Part 13

Though we may in a measure have outgrown him, and now find his paradoxes, his daring affirmations, his trick of overstatement and understatement less novel and stimulating than we once did, yet we cherish him in our heart of hearts.

The process of maturing, with the spirit as with the body, with man as with the various organic growths, is more or less a hardening and toughening process,--a hardening for strength and endurance. Emerson belongs to the earlier period, before the hardening has progressed far, while the grain of our thoughts is yet in the milk. He appeals to us most strongly in youth or early manhood, when we are not too critical and while we are yet full of brave and generous impulses. A little callow we may be, but buoyant and optimistic. As we grow older something seems to evaporate from him, and one returns to his pages in middle or later life as to the scene of some youthful festival, half religious, half social, in which he took part, and the memory of which still stirs his emotions.

Emerson finally dropped the church, but he never ceased to be a clergyman. He was like a flower escaped from the garden, and finding a lodgment in an adjoining field, but which never ceased to be a garden flower. A certain sanctity and unworldliness always clung to him,--a certain remoteness from the common thoughts, aims, attractions, of everyday humanity. If he had been a better worldling he would have been a better poet,--that is, if he had had more of the feelings, passions, sympathies and thoughts of ordinary men. These things would have given him more flexibility and brought him closer to human life. Rarely, as poet or prose writer, could he speak in the tone of the people. There was always, more or less concealed, the tone of the pulpit. Mr. James expressed this idea well when he said that Emerson “had no prosaic side relating him to ordinary people.”

This prosaic side is very important to the poet, or to any man who would touch and move his fellow-men. We desire our singer or teacher to be of the same flesh and blood as ourselves. Emerson was always a preacher, and his theme, by whatever name he called it, was always religion, or what he called religion, namely, the universality of the moral law.

No lover of Emerson, I imagine, would have had him other than what he was; I certainly would not. At the same time it is a pleasure to explore his limitations and see just what he was, and what he was not. He was a rare soul, probably the most astral genius in English or any other literature. His books are for young men and for those of a religious cast of mind. His signal defect as a writer, as a contributor to the world’s literature, arises from this same want of sympathy with the world,--from the select, abridged, circumscribed character of his genius. He did not and could not deal with human life as Montaigne, or Bacon, or Plutarch, or Cicero did.

He was conscious of his defect in this direction, and would fain have had it otherwise. Thus he writes in his journal in 1839: “We would all be public men if we could afford it. I am wholly private; such is the poverty of my constitution. ‘Heaven betrayed me to a book and wrapped me in a gown.’ I have no social talent, no will, and a steady appetite for insights in any or all directions, to balance my manifold imbecilities.” He even quotes approvingly the remark of some one that he “always seemed to be on stilts.” “It is even so. Most of the persons whom I see in my own house I see across a gulf. I cannot go to them nor they come to me.” He lacked sympathy with men. He cared nothing for persons as such, but only for the genius of humanity which they embodied, and this genius of humanity he did not find in any sufficiency in ordinary mortals.

He writes in his journal, “I like man, but not men!” He liked ideas, but not things. He dwelt in the abstract, not in the concrete. “In the highest friendship,” he says, “we form a league with the Idea of the man who stands to us in that relation--not with the actual person.” And his letters, fine and eloquent as most of them are, do not read like a message from one person to another person, but from one Idea to another Idea.

Yet Emerson’s leading trait is eminently American; I mean his hospitality toward the new,--the eagerness with which he sought and welcomed the new idea and the new man. Perhaps we might call it his inborn radicalism. No writer ever made such rash, such extreme statements, in the hope that some new truth might be compassed. Anything new and daring instantly challenged his attention. His face was wholly set toward the future,--the new. The past was discredited the moment it became the past. “The coming only is sacred,” he said; “no truth so sublime but it may be trivial to-morrow in the light of new thoughts.”

As a writer, he sought to make all the old thoughts appear trivial in the light of his audacious affirmations. He stood ready at all times to strike his colors to the man who could bring a larger generalization than his own. All his knowledge, all his opinions, were at the mercy of the new idea. He did not tread the beaten paths, or seek truth in the logical way; he sought for it by spurts and sallies of the mind. He called himself an “experimenter,” and said he did not pretend to settle anything as true or false. “I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane: I simply experiment; an endless seeker with no Past at my back.” In his random, prophetic way he hits on many sublime truths--hits on them by sheer force of affirmation, like the truth of evolution, and of the correlation of forces. Indeed, there are few great thoughts current in our time that were not indicated by the bold guessing of Emerson. The fragmentary and projectile-like character of his thinking is often very effective. He spent no force upon logic, upon fortifying his position, but sent his single bullet as far and as deep as he could. Emerson’s hope and confidence in the new is shown in his serious prophecy and expectancy of the coming man.

