Part 15
He was in effect one of the most respected, sagacious, prosperous and virtuous villagers of Concord. Some slight departures from common custom he tranquilly tested and as tranquilly abandoned. He tried vegetarianism for a while, but gave it up when he found that it did him no good. He attempted to introduce domestic democracy by having the servants sit at table with the rest of the household, but was readily induced to abandon the experiment by the protest of his two sensible hired girls against such an inconvenient arrangement. He began to practise a theory that manual labour should form part of the scholar’s life, but was checked by the personal discovery that hard work in the garden meant poor work in the study. “The writer shall not dig,” was his conclusion. Intellectual freedom was what he chiefly desired; and this he found could best be attained in an inconspicuous manner of living and dressing, not noticeably different from that of the average college professor or country minister.
Here you see the man “in his habit as he lived,” (and as thousands of lecture-audiences saw him,) pictured in the old photograph which illustrates this chapter. Here is the familiar _décor_ of the photographer’s studio: the curtain draped with a cord and tassel, the muslin screen background, and probably that hidden instrument of torture, the “head-rest,” behind the tall, posed figure. Here are the solemn “swallow-tail coat,” the conventional cravat, and the black satin waistcoat. Yet even this antique “carte de visite,” it seems to me, suggests something more and greater,—the imperturbable, kindly presence, the noble face, the angelic look, the serene manner, the penetrating and revealing quality of the man who set out to be “a friend to all who wished to live in the spirit.”
Whatever the titles of his lectures,—_Man the Reformer_, _The Method of Nature_, _The Conduct of Life_, _Fate_, _Compensation_, _Prudence_, _The Present Age_, _Society and Solitude_,—his main theme is always the same, “namely the infinitude of the private man.” But this private man of Emerson’s, mark you, is linked by invisible ties to all Nature and carries in his breast a spark of the undying fire which is of God. Hence he is at his best when he feels not only his personal _unity_ but also his universal _community_, when he relies on himself and at the same time cries
“I yield myself to the perfect whole.”
This kind of independence is the truest form of obedience.
The charm of Emerson’s way of presenting his thought comes from the spirit of poetry in the man. He does not argue, nor threaten, nor often exhort; he reveals what he has seen or heard, for you to make what you will of it. He relies less on syllogisms than on imagery, symbols, metaphors. His utterance is as inspirational as the ancient oracle of Delphi, but he shuns the contortions of the priestess at that shrine.
The clearness and symmetry of his sentences, the modulations of his thrilling voice, the radiance of his fine features and his understanding smile, even his slight hesitations and pauses over his manuscript as he read, lent a singular attraction to his speech. Those who were mistrustful of his views on theology and the church, listened to him with delight when he poetized on art, politics, literature, human society and the natural world. To the finest men and women of America in the mid-Victorian epoch he was the lecturer _par excellence_, the intellectual awakener and liberator, the messenger calling them to break away from dull, thoughtless, formal ways of doing things, and live freely in harmony with the laws of God and their own spirit. They heard him gladly.
I wonder how he would fare to-day, when lecturers, male or female, have to make a loud noise to get a hearing.
II
Emerson’s books, prose and verse, remain with us and still live,—“the precious life-blood of a masterspirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.” That they are companionable is proved by the way all sorts of companionable people love them. I know a Pullman car conductor who swears by Emerson. A young French Canadian woodsman, (who is going to work his way through college,) told me the other day that he liked Emerson’s essays better than any other English book that he had read. Restive girls and boys of the “new generation” find something in him which appeals to them; reading farmers of New England and the West prefer him to Plato; even academic professors and politicians qualifying for statesmen feel his stimulating and liberating influence, although (or perhaps because) he sometimes says such hard things about them. I guess that nothing yet written in America is likely to live longer than Emerson’s best work.
His prose is better known and more admired than his verse, for several reasons: first, because he took more pains to make the form of it as perfect as he could; second, because it has a wider range and an easier utterance; third, because it has more touches of wit and of familiarity with the daily doings of men; and finally, because the majority of readers probably prefer prose for silent reading, since the full charm of good verse is revealed only in reading aloud.
But for all that, with Emerson, (as with a writer so different as Matthew Arnold,) I find something in the poems which is not in the essays,—a more pure and subtle essence of what is deepest in the man. Poetry has a power of compression which is beyond prose. It says less and suggests more.
