Emerson, RALPH WALDO, poet and essayist, born in Boston, United States of America, May 25, 1803; died in Concord, Massachusetts, April 27, 1882. He came of what his own people would call the best New England stock, namely, from a long line of educated and respected ministers. His father was settled over a Boston congregation: an able preacher and an accomplished man of letters. His mother was a woman of high qualities and dignified bearing; his aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, who influenced him very strongly, was a strikingly original and a very cultivated woman. He was the third of seven children; two of his brothers, Edward and Charles, were distinguished for ability, but both died before middle age. His birthplace was within a few minutes' walk of that of 'the great Bostonian,' Benjamin Franklin. His father died when he was six years old, leaving his family in a straitened condition. At eight years old he entered the public grammar-school, and soon afterwards the Latin school. At the age of ten or eleven he was turning Virgil into English heroic verse, was fond of reading history, loved the study of Greek, and was given to frequent rhyming. He thinks the idle books under the bench at the Latin school were as profitable to him as the regular studies. One of his early schoolmates remembered him as 'a spiritual-looking boy in blue nankeens,' whom he loved when he looked upon him, he thought him 'so angelic and remarkable.'
Emerson did not take a very high rank in his college class, that which graduated at Harvard in 1821. He took a second prize, however, for an essay in English, and was chosen class poet after several others had declined. His college career had nothing of the singular brilliancy which characterised that of his brothers Edward and Charles. After graduating he kept school in different places, at the same time studying divinity under the direction of Dr Channing, and attending some of the lectures given at the Harvard Divinity School, the chief Unitarian theological seminary. He was grave, gentle, dignified as a teacher, never punishing except by words. He used to give the boys selections for reading—something from Plutarch's Lives, for instance—to carry home with them. In 1826 he was 'approved to preach' by the Middlesex Association of Ministers, and after preaching in several pulpits—at the south, where he was obliged to go for his health, at New Bedford, at Northampton—he was, on the 11th of March 1829, settled as colleague with the Rev. Henry Ware, minister of the Second Church in Boston. In September of the same year he was married to Miss Ellen Louisa Tucker, who died, without leaving any children, in 1832. In this same year he preached a sermon in which he announced certain views with regard to the Lord's Supper which were disapproved by the larger part of his congregation. This sermon is the only one of his ever printed. In consequence of the difference of opinion between himself and his parishioners, he found it impossible to continue in the relation which had been harmonious and happy, and thus, with the most friendly feelings on both sides, he left the pulpit of the Second Church, and found himself obliged to make a beginning in a new career.
In 1833 he made a first visit to Europe, of which he has given a brief account in the work entitled English Traits. On his return he preached in different pulpits, and began devoting himself to delivering lectures and writing essays. His first
Copyright 1889 in U.S. by J. B. Lippincott Company. subjects were 'Water' and 'Relation of Man to the Globe'—hardly such as we should have expected from the spiritual philosopher and poet, his acquaintance with the physical sciences being apparently very limited. But he wished to make good the loss of his salary, and lectured on branches of knowledge in which he knew he could interest the public. After a short experience he ventured on subjects more congenial to his past studies and habits of thought—Michael Angelo, Milton, Luther, George Fox, and Edmund Burke. In 1834 Emerson fixed his residence at Concord, a pleasant farming town in Middlesex county, Massachusetts, famous for having been the scene of the opening conflict of the revolution. He lived at first in an old 'gambrel-roofed' house built by his grandfather, the Rev. William Emerson, and afterwards celebrated as the 'Old Manse' of one of Hawthorne's stories, and the place where for a time he resided. In 1835 he married his second wife, Miss Lydia Jackson of Plymouth, Massachusetts. After this marriage, Mr and Mrs Emerson removed to the house which he purchased, where he passed the rest of his days. His widow, born 1802, died 13th November 1892.
During several successive years he delivered courses of lectures in Boston; in 1835 ten lectures on English literature, in 1836 twelve lectures on the philosophy of history, in 1837 ten lectures on human culture.
