avowed, in reply to urgent
questions, that I was disappointed in an oration of Mr. Everett's; and
another was that I had publicly condemned the institution of slavery. I
hope the Boston people have outgrown the childishness of sulking at
opinions not in either case volunteered, but obtained by pressure. But
really, the subservience to opinion at that time seemed a sort of
mania."
The mania was by no means confined to Boston, but qualified this period
of our history throughout the Northern States. There was no literature.
"If great writers have not at present 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," wrote Tocqueville. There were no amusements, neither music nor
sport nor pastime, indoors or out of doors. The whole life of the
community was a life of the intelligence, and upon the intelligence lay
the weight of intellectual tyranny. The pressure kept on increasing, and
the suppressed forces kept on increasing, till at last, as if to show
what gigantic power was needed to keep conservatism dominant, the
Merchant Province put forward Daniel Webster.
The worst period of panic seems to have preceded the anti-slavery
agitations of 1831, because these agitations soon demonstrated that the
sky did not fall nor the earth yawn and swallow Massachusetts because of
Mr. Garrison's opinions, as most people had sincerely believed would be
the case. Some semblance of free speech was therefore gradually
regained.
Let us remember the world upon which the young Emerson's eyes opened.
The South was a plantation. The North crooked the hinges of the knee
where thrift might follow fawning. It was the era of Martin Chuzzlewit,
a malicious caricature,--founded on fact. This time of humiliation, when
there was no free speech, no literature, little manliness, no reality,
no simplicity, no accomplishment, was the era of American brag. We
flattered the foreigner and we boasted of ourselves. We were
over-sensitive, insolent, and cringing. As late as 1845, G.P. Putnam, a
most sensible and modest man, published a book to show what the country
had done in the field of culture. The book is a monument of the age.
With all its good sense and good humor, it justifies foreign contempt
because it is explanatory. Underneath everything lay a feeling of
unrest, an instinct,--"this country cannot permanently endure half slave
and half free,"--which was the truth, but which could not be uttered.
So long as there is any subject which men may not freely discuss, they
are timid upon all subjects. They wear an iron crown and talk in
whispers. Such social conditions crush and maim the individual, and
throughout New England, as throughout the whole North, the individual
was crushed and maimed.
The generous youths who came to manhood between 1820 and 1830, while
this deadly era was maturing, seem to have undergone a revulsion against
the world almost before touching it; at least two of them suffered,
revolted, and condemned, while still boys sitting on benches in school,
and came forth advancing upon this old society like gladiators. The
activity of William Lloyd Garrison, the man of action, preceded by
several years that of Emerson, who is his prophet. Both of them were
parts of one revolution. One of Emerson's articles of faith was that a
man's thoughts spring from his actions rather than his actions from his
thoughts, and possibly the same thing holds good for society at large.
Perhaps all truths, whether moral or economic, must be worked out in
real life before they are discovered by the student, and it was
therefore necessary that Garrison should be evolved earlier than
Emerson.
The silent years of early manhood, during which Emerson passed through
the Divinity School and to his ministry, known by few, understood by
none, least of all by himself, were years in which the revolting spirit
of an archangel thought out his creed. He came forth perfect, with that
serenity of which we have scarce another example in history,--that union
of the man himself, his beliefs, and his vehicle of expression that
makes men great because it makes them comprehensible. The philosophy
into which he had already transmuted all his earlier theology at the
time we first meet him consisted of a very simple drawing together of a
few ideas, all of which had long been familiar to the world. It is the
wonderful use he made of these ideas, the closeness with which they
fitted his soul, the tact with which he took what he needed, like a bird
building its nest, that make the originality, the man.
The conclusion of Berkeley, that the external world is known to us only
through our impressions, and that therefore, for aught we know, the
whole universe exists only in our own consciousness, cannot be
disproved. It is so simple a conception that a child may understand it;
and it has probably been passed before the attention of every thinking
man since Plato's time. The notion is in itself a mere philosophical
catch or crux to which there is no answer. It may be true. The mystics
made this doctrine useful. They were not content to doubt the
independent existence of the external world. They imagined that this
external world, the earth, the planets, the phenomena of nature, bore
some relation to the emotions and destiny of the soul. The soul and the
cosmos were somehow related, and related so intimately that the cosmos
might be regarded as a sort of projection or diagram of the soul.
Plato was the first man who perceived that this idea could be made to
provide the philosopher with a vehicle of expression more powerful than
any other. If a man will once plant himself firmly on the proposition
that _he is_ the universe, that every emotion or expression of his mind
is correlated in some way to phenomena in the external world, and that
he shall say how correlated, he is in a position where the power of
speech is at a maximum. His figures of speech, his tropes, his
witticisms, take rank with the law of gravity and the precession of the
equinoxes. Philosophical exaltation of the individual cannot go beyond
this point. It is the climax.