Emerson wrote to the girl whom he afterwards married: “I am born a poet,—of a low class without doubt, but a poet.... My singing, to be sure, is very husky and is for the most part in prose. Still I am a poet in the sense of a perceiver and dear lover of the harmonies that are in the soul and in matter, and specially of the correspondence between them.” This is penetrating self-criticism. That he was “of a low class” as poet is more than doubtful,—an error of modesty. But that his singing was often “husky” cannot be denied. He never troubled himself to learn the art of song. The music of verse, in which Longfellow gained such mastery, and Lowell and Whittier had such native gifts, is not often found in Emerson’s poetry. His measures rarely flow with freedom and harmony. They are alternately stiff and spasmodic, and the rhymes are sometimes threadbare, sometimes eccentric. Many of his poems are so condensed, so tight-packed with thought and information that they seem to labour along like an overladen boat in a choppy sea. For example, this:
“The journeying atoms, Primordial wholes, Firmly draw, firmly drive, By their animate poles.”
Or this:
“Puny man and scentless rose Tormenting Pan to double the dose.”
But for these defects of form Emerson as poet makes ample amends by the richness and accuracy of his observation of nature, by the vigorous flight of his imagination, by the depth and at times the passionate controlled intensity of his feeling. Of love-poetry he has none, except the philosophical. Of narrative poetry he has practically none, unless you count such brief, vivid touches as,—
“By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world.”
But his descriptive pieces are of a rare beauty and charm, truthful in broad outline and delicate detail, every flower and every bird in its right colour and place. Walking with him you see and breathe New England in the light of early morn, with the dew sparkling on the grass and all the cosmic forces working underneath it. His reflective and symbolic poems, like _Each and All_, _The Problem_, _Forerunners_, _Days_, _The Sphinx_, are full of a searching and daring imaginative power. He has also the genius of the perfect phrase.
“The frolic architecture of the snow.”
“Earth proudly wears the Parthenon, As the best gem upon her zone”
“The silent organ loudest chants The Master’s requiem.”
“Music pours on mortals Its beautiful disdain.”
“Over the winter glaciers, I see the summer glow, And through the wild-piled snowdrift The warm rose-buds below.”
“I thenceforward and long after, Listen for their harp-like laughter, And carry in my heart, for days, Peace that hallows rudest ways.”
His _Threnody_, written after the early death of his first-born son, has always seemed to me one of the most moving elegies in the English tongue. His patriotic poems, especially the _Concord Ode_, are unsurpassed as brief, lyrical utterances of the spirit of America. In certain moods, when the mind is in vigour and the windows of far vision open at a touch, Emerson’s small volume of _Poems_ is a most companionable book.
* * * * *
As his prose sometimes intrudes into his verse and checks its flow, so his poetry often runs over into his prose and illuminates it. What could be more poetic in conception than this sentence from his first book, _Nature_? “If the stars should appear but one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!”
Emerson’s _Essays_ are a distillation of his lectures. His way of making these was singular and all his own. It was his habit to keep note-books in which he jotted down bits of observation about nature, stray thoughts and comparisons, reflections on his reading, and striking phrases which came to him in meditation or talk. Choosing a subject he planted it in his mind and waited for ideas and illustrations to come to it, as birds or insects to a flower. When a thought appeared he followed it, “as a boy might hunt a butterfly,” and when it was captured he pinned it in his “thought-book.” No doubt there were mental laws at work all the time, giving guidance and direction to the process of composition which seemed so irregular and haphazard. There is no lack of vital unity in one of Emerson’s lectures or essays. It deals with a single subject and never gets really out of sight of the proposition with which it begins. Yet it seldom gives a complete, all-round view of it. It is more like a series of swift and vivid glimpses of the same object seen from different stand-points, a collection of snap-shot pictures taken in the course of a walk around some great mountain.
From the pages of his note-books he gathered the material for one of his lectures, selecting and arranging it under some such title as Fate, Genius, Beauty, Manners, Duty, The Anglo-Saxon, The Young American, and giving it such form and order as he thought would be most effective in delivery. If the lecture was often repeated, (as it usually was,) the material was frequently rearranged, the pages were shifted, the illustrations changed. Then, after it had served its purpose, the material was again rearranged and published in a volume of _Essays_.
It is easy to trace in the essays the effects of this method of writing. The material is drawn from a wide range of reading and observation. Emerson is especially fond of poetry, philosophy and books of anecdote and biography. He quotes from Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, George Herbert, Wordsworth, Plutarch, Grimm, St. Simon, Swedenborg, Behmen the mystic, Plato, and the religious books of the East. His illustrations come from far and near. Now they are strange and remote, now homely and familiar. The Zodiac of Denderah; the Savoyards who carved their pine-forests into toys; the _lustrum_ of silence which Pythagoras made his disciples keep; Napoleon on the _Bellerophon_ watching the drill of the English soldiers; the Egyptian legend that every man has two pair of eyes; Empedocles and his shoe; the flat strata of the earth; a soft mushroom pushing up through the hard ground;—all these allusions and a hundred more are found in the same volume. On his pages, close beside the Parthenon, St. Paul’s, the Sphinx, Ætna and Vesuvius, you will read of the White Mountains, Monadnock, Katahdin, the pickerel-weed in bloom, the wild geese honking across the sky, the chickadee singing in the face of winter, the Boston State-house, Wall Street, cotton-mills, railroads, Quincy granite, and so forth. Nothing is too far away to seem real to him, nothing too near to seem interesting and valuable. There is an abundance, sometimes a superabundance, of material in his essays, not always well-assorted, but all vivid and suggestive.
