RALPH WALDO EMERSON

VOLUMES IN THIS SERIES

Published and in Preparation

Edited by Will D. Howe

RW Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson

HOW TO KNOW HIM

By

Samuel McChord Crothers

Author of

THE GENTLE READER, THE PARDONER’S WALLET OLIVER WENDEL HOLMES AND HIS FELLOW BOARDERS ETC., ETC.

WITH PORTRAIT

INDIANAPOLIS THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY PUBLISHERS

Copyright 1921 The Bobbs-Merrill Company

Printed in the United States of America

PRESS OF BRAUNWORTH & CO. BOOK MANUFACTURERS BROOKLYN, N. Y.

INTRODUCTORY

The mind of Emerson was a searchlight revealing not itself but the various objects on which it successively turned. An intense and narrow beam of light would shoot through the darkness and reveal some object. Then it would pick up another object which would have its brief moment of visibility. The landscape was never revealed in any one view.

The only way to know Emerson is to join him in his intellectual exercises. In spite of his personal aloofness I know of no one with whom we can more readily come to a feeling of intellectual intimacy. He had no pretensions and no reserves. In clear sentences he told us what from time to time he thought. He made no attempt to connect these thoughts into a coherent system. For any one else to attempt to do this would be to misrepresent him.

In the short chapters which follow I have treated Emerson as a contemporary rather than as a writer of the last generation. His thought is as pertinent to the twentieth century as to the nineteenth. Indeed I think that in many respects we may be nearer to him than were those who first listened to him. The prejudices which he encountered have largely died away. The problems over which he was meditating remain.

I wish to make grateful acknowledgment to Houghton Mifflin Company for special permission to make extracts from their authorized and copyright editions of Emerson’s works. Also to Doctor Edward Emerson for the use of his edition of his father’s journals.

S. M. M.

CONTENTS

[Pg 1]

EMERSON

CHAPTER I

THE APPROACH TO EMERSON

SO Emerson writes of the Persian poet Saadi who “sat in the sun” and with smiling lips uttered his thoughts to whosoever chose to listen. He had nothing to prove, nothing to apologize for, nothing to lament.

We are so used to wrangling and defining, to[Pg 2] building systems of thought, and with odious subtlety criticizing other men’s systems, that we hardly know how to get along without these intellectual exercises. What is there to say about a literary man or a philosopher who cares for none of these things?

To become acquainted with Emerson we must discard any conventional idea of the literary man or the philosopher. We must not become too much interested in his works. We must be genuinely interested in the things he was thinking about, so as to find joy in comparing notes. He was not a man of letters in the sense of a maker of books, and he was careless about the articulation of his thought, and so he is the despair of those who try to “place” him.

There are those who think they can explain a man of genius by means of painstaking investigation of the town he lived in, the folks he knew, the books he read, the party to which he belonged, and the family into which he was born. A great deal can be explained in this way, in fact all those things in which he was like the thousands of other[Pg 3] persons who were subjected to similar influences. But what about his genius, which is the one thing in which he differed from those who were about him? It happens that it is this difference which is the matter of vital moment.

There are indeed great men whose difference from their contemporaries is in the quantity of their endowment rather than in its essential quality. They think and feel as does the average man, they share his opinions and habits of thought, only they have everything in greater abundance. They are representative of the time in which they lived and we can not think of them as belonging to any other place or period. This is perhaps what we mean by a great man. The term is quantitative.

But there are others whose genius is essentially timeless. They owe very little to their immediate environment. They might have lived anywhere or at any time, and the substance and manner of their thinking would have been very much the same. Ralph Waldo Emerson was of this order. In one sense he was a typical American,[Pg 4] more than that he was a New Englander, and his thought was colored by the experience of the passing day. But it was only colored. The texture was not peculiar to America. That he was born at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the descendant of a long line of Puritan preachers, that he was educated at Harvard College, and became for a time the minister of a Unitarian Church, that he was interested in what was called the Transcendental Movement, that he traveled about the country delivering lyceum lectures, that he took a worthy part in all sorts of reform movements, and that he lived in Concord to a good old age—all these are interesting facts. If we happen to be interested in Emerson, we like to know about them. But they do not enable us to know

what manner of man he was, or what gift he may have for us.

Indeed, if we take such facts too seriously, we may obscure the real Emerson, for he certainly did not take them very seriously, and was rather absent-minded in regard to them. It was one of his whimsies to profess a great contempt for foreign[Pg 5] travel. Concord was good enough for him and he could see all that was most worth seeing without wandering from the vicinity of the town house. But this was not because he had any unusual prejudice for a particular locality, but that he had means of getting away from it that his neighbors did not possess. One place is as good as another to one whose mind is free of the universe.