Emerson made the personal acquaintance of Carlyle during his first visit to Europe in 1833. Carlyle was then living at Craigenputtock, where Emerson sought him out, and passed time enough with him for some conversation, of which he has given an account in the first chapter of English Traits. In the next year, 1834, a letter from Emerson to Carlyle began a correspondence which continued nearly forty years, closing with the letter from Carlyle to Emerson, dated April 2, 1872. This correspondence, which has been carefully edited by Professor Charles Eliot Norton, shows the two men with all their characteristics; different as optimist and pessimist, yet with many profound sympathies with each other. Emerson was very desirous of having Carlyle come to stay with him at Concord. It would have been a dangerous experiment in vital chemistry—hydrofluoric acid in a vessel of glass. The deaths of Emerson's younger brothers, Edward in 1834, and Charles in 1836, produced a very deep impression on his affectionate nature. He had a true admiration for both of them, which they well deserved. The youngest, Charles Chauncy Emerson, well remembered by the present writer, stands apart from all the young men he has known for the elevation and beauty of his intellect and character.
In 1836 a thin volume was published, entitled Nature, which, though appearing anonymously, was at once known as coming from Emerson. Like his early poems, it was read by few, understood by fewer still, little thought of or cared for by the general reading public, but made much of by a small circle of admirers. It is a kind of poetical rhapsody—prose with wings growing, but not strong enough to lift it into the atmosphere of rhythmical music. To those who like naturally, or have acquired the taste for, the Emersonian modes of thought and expression, it is fascinating. But it took twelve years to sell five hundred copies. The germs of many of Emerson's thoughts, afterwards expanded in his essays and poems, may be found in this dreamy little volume.
Nature was followed by 'The American Scholar,' an oration delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard University. Few anniversary addresses have attracted so much attention. Mr Lowell says of it that 'its delivery was an event without any former parallel in our literary annals, a scene to be always treasured in the memory for its picturesqueness and its inspiration.' This grand oration was our intellectual declaration of independence. The orator did not spare his fellow-countrymen. 'We have listened too much,' he says, 'to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the American freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame. The scholar is decent, indolent, complacent.' The young men of promise, he says, are discouraged and disheartened. 'What is the remedy? If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts and there abide, the huge world will come round to him. Patience—patience; with the shades of all the good and great for company; and for solace the perspective of your own infinite life; and for work the study and the communication of principles, the making those instincts prevalent, the conversion of the world.'
These two publications, the first in the series of his collected works, strike the keynote of his philosophical, poetical, and moral teachings. The 'Address before the senior class in Divinity College, Cambridge, July 1838,' which follows them, defined his position in, or out of, the church in which he had been a minister. Two or three sentences will sufficiently show where he stood: 'One man was true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth to take possession of his world. He said in this jubilee of sublime emotion, "I am divine. Through me God acts; through me speaks." . . . There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by the Understanding. The Understanding caught this high chant from the poet's lips and said, in the next age, "This was Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will kill you if you say he was a man." In its simplest and broadest statement this discourse was a plea for the individual consciousness as against all historical creeds, bibles, churches; for the soul of each man as the supreme judge in spiritual matters. The delivery and publication of this address produced a great sensation in the religious world, especially among the Unitarians. Professor Andrews Norton attacked Mr Emerson's position in an article entitled 'The Latest Form of Infidelity.' Much controversy followed, in which Emerson took no part. He was not in the habit of defending his oracular statements. Delphi is not given to argument and explanation.
Whosoever has read carefully and lovingly these three essays, Nature, the Phi Beta Kappa Oration, and the Divinity School Address, can almost say of Emerson what he makes the Sphinx say of herself:
Who telleth one of my meanings
Is master of all I am.