This is the school of thought to which Emerson belonged. The sun and
moon, the planets, are mere symbols. They signify whatever the poet
chooses. The planets for the most part stay in conjunction just long
enough to flash his thought through their symbolism, and no permanent
relation is established between the soul and the zodiac. There is,
however, one link of correlation between the external and internal
worlds which Emerson considered established, and in which he believed
almost literally, namely, the moral law. This idea he drew from Kant
through Coleridge and Wordsworth, and it is so familiar to us all that
it hardly needs stating. The fancy that the good, the true, the
beautiful,--all things of which we instinctively approve,--are somehow
connected together and are really one thing; that our appreciation of
them is in its essence the recognition of a law; that this law, in fact
all law and the very idea of law, is a mere subjective experience; and
that hence any external sequence which we cooerdinate and name, like the
law of gravity, is really intimately connected with our moral
nature,--this fancy has probably some basis of truth. Emerson adopted it
as a corner-stone of his thought.
Such are the ideas at the basis of Emerson's philosophy, and it is fair
to speak of them in this place because they antedate everything else
which we know of him. They had been for years in his mind before he
spoke at all. It was in the armor of this invulnerable idealism and with
weapons like shafts of light that he came forth to fight.
In 1836, at the age of thirty-three, Emerson published the little
pamphlet called Nature, which was an attempt to state his creed.
Although still young, he was not without experience of life. He had been
assistant minister to the Rev. Dr. Ware from 1829 to 1832, when he
resigned his ministry on account of his views regarding the Lord's
Supper. He had married and lost his first wife in the same interval. He
had been abroad and had visited Carlyle in 1833. He had returned and
settled in Concord, and had taken up the profession of lecturing, upon
which he in part supported himself ever after. It is unnecessary to
review these early lectures. "Large portions of them," says Mr. Cabot,
his biographer, "appeared afterwards in the Essays, especially those of
the first series." Suffice it that through them Emerson had become so
well known that although Nature was published anonymously, he was
recognized as the author. Many people had heard of him at the time he
resigned his charge, and the story went abroad that the young minister
of the Second Church had gone mad. The lectures had not discredited the
story, and Nature seemed to corroborate it. Such was the impression
which the book made upon Boston in 1836. As we read it to-day, we are
struck by its extraordinary beauty of language. It is a supersensuous,
lyrical, and sincere rhapsody, written evidently by a man of genius. It
reveals a nature compelling respect,--a Shelley, and yet a sort of
Yankee Shelley, who is mad only when the wind is nor'-nor'west; a mature
nature which must have been nourished for years upon its own thoughts,
to speak this new language so eloquently, to stand so calmly on its
feet. The deliverance of his thought is so perfect that this work adapts
itself to our mood and has the quality of poetry. This fluency Emerson
soon lost; it is the quality missing in his poetry. It is the
efflorescence of youth.
"In good health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue. Crossing
a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky,
without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good
fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the
brink of fear. In the woods, too, a man casts off his years, as the
snake his slough, and at what period soever of life is always a
child. In the woods is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of
God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed,
and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand
years.... It is the uniform effect of culture on the human mind, not
to shake our faith in the stability of particular phenomena, as
heat, water, azote; but to lead us to regard nature as phenomenon,
not a substance; to attribute necessary existence to spirit; to
esteem nature as an accident and an effect."
Perhaps these quotations from the pamphlet called Nature are enough to
show the clouds of speculation in which Emerson had been walking. With
what lightning they were charged was soon seen.
In 1837 he was asked to deliver the Phi Beta Kappa oration at Cambridge.
This was the opportunity for which he had been waiting. The mystic and
eccentric young poet-preacher now speaks his mind, and he turns out to
be a man exclusively interested in real life. This recluse, too tender
for contact with the rough facts of the world, whose conscience has
retired him to rural Concord, pours out a vial of wrath. This cub puts
forth the paw of a full-grown lion.
Emerson has left behind him nothing stronger than this address, The
American Scholar. It was the first application of his views to the
events of his day, written and delivered in the heat of early manhood
while his extraordinary powers were at their height. It moves with a
logical progression of which he soon lost the habit. The subject of it,
the scholar's relation to the world, was the passion of his life. The
body of his belief is to be found in this address, and in any adequate
account of him the whole address ought to be given.