Emerson’s mind was in the most literal sense cosmopolitan; he was a citizen of the world, as no mere traveler can become. The globe trotter is lured on by the expectation of coming to foreign parts. Emerson did not think of any portion of the world as foreign. It was all of a piece. Wherever he happened to be, he was confronted by the marvel of the whole which manifested itself in every part. He was like the citizen in a great metropolis, who leaves to strangers the transitory joys of sightseeing. He goes about his own business, and yet he is gladly conscious all the time that he belongs to the mighty aggregation.

[Pg 6]

In dealing with such a person, the biographer is always more or less of an intruder. To Emerson the inner life was much more important than the events and circumstances of the outer life. To the inner life as disclosed by himself, we may go directly. Thus only we know what manner of man he was. He was describing himself when he wrote:

“There is an external life, which is educated at school, taught to read, write, cipher, and trade; taught to grasp all the boy can get, urging him to put himself forward, to make himself useful and agreeable in the world, to ride, run, argue, and contend, unfold his talents, shine, conquer, and possess.

“But the inner life sits at home, and does not learn to do things, nor value these feats at all. ’Tis a quiet, wise perception. It loves truth, because it is itself real; it loves right, it knows nothing else; but it makes no progress; was as wise in our first memory of it as now; is just the same now in maturity, and hereafter in age, as it was in[Pg 7] youth. We have grown to manhood and womanhood; we have powers, connection, children, reputations, professions: this makes no account of them all. It lives in the great present; it makes the present great. This tranquil, well-founded, wide-seeing soul is no express-rider, no attorney, no magistrate: it lies in the sun, and broods on the world. A person of this temper once said to a man of much activity, ‘I will pardon you that you do so much, and you me that I do nothing.’ And Euripides says that ‘Zeus hates busybodies and those who do too much.’”

All this is quite foreign to the mind of the typical American. It was not characteristic of the nineteenth century. It is not easy to explain why Emerson should have turned up when he did.

If, however, it is necessary for us to “place” Emerson, and to classify him, it might be as well to ignore the accident of his birth, and put him among those with whom his ways of thinking and speaking would have been most congenial.

He was a philosopher, not in the modern sense,[Pg 8] but in the simpler ancient sense of a lover of wisdom. He belonged in a way with the men who in Athens liked to walk about in the gardens discoursing about the nature of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Perhaps the Greek dialectic might have wearied his more direct mind. It would have seemed a too roundabout way of getting at moral truths.

I rather think that he would have been more at home with less sophisticated thinkers, let us say with the lovers of wisdom in the land of Uz, who gathered around Job, in his happier days before Satan mingled with his affairs. It is in the cool of the evening, and they gather at the gate, and Job discourses on the pleasant mysteries of life. And people who had been bearing the heat and burden of the day, and whose souls were parched, came for refreshment. In their arid lives, it was wonderful to meet a man who was thinking aloud. “My speech dropped upon them, and they waited for me as for the rain.”

Such speech comes in sentences that are easily remembered. In the land of Uz people do not[Pg 9] get their ideas from books, but from the lips of a man who has the gift of direct address.

In process of time scribes gather these scattered sentences into volumes, and we have collections of what the Hebrew scholars call Wisdom Literature. So we have the Proverbs, The Wisdom of Solomon, and the Wisdom of the Son of Sirach. They contain the observations and the meditations of men who had found time for such things. They are enjoyed by those of kindred temper.

Emerson’s essays belong to this Wisdom Literature. They are gnomic, that is to say, they consist of pregnant sentences. Their arrangement is a matter largely of accident.

Had he lived in the land of Uz, Emerson would have uttered these sentences to a little group at the city gate, and trusted to their memories for the preservation of what was of value. Being an American in the nineteenth century, he jotted them down in his note-book when they occurred to him, and then as opportunity offered presented them to groups of his fellow-citizens, gathered on winter evenings in poorly ventilated halls. All[Pg 10] the way from Massachusetts to Iowa he found his audience, and gave them freely of his best. Then acting as his own scribe, he gathered the sentences together into the form familiar to us.

To get his general point of view, read the ninth chapter of Proverbs:

“Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars; she hath killed her beasts; she hath mingled her wine; she hath also furnished her table. She hath sent forth her maidens: she crieth upon the highest places of the city.... Come, eat of my bread, and drink of the wine which I have mingled.”

It is all very simple and natural. Wisdom is the builder. She builds according to her own plan, and when the house is furnished, she makes her feast and sends forth her maidens with the invitation to her table.

And the thinker, who is he? He is not the architect, he did not plan the building. Nor is he the high priest ordering the sacrifice. He does[Pg 11] not take himself so solemnly. He is only one of the invited guests, who has not lost the sense of wondering curiosity. He can not churlishly sit down to the feast without being introduced to the hostess. He wanders about among all the marvels, seeking her. For, says the son of Sirach, “It is the chief point of Wisdom to know whose gift it is.”