These three essays take up about one-third of the first volume of his collected works, which are eleven in all. The titles of these volumes are as follow: Vol. i. Nature; Addresses and Lectures; ii. and iii. Essays, first and second series; iv. Representative Men; v. English Traits; vi. The Conduct of Life; vii. Society and Solitude; viii. Letters and Social Aims; ix. Poems; x. Lectures and Biographical Sketches; xi. Miscellanies. These titles, and the more special ones which are included within them, give a very imperfect and unsatisfying idea of the contents of the eleven volumes. If these were taken to pieces, and their leaves thrown into a basket or barrel and shaken up, they might be taken out and rearranged in a dozen different ways, and yet have cohesion enough to make almost as intelligible consecutive reading as they are in their present order. Their arrangement under their different heads is nearly as arbitrary as that of certain stars which are grouped under the name of Corona, or Lyra, or Andromeda. His son, Dr Edward Emerson, gave this account of his way of building his lectures in a paper, to the reading of which I had the privilege of listening: 'All through his life he kept a journal. . . . This book, he said, was his "Savings Bank." The thoughts thus received and garnered in his journals were indexed, and a great many of them appeared in his published works. They were religiously set down just as they came, in no order except chronological, but later they were grouped, enlarged or pruned, illustrated, worked into a lecture or discourse, and after having in this capacity undergone repeated testing and rearranging, were finally carefully sifted and more rigidly pruned, and were printed as essays.'
We can easily understand that in adjusting his mosaic fragments to each other there are likely to be occasional misfits which puzzle weary eyes and brains. Still, there are subtle connections oftentimes in thoughts which at first sight seem unrelated, and the pious reader of Emerson will always find it worth while to seek for them, though some of them may be 'hard for the non-elect to understand.'
Emerson wrote occasionally in verse from his schooldays until he had reached the age which used to be known as 'the grand climacteric,' sixty-three. Terminus, which he read to his son in 1866, is, so far as I know, the last poem he wrote. It is a farewell to his literary life, though he made some efforts in after-years. His poems are to his prose what the corolla is to the calyx. Both spring from the same root; both are modifications of the same growth; the sepal often shows the delicacy and colour of the petal, and the petal often lapses into the homelier texture and complexion of the sepal. His poems are not and hardly can become popular; they are not meant to be liked by the many, but to be dearly loved and cherished by the few. Such poems as The Problem, Fate, and Days, once rightly read, are never forgotten. The influence of Marvell, of George Herbert, of the Persian poets, of whom he was very fond, may be frequently traced; but the writer he most reminds us of, whatever he writes, is—Emerson. His occasional lawlessness in technical construction, his sometimes fantastic expressions, his enigmatic obscurities hardly detract from the pleasant surprise his verses so often bring with them. His teachings have not always had a wholesome effect on his train of imitators and followers in poetry, or what was meant for poetry. It was very well for him to find fault with 'the tinkle of piano-strings,' and say that
The kingly bard
Must strike the strings rudely and hard
As with hammer or with mace;
but if a self-crowned 'kingly bard' undertakes to play on the harp or piano with his fists instead of his fingers, we must beg leave to stop our ears. The magnificent lawlessness of 'Lord' Timothy Dexter in punctuation is a bad precedent for poets to follow in composition. The poetic license which we allow in the verse of Emerson is more than excused by the noble spirit which makes us forget its occasional blemishes, sometimes to be pleased with them as characteristic of the writer.
The idealist in philosophy, the rationalist in religion, the bold advocate of spiritual independence, of intuition as a divine guidance, of instinct as a heaven-born impulse, of individualism in its fullest extent, making each life a kind of theocratic egoism; all this may be seen in every one of his larger utterances. For him nature is a sphinx, written all over with hieroglyphics for which the spirit of man is to find the key. To interpret nature is the province of the thinker, and especially of the poet—not as Bacon intends, by the analysis of phenomena—'natural philosophy'—but by detecting the higher, hidden significance of all natural appearances. He had learned from his wise relative, Aunt Mary Moody Emerson, to 'scorn trifles;' he bettered his lesson by teaching that man is made to scorn heaven itself if a higher empyrean is offered to him.