He was apparently always on the lookout for a new and greater man than had yet appeared. He was always sweeping the horizon for this strange sail. “A new person,” he says, “is to me a great event, and keeps me from sleep.” He met every stranger with a curious, expectant glance. He looked at you and waited for you to speak, as if the thought that perhaps here is the man I am waiting for, was never absent from his mind. “If the companions of our childhood,” he says, “should turn out to be heroes, and their condition regal, it would not surprise us.” But the experience of most persons, I fancy, points just the other way: we are always incredulous when told that our playmates have turned out to be heroes; just as the whole world, except the Emersons in it, are skeptical of the worth of the new idea, or of the new invention.

Emerson does not so much expound a philosophy as he celebrates a sentiment or a law. He does not inculcate a virtue, but quickens our moral sense. He does not teach a religion, but shows all nature as religious. His method is not that of the analyst; he celebrates and presents whole what others give in detail. His mind is deficient in continuity, but strong in affirmation, strong in its separate sallies and flights. He has not a definite, practical bent like Carlyle; he seldom lays his hand on any current evil or want, but rather glorifies the world as it is. He is abstract in his aim, and concrete in his methods. He fixes his eye on the star, but would make it draw his wagon.

Carlyle was like an engine tied to its iron rails,--he turned aside for nothing; Emerson was more like a sailing yacht that hovers about all shores and takes advantage of every breeze.

XIII

THOREAU’S WILDNESS.

Doubtless the wildest man New England has turned out since the red aborigines vacated her territory was Henry Thoreau,--a man in whom the Indian reappeared on the plane of taste and morals. One is tempted to apply to him his own lines on “Elisha Dugan,” as it is very certain they fit himself much more closely than they ever did his neighbor:--

“O man of wild habits, Partridges and rabbits, Who hast no cares. Only to set snares, Who liv’st all alone Close to the bone, And where life is sweetest Constantly eatest.”

His whole life was a search for the wild, not only in nature but in literature, in life, in morals. The shyest and most elusive thoughts and impressions were the ones that fascinated him most, not only in his own mind, but in the minds of others. His startling paradoxes are only one form his wildness took. He cared little for science, except as it escaped the rules and technicalities, and put him on the trail of the ideal, the transcendental. Thoreau was of French extraction; and every drop of his blood seems to have turned toward the aboriginal, as the French blood has so often done in other ways in this country. He, for the most part, despised the white man; but his enthusiasm kindled at the mention of the Indian. He envied the Indian; he coveted his knowledge, his arts, his woodcraft. He accredited him with a more “practical and vital science” than was contained in the books. “The Indian stood nearer to wild Nature than we.” “It was a new light when my guide gave me Indian names for things for which I had only scientific ones before. In proportion as I understood the language, I saw them from a new point of view.” And again, “The Indian’s earthly life was as far off from us as Heaven is.” In his “Week” he complains that our poetry is only white man’s poetry. “If we could listen for an instant to the chant of the Indian muse, we should understand why he will not exchange his savageness for civilization.” Speaking of himself, he says, “I am convinced that my genius dates from an older era than the agricultural. I would at least strike my spade into the earth with such careless freedom, but accuracy, as the woodpecker his bill into a tree. There is in my nature, methinks, a singular yearning toward all wildness.” Again and again he returns to the Indian. “We talk of civilizing the Indian, but that is not the name for his improvement. By the wary independence and aloofness of his dim forest life he preserves his intercourse with his native gods, and is admitted from time to time to a rare and peculiar society with Nature. He has glances of starry recognition, to which our saloons are strangers. The steady illumination of his genius, dim only because distant, is like the faint but satisfying light of the stars compared with the dazzling but ineffectual and short-lived blaze of candles.” “We would not always be soothing and taming nature, breaking the horse and the ox, but sometimes ride the horse wild, and chase the buffalo.” The only relics that interest him are Indian relics. One of his regular spring recreations or occupations is the hunting of arrow-heads. He goes looking for arrow-heads as other people go berrying or botanizing. In his published journal he makes a long entry under date of March 28, 1859, about his pursuit of arrow-heads. “I spend many hours every spring,” he says, “gathering the crop which the melting snow and rain have washed bare. When, at length, some island in the meadow or some sandy field elsewhere has been ploughed, perhaps for rye, in the fall, I take note of it, and do not fail to repair thither as soon as the earth begins to be dry in the spring. If the spot chances never to have been cultivated before, I am the first to gather a crop from it. The farmer little thinks that another reaps a harvest which is the fruit of his toil.” He probably picked up thousands of arrow-heads. He had an eye for them. The Indian in him recognized its own.