The structure of the essay, the way of putting the material together, does not follow any fixed rule or system. Yet in most cases it has a well-considered and suitable form; it stands up; it is architecturally built, though the art is concealed. I once amused myself trying to analyze some of the essays, and found that many of the best ones have a definite theme, like a text, and follow a regular plan of development, with introduction, discussion, and conclusion. In some cases Emerson does not disdain the “heads and horns” of the old-fashioned preacher, and numbers his points “first,” “second,” “third,”—perhaps even “fourth.” But this is rare. For the most part the essays do not seem to be constructed but to grow. They are like conversations with the stupid things left out. They turn aside from dull points, and omit connecting links, and follow an attractive idea wherever it may lead. They seldom exhaust a subject, but they usually illuminate it.
“The style is the man,” and in this case it is well suited to his material and his method. It is brilliant, sparkling, gem-like. He has great freedom in the choice of words, using them sometimes in odd ways and not always correctly. Generally his diction is made up of terse, pungent Anglo-Saxon phrases, but now and then he likes to bring in a stately word of Greek or Latin origin, with a telling effect of contrast. Most of his sentences are short and clear; it is only in the paragraph that he is sometimes cloudy. Every essay is rich in epigrams. If one reads too much of a style like this, the effect becomes fatiguing. You miss the long, full, steady flow of sentences with varied cadence and changing music.
Emerson’s river is almost all rapids. The flash and sparkle of phrase after phrase tire me after a while. But for a short voyage nothing could be more animated and stimulating. I read one essay at a time and rise refreshed.
But the secret of Emerson’s power, (to change the figure,) is in the wine which he offers, not the cup into which he pours it. His great word,—“self-reliance,”—runs through all his writing and pervades all that he says. At times it is put in an extreme form, and might lead, if rashly followed, to intellectual conceit and folly. But it is balanced by other words, no less potent,—self-criticism, modesty, consideration, prudence, and reverence. He is an aspiring, hopeful teacher of youth; correcting follies with a sharp wit; encouraging noble ambitions; making the face of nature luminous with the glow of poetic imagination; and elevating life with an ideal patriotism and a broad humanity. In all his writing one feels the serene, lofty influence of a sane and chastened optimism, the faith which holds, amid many appearances which are dark, mysterious and terrifying, that Good is stronger than Evil and will triumph at last everywhere.
Read what he says in the essay called _Compensation_: “There is no penalty to virtue; no penalty to wisdom; they are proper additions of being. In a virtuous action I properly _am_; in a virtuous act I add to the world; I plant into deserts conquered from Chaos and Nothing, and see the darkness receding on the limits of the horizon. There can be no excess to love, none to knowledge, none to beauty, when these attributes are considered in the purest sense. The soul refuses limits, and always affirms an Optimism, never a Pessimism.”
This is the note that brings a brave joy to the ear of youth. Old age gladly listens to the same note in the deeper, quieter music of Emerson’s poem, _Terminus_.
“As the bird trims her to the gale, I trim myself to the storm of time, I man the rudder, reef the sail, Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime: ‘Lowly faithful, banish fear, Right onward drive unharmed; The port, well worth the cruise, is near, And every wave is charmed.’”
AN ADVENTURER IN A VELVET JACKET
Thus gallantly he appears in my mind’s eye when I pause in rereading one of his books and summon up a fantasm of the author,—Robert Louis Stevenson, gentleman adventurer in life and letters, his brown eyes shining in a swarthy face, his lean, long-enduring body adorned with a black-velvet jacket.
This garment is no disguise but a symbol. It is short, so as not to impede him with entangling tails. It is unconventional, as a protest against the tyranny of fashion. But it is of velvet, mark you, to match a certain niceness of choice and preference of beauty,—yes, and probably a touch of bravura,—in all its wearer’s vagaries. ’Tis like the silver spurs, broad sombrero and gay handkerchief of the thoroughbred cowboy,—not an element of the dandiacal, but a tribute to romance. Strange that the most genuine of men usually have a bit of this in their composition; your only incurable _poseur_ being the fellow who affects never to pose and betrays himself by his attitude of scorn.