The fiend that man harries
Is love of the Best. . . .
The heaven that now draws him
With sweetness untold
Once found—for new heavens
He spurneth the old.
Throughout his lectures and essays are scattered wise sayings, shrewd observations, delicate strokes of wit, curious gleanings from his widely discursive reading, and eloquent imaginative passages. But above all the special virtues to be found in his writings in prose and in verse we must recognise the sense of being in relation with a pure and lofty spiritual nature. 'Love of the Best' breathes in every expression of his thought. His writings must be read for their inspiring influence, their stimulus to high thought and endeavour, the noble manhood which pervades them. Recognising these as the chief claims of Emerson's essays and poems, we can delight in their singular and distinctive beauty of expression, their delicate wit, their iridescent variety of unexpected suggestions, their unaffected and often unconscious archaisms, which carry the reader's imagination back to his favourite Montaigne, their happy illustrations, their self-sustaining wisdom.
Emerson loved his quiet Concord life, the repose of which was, however, constantly broken by more or less welcome visitors, who sought him as an oracle. He was long-suffering with those 'devastators of the day,' as he called them, each of whom thinks of himself or herself as a privileged intruder. He travelled far and wide as a lecturer. In English Traits he has recorded not so much what he saw as what he thought while visiting England and Scotland, and in reflecting on his tour after his return. At home he was, according to village evidence, 'a first-rate neighbour, and one who always kept his fences up.'
Emerson was strongly opposed to slavery, but not conspicuous as an abolitionist. He would have bought out the slave-holders, and if men did not cling closer to their money than they do to their lives, his idea might have had some reason in it. He looked on at the 'Brook Farm' experiment with a kind of amused interest, but took no active part in the project. He listened to the long-haired reformers who swarmed at one time about the Chardon Street Chapel with a kindly curiosity, but his sense of humour as well as his good judgment was his safeguard, and he was not to be betrayed into any fanatical extravagance.
His personal appearance was that of the typical New Englander of college-bred ancestry. Tall, spare, slender, with sloping shoulders, slightly stooping in his later years, with light hair and eyes, the scholar's complexion, the prominent, somewhat arched nose which belongs to many of the New England sub-species, thin lips, suggestive of delicacy, but having nothing like primness, still less of the rigidity which is often noticeable in the generation succeeding next to that of the men in their shirt-sleeves, he would have been noticed anywhere as one evidently a scholarly thinker astray from the alcove or the study, which were his natural habitats. His voice was very sweet, and penetrating without any loudness or mark of effort. His enunciation was beautifully clear, but he often hesitated as if waiting for the right word to present itself. His manner was very quiet, his smile was pleasant, but he did not like explosive laughter any better than Hawthorne did. None who met him can fail to recall that serene and kindly presence, in which there was mingled a certain spiritual remoteness with the most benign human welcome to all who were privileged to enjoy his companionship.
Much has been written about Emerson during his life and since his death. Some of the principal sources of information about him are A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, by James Elliot Cabot (Houghton & Mifflin, Boston and New York, 1887), which is the authoritative Life of Emerson, by his literary executors; Ralph Waldo Emerson, Life, Writings, and Philosophy, by G. W. Cooke (James R. Osgood & Co., Boston, 1882); Emerson at Home and Abroad, by Moncure Daniel Conway (James R. Osgood & Co., Boston, 1882); Ralph Waldo Emerson, a Biographical Sketch, by Alexander Ireland (Simpkin, Marshall & Co., Lond. 1882); Ralph Waldo Emerson, in 'American Men of Letters,' by Oliver Wendell Holmes (Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston, 1885); Emerson in Concord, by his son Edward Waldo Emerson, a most interesting personal memoir (Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston, 1889). Emerson's complete works, edited by James Elliot Cabot, are published in a uniform edition, making eleven duodecimo volumes, by Messrs Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston, U.S., and by Macmillan & Co., London, in six volumes, with preface by John Morley.