His genius itself is arrow-like, and typical of the wild weapon he so loved,--hard, flinty, fine-grained, penetrating, winged, a flying shaft, bringing down its game with marvelous sureness. His literary art was to let fly with a kind of quick inspiration; and though his arrows sometimes go wide, yet it is always a pleasure to watch their aerial course. Indeed, Thoreau was a kind of Emersonian or transcendental red man, going about with a pocket-glass and an herbarium, instead of with a bow and a tomahawk. He appears to have been as stoical and indifferent and unsympathetic as a veritable Indian; and how he hunted without trap or gun, and fished without hook or snare! Everywhere the wild drew him. He liked the telegraph because it was a kind of æolian harp; the wind blowing upon it made wild, sweet music. He liked the railroad through his native town, because it was the wildest road he knew of: it only made deep cuts into and through the hills. “On it are no houses nor foot-travellers. The travel on it does not disturb me. The woods are left to hang over it. Though straight, it is wild in its accompaniments, keeping all its raw edges. Even the laborers on it are not like other laborers.” One day he passed a little boy in the street who had on a home-made cap of woodchuck’s skin, and it completely filled his eye. He makes a delightful note about it in his journal. That was the kind of cap to have,--“a perfect little idyl, as they say.” Any wild trait unexpectedly cropping out in any of the domestic animals pleased him immensely. The crab-apple was his favorite apple, because of its beauty and perfume. He perhaps never tried to ride a wild horse, but such an exploit was in keeping with his genius.

Thoreau hesitated to call himself a naturalist. That was too tame; he would perhaps have been content to have been an Indian naturalist. He says in this journal, and with much truth and force, “Man cannot afford to be a naturalist, to look at Nature directly, but only with the side of his eye. He must look through and beyond her. To look at her is as fatal as to look at the head of Medusa. It turns the man of science to stone.” When he was applied to by the secretary of the Association for the Advancement of Science, at Washington, for information as to the particular branch of science he was most interested in, he confesses he was ashamed to answer for fear of exciting ridicule. But he says, “If it had been the secretary of an association of which Plato or Aristotle was the president, I should not have hesitated to describe my studies at once and particularly.” “The fact is, I am a mystic, a transcendentalist, and a natural philosopher to boot.” Indeed, what Thoreau was finally after in nature was something ulterior to science, something ulterior to poetry, something ulterior to philosophy; it was that vague something which he calls “the higher law,” and which eludes all direct statement. He went to Nature as to an oracle; and though he sometimes, indeed very often, questioned her as a naturalist and a poet, yet there was always another question in his mind. He ransacked the country about Concord in all seasons and weathers, and at all times of the day and night he delved into the ground, he probed the swamps, he searched the waters, he dug into woodchuck holes, into muskrats’ dens, into the retreats of the mice and squirrels; he saw every bird, heard every sound, found every wild-flower, and brought home many a fresh bit of natural history; but he was always searching for something he did not find. This search of his for the transcendental, the unfindable, the wild that will not be caught, he has set forth in a beautiful parable in “Walden:”--

“I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks, and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud; and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves.”

XIV

NATURE IN LITERATURE

Several different kinds or phases of this thing we call Nature have at different times appeared in literature. For instance, there is the personified or deified Nature of the towering Greek bards, an expression of Nature born of wonder, fear, childish ignorance, and the tyranny of personality; the Greek was so alive himself that he made everything else alive, and so manly and human that he could see only these qualities in Nature. Or the Greek idyllic poets, whose Nature is simple and fresh like spring water, or the open air, or the taste of milk or fruit or bread. The same thing is perhaps true in a measure of Virgil’s Nature. In a later class of writers and artists that arose in Italy, Nature is steeped in the faith and dogmas of the Christian Church; it is a kind of theological Nature.

In English literature there is the artificial Nature of Pope and his class,--a kind of classic liturgy repeated from the books, and as dead and hollow as fossil shells. Earlier than that, the quaint and affected Nature of the Elizabethan poets; later the melodramatic and wild-eyed Nature of the Byronic muse; and lastly, the transmuted and spiritualized Nature of Wordsworth, which has given the prevailing tone and cast to most modern poetry. Thus, from a goddess Nature has changed to a rustic nymph, a cloistered nun, a heroine of romance, besides other characters not so definite, till she has at last become a priestess of the soul. What will be the next phase is perhaps already indicated in the poems of Walt Whitman, in which Nature is regarded mainly in the light of science, through the immense vistas opened up by astronomy and geology. This poet sees the earth as one of the orbs, and has sought to adjust his imagination to the modern problems and conditions, always taking care, however, to preserve an outlook into the highest regions.