Of course, Stevenson did not always wear this symbolic garment. In fact the only time I met him in the flesh his clothes had a discouraging resemblance to those of the rest of us at the Authors Club in New York. And a few months ago, when I traced his “footprints on the sands of time” at Waikiki beach, near Honolulu, the picture drawn for me by those who knew him when he passed that way, was that of a lank, bare-footed, bright-eyed, sun-browned man who daundered along the shore in white-duck trousers and a shirt wide open at the neck. But the velvet jacket was in his wardrobe, you may be sure, ready for fitting weather and occasion. He wore it, very likely, when he went to beard the Honolulu colourman who was trying to “do” his stepson-in-law in the matter of a bill for paints. He put it on when he banqueted with his amiable but bibulous friend, King Kalakaua. You can follow it through many, if not most, of the photographs which he had taken from his twentieth to his forty-fourth, and last, year. And in his style you can almost always feel it,—the touch of distinction, the ease of a native elegance, the assurance of a well-born wanderer,—in short, the velvet jacket.
Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson began the adventure of life in a decent little house in Howard Place, Edinburgh, on November 13, 1850. He completed it on the Samoan island of Upolu in the South Seas, December 3, 1894,—completed it, I think, for though he left his work unfinished he had arrived at the port of honour and the haven of happy rest.
His father, and his father’s father, were engineers connected with the Board of Northern Lights. This sounds like being related to the Aurora Borealis; and indeed there was something of mystery and magic about Stevenson, as if an influence from that strange midnight dawn had entered his blood. But as a matter of fact the family occupation was nothing more uncanny than that of building and maintaining lighthouses and beacons along the Scottish coast, a profession in which they won considerable renown and to which the lad himself was originally assigned. He made a fair try at it, and even won a silver medal for an essay on improvements in lighthouses. But the calling did not suit him, and he said afterward that he gained little from it except “properties for some possible romance, or words to add to my vocabulary.”
This lanky, queer, delicate, headstrong boy was a dreamer of dreams, and from youth desperately fond of writing. He felt himself a predestinated author, and like a true Scot toiled diligently to make his calling and election sure.
But there was one thing for which he cared more than for writing, and that was living. He plunged into it eagerly, with more zest than wisdom, trying all the games that cities offer, and learning some rather disenchanting lessons at a high price. For in truth neither his physical, nor (as he later discovered) his moral, nature was suited to the sowing of wild oats. His constitution was one of the frailest ever exposed to the biting winds and soaking mists of the North British Boston. Early death seemed to be written in his horoscope. But an indomitable spirit laughs at dismal predictions. Robert Louis Stevenson, (as he now called himself, velvet-jacketing his own name,) was not the man to be easily snuffed out by weak lungs or wild weather. Mocking at “bloody Jack” he held fast to life with grim, cheerful, grotesque courage; his mother, his wife, his trusty friends, heartened him for the combat; and he succeeded in having a wider experience and doing more work than falls to the lot of many men in rudely exuberant health. To do this calls for a singular kind of bravery, not inferior to, nor unlike, that of the good soldier who walks with Death undismayed.
Undoubtedly Stevenson was born with a _Wanderlust_.
“My mistress was the open road And the bright eyes of danger.”
Ill health gave occasion and direction to many voyages and experiments, some of which bettered him, while others made him worse. As a bachelor he roamed mountains afoot and travelled rivers in his own boat, explored the purlieus and sublittorals of Paris, London, and Edinburgh, lodged “on the seacoast of Bohemia,” crossed the ocean as an emigrant, and made himself vagrantly at home in California where he married the wife “the great Artificer made for him.” They passed their honeymoon in a deserted miner’s cabin, and then lived around, in Scotland, the Engadine, Southern France, Bournemouth, the Adirondacks, and on a schooner among the South Sea Islands, bringing up at last in the pleasant haven of Vailima. On all these distant roads Death pursued him, and, till the last ten years, Poverty was his companion. Yet he looked with keen and joyful eyes upon the changing face of the world and into its shadowy heart without trembling. He kept his spirit unbroken, his faith unquenched even when the lights burned low. He counted life
“just a stuff To try the soul’s strength on and educe the man.”
He may have stumbled and sometimes fallen, things may have looked black to him; but he never gave up, and in spite of frailties and burdens, he travelled a long way,—upward. Through all his travels and tribulations he kept on writing, writing, writing,—the very type of a migratory author. He made his first appearance in a canoe. The log of this journey, _An Inland Voyage on French Rivers_, published in 1878, was a modest, whimsical, charming début in literature. In 1879 he appeared again, and this time with a quaint companion. _Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes_ is one of the most delightful, uninstructive descriptions of a journey ever written in English. It contains no practical information but plenty of pleasure and profit. I do not envy the reader who can finish it without loving that obstinate little mouse-coloured Modestine, and feeling that she is one of the best-drawn female characters, of her race, in fiction.
From this good, quiet beginning his books followed rapidly, and (after _Treasure Island_, that incomparable boys’ book for men,) with growing popularity among the judicious, the “gentle readers,” who choose books not because they are recommended by professors or advertised in department stores, but because they are really well written and worth reading.