"Thus far," he said, "our holiday has been simply a friendly sign of the
survival of the love of letters amongst a people too busy to give to
letters any more. As such it is precious as the sign of an
indestructible instinct. Perhaps the time is already come when it ought
to be, and will be, something else; when the sluggard intellect of this
continent will look from under its iron lids and fill the postponed
expectation of the world with something better than the exertions of
mechanical skill.... The theory of books is noble. The scholar of the
first age received into him the world around; brooded thereon; gave it
the new arrangement of his own mind, and uttered it again. It came into
him life; it went out from him truth.... Yet hence arises a grave
mischief. The sacredness which attaches to the act of creation, the act
of thought, is transferred to the record. The poet chanting was felt to
be a divine man: henceforth the chant is divine, also. The writer was a
just and wise spirit: henceforward it is settled the book is perfect; as
love of the hero corrupts into worship of his statue. Instantly the book
becomes noxious: the guide is a tyrant.... Books are the best of things,
well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the
one end which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to
inspire.... The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul.
This every man is entitled to; this every man contains within him,
although in almost all men obstructed, and as yet unborn. The soul
active sees absolute truth and utters truth, or creates. In this action
it is genius; not the privilege of here and there a favorite, but the
sound estate of every man.... Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of
genius by over-influence. The literature of every nation bears me
witness. The English dramatic poets have Shakspearized now for two
hundred years.... These being his functions, it becomes him to feel all
confidence in himself, and to defer never to the popular cry. He, and he
only, knows the world. The world of any moment is the merest appearance.
Some great decorum, some fetish of a government, some ephemeral trade,
or war, or man, is cried up by half mankind and cried down by the other
half, as if all depended on this particular up or down. The odds are
that the whole question is not worth the poorest thought which the
scholar has lost in listening to the controversy. Let him not quit his
belief that a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient and honorable of
the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom."
Dr. Holmes called this speech of Emerson's our "intellectual
Declaration of Independence," and indeed it was. "The Phi Beta Kappa
speech," says Mr. Lowell, "was an event without any former parallel in
our literary annals,--a scene always to be treasured in the memory for
its picturesqueness and its inspiration. What crowded and breathless
aisles, what windows clustering with eager heads, what enthusiasm of
approval, what grim silence of foregone dissent!"
The authorities of the Divinity School can hardly have been very careful
readers of Nature and The American Scholar, or they would not have
invited Emerson, in 1838, to deliver the address to the graduating
class. This was Emerson's second opportunity to apply his beliefs
directly to society. A few lines out of the famous address are enough to
show that he saw in the church of his day signs of the same decadence
that he saw in the letters: "The prayers and even the dogmas of our
church are like the zodiac of Denderah and the astronomical monuments of
the Hindoos, wholly insulated from anything now extant in the life and
business of the people. They mark the height to which the waters once
rose.... 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. None believeth in the soul
of man, but only in some man or person old and departed. Ah me! no man
goeth alone. All men go in flocks to this saint or that poet, avoiding
the God who seeth in secret. They cannot see in secret; they love to be
blind in public. They think society wiser than their soul, and know not
that one soul, and their soul, is wiser than the whole world."
It is almost misleading to speak of the lofty utterances of these early
addresses as attacks upon society, but their reception explains them.
The element of absolute courage is the same in all natures. Emerson
himself was not unconscious of what function he was performing.
The "storm in our wash-bowl" which followed this Divinity School
address, the letters of remonstrance from friends, the advertisements by
the Divinity School of "no complicity," must have been cheering to
Emerson. His unseen yet dominating ambition is shown throughout the
address, and in this note in his diary of the following year:--
"_August_ 31. Yesterday at the Phi Beta Kappa anniversary. Steady,
steady. I am convinced that if a man will be a true scholar he
shall have perfect freedom. The young people and the mature hint at
odium and the aversion of forces to be presently encountered in
society. I say No; I fear it not."
The lectures and addresses which form the latter half of the first
volume in the collected edition show the early Emerson in the ripeness
of his powers. These writings have a lyrical sweep and a beauty which
the later works often lack. Passages in them remind us of Hamlet:--
"How silent, how spacious, what room for all, yet without space to
insert an atom;--in graceful succession, in equal fulness, in
balanced beauty, the dance of the hours goes forward still. Like an
odor of incense, like a strain of music, like a sleep, it is inexact
and boundless. It will not be dissected, nor unravelled, nor
shown.... The great Pan of old, who was clothed in a leopard skin to
signify the beautiful variety of things and the firmament, his coat
of stars,--was but the representative of thee, O rich and various
man! thou palace of sight and sound, carrying in thy senses the
morning and the night and the unfathomable galaxy; in thy brain, the
geometry of the City of God; in thy heart, the bower of love and the
realms of right and wrong.... Every star in heaven is discontent
and insatiable. Gravitation and chemistry cannot content them. Ever
they woo and court the eye of the beholder. Every man who comes into
the world they seek to fascinate and possess, to pass into his mind,
for they desire to republish themselves in a more delicate world
than that they occupy.... So it is with all immaterial objects.
These beautiful basilisks set their brute glorious eyes on the eye
of every child, and, if they can, cause their nature to pass through
his wondering eyes into him, and so all things are mixed."
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