I was much struck with a passage in Whitman’s last volume, “Two Rivulets,” in which he says that he has not been afraid of the charge of obscurity in his poems, “because human thought, poetry or melody, must have dim escapes and outlets,--must possess a certain fluid, aërial character, akin to space itself, obscure to those of little or no imagination, but indispensable to the highest purposes. Poetic style, when addressed to the soul, is less definite form, outline, sculpture, and becomes vista music, half-tints, and even less than half-tints.” I know no ampler justification of a certain elusive quality there is in the highest poetry--something that refuses to be tabulated or explained, and that is a stumbling-block to many readers--than is contained in these sentences.

XV

SUGGESTIVENESS

There is a quality that adheres to one man’s writing or speaking, and not to another’s, that we call suggestiveness,--something that warms and stimulates the mind of the reader or hearer, quite apart from the amount of truth or information directly conveyed.

It is a precious literary quality, not easy of definition or description. It involves quality of mind, mental and moral atmosphere, points of view, and maybe, racial elements. Not every page or every book carries latent meaning; rarely does any sentence of a writer float deeper than it shows.

Thus, of the great writers of English literature, Dr. Johnson is, to me, the least suggestive, while Bacon is one of the most suggestive. Hawthorne is undoubtedly the most suggestive of our romancers; he has the most atmosphere and the widest and most alluring horizon. Emerson is the most suggestive of our essayists, because he has the deepest ethical and prophetic background. His page is full of moral electricity, so to speak, which begets a state of electric excitement in his reader’s mind. Whitman is the most suggestive of our poets; he elaborates the least and gives us in profusion the buds and germs of poetry. A musical composer once said to me that Whitman stimulated him more than Tennyson, because he left more for him to do,--he abounded in hints and possibilities that the musician’s mind eagerly seized.

This quality is not related to ambiguity of phrase or to cryptic language or to vagueness and obscurity. It goes, or may go, with perfect lucidity, as in Matthew Arnold at his best, while it is rarely present in the pages of Herbert Spencer. Spencer has great clearness and compass, but there is nothing resonant in his style,--nothing that stimulates the imagination. He is a great workman, but the metal he works in is not of the kind called precious.

The late roundabout and enigmatical style of Henry James is far less fruitful in his readers’ minds than his earlier and more direct one, or than the limpid style of his compeer, Mr. Howells. The indirect and elliptical method may undoubtedly be so used as to stimulate the mind; at the same time there may be a kind of inconclusiveness and beating around the bush that is barren and wearisome. Upon the page of the great novelist there fall, more or less distinct, all the colors of the spectrum of human life; but Mr. James in his later works seems intent only upon the invisible rays of the spectrum, and his readers grope in the darkness accordingly.

In the world of experience and observation the suggestiveness of things is enhanced by veils, concealments, half lights, flowing lines. The twilight is more suggestive than the glare of noonday, a rolling field than a lawn, a winding road than a straight one. In literature perspective, indirection, understatement, side glimpses, have equal value; a vocabulary that is warm from the experience of the writer, sentences that start a multitude of images, that abound in the concrete and the specific, that shun vague generalities,--with these go the power of suggestiveness.

Beginnings, outlines, summaries, are suggestive, while the elaborated, the highly wrought, the perfected afford us a different kind of pleasure. The art that fills and satisfies us has one excellence, and the art that stimulates and makes us ahunger has another. All beginnings in nature afford us a peculiar pleasure. The early spring with its hints and dim prophecies, the first earth odors, the first robin or song sparrow, the first furrow, the first tender skies, the first rainbow, the first wild flower, the dropping bud scales, the awakening voices in the marshes,--all these things touch and move us in a way that later developments in the season do not. What meaning, too, in the sunrise and the sunset, in the night with its stars, the sea with its tides and currents, the morning with its dews, autumn with its bounty, winter with its snows, the desert with its sands,--in everything in the germ and in the bud,--in parasites, suckers, blights, in floods, tempests, droughts! The winged seeds carry thoughts, the falling leaves make us pause, the clinging burrs have a tongue, the pollen dust, not less than meteoric dust, conveys a hint of the method of nature.

Some things and events in our daily experience are more typical, and therefore more suggestive, than others. Thus the sower striding across the ploughed field is a walking allegory, or parable. Indeed the whole life of the husbandman,--his first-hand relation to things, his ploughing, his planting, his fertilizing, his draining, his pruning, his grafting, his uprootings, his harvestings, his separating of the wheat from the chaff, and the tares from the wheat, his fencing his field with the stones and boulders that hindered his plough or cumbered his sward, his making the wilderness blossom as the rose,--all these things are pleasant to contemplate because in them there is a story within a story, we translate the facts into higher truths.