In the nineteenth century Ralph Waldo Emerson lived a life that was as simple as that of the antique philosophers. He practised an art which has been thought to be lost—the art of meditation. The fruit of his meditations he offered to all those whom it might concern.

Emerson was a man thinking. There is no Emersonian system of philosophy, only an Emersonian way of looking at things, and that is perfectly simple. There is a legal phrase, “without prejudice,” which is used of parties to a controversy, implying that should the negotiations fail, nothing that has passed shall be taken advantage of thereafter. Thus should the defendant offer without prejudice to pay half the claim, the plaintiff[Pg 12] can not consider this offer as an admission of his having the right to some payment.

To read the words of Emerson in the spirit in which they were written, we must remember to take what he says without prejudice. Each sentence makes its own appeal, and it is for us to determine whether it rings true or false. But we must not hold him responsible for the inferences which we may draw. He was not uttering oracles, though the form might sometimes seem oracular. He aimed to challenge us rather than to secure docile acceptance of his ideas. He did not attempt at any one time to state the whole truth. He preferred to state a half truth in such a manner that we should be ready to supply the other half. Instead of avoiding extreme opinions, he wished to have them confront each other in the same mind.

“This is true, that other is true. But our geometry cannot span the extreme points and reconcile them. What to do? By obeying each thought frankly, by harping, or if you will, pounding on[Pg 13] each string, we learn at last its power. By the same obedience to others’ thoughts, we learn theirs and then comes some reasonable hope of harmonizing them.”

The method which he recommended and which he followed was in the highest degree unsystematic. It was “the method of taking up in turn each of the leading topics which belong to our scheme of human life, and by stating all that is agreeable to experience on one hand, and doing the same justice to the opposing facts, the true limitations will appear. Any excess of emphasis on one part would be corrected and a just balance made.”

In other words, Emerson would never assume the cool judicial attitude in regard to any vital question. He would speak as an advocate of the side which for the moment seemed to him most important. But he would always reserve the right to state the other side just as strongly. Not only did he claim the right to take both sides, but also to change the subject as often as he liked.[Pg 14] He believed that there were certain general principles which were applicable to all the various professions and callings. One who was in Milton’s phrase “a skillful considerer of human things” had a right to express his opinions, for in spite of all the modern division of labor, life is still made up of a few simple elements.

In the following chapters I have made no attempt to harmonize the views of Emerson. That would only obscure the sharp outlines of each separate view. One who would know Emerson must not read his word with the docility of a mere disciple. He must rather take it as a game and match his wits against a quick antagonist.

It is the mental attitude which that unconventional sixteenth-century preacher, Bishop Hugh Latimer, sought to inspire in his congregation. In his famous Sermon on the Cards, he challenged his congregation to play a game of cards, which in those days was called “Triumph.”

Quoth Latimer: “Whereas, ye are wont to celebrate Christmas in playing at cards, I intend by God’s grace to deal unto you Christ’s cards. The[Pg 15] game we shall play at shall be called the triumph (trump) which if it be well played, he that dealeth shall win, the players shall likewise win, and the standers and lookers on shall do the same, inasmuch that there is no man that is willing to play at this Triumph with these cards but that they shall all be winners, and no losers. Let therefore every Christian man and woman play at these cards, that they may have and obtain the triumph; you must mark also that the triumph must apply to fetch home with him all the other cards whatsoever suit they be of. Now then take ye this first card which must appear and be shewed to you as followeth.”

In some such way Emerson invites us to join in his favorite recreation. It is the free play of thought in which “he that dealeth shall win, the players shall likewise win and the standers and lookers on shall do the same.”

[Pg 16]

CHAPTER II

A DISCRIMINATING OPTIMIST

ONE of the most familiar terms of reproach in these days is “Victorian.” It is used by clever literary persons who have rebelled against the standards of their immediate predecessors. It implies a certain smugness and self-satisfaction which is very irritating to persons who are conscious of the cruel realities of this unfinished world. The Victorians are supposed to have been incorrigible optimists who mistook the Fool’s Paradise in which they lived for the final resting place of humanity. They were worshipers of the respectabilities, and were content with the cant of liberalism as their fathers had been content with the cant of Toryism.

To-day, however, we are taught that it is our duty to face the grimmest realities, and not to[Pg 17] flinch when we see something that is ugly and threatening. We must see how the other half lives, and we must free ourselves from amiable delusions.

In turning from the work of our painfully sincere realists to Emerson, the first impression is that we are going back to that discredited state of mind, the early Victorian optimism. For Emerson faces the existing world with a smiling face. He takes for granted that there is a friendliness in its laws, and that the ultimate reality is not to be feared. He has a frank predilection for beauty and does not feel it his duty to feed his imagination on what is ugly and unwholesome. He is always glad to be alive, and glad to find so many other creatures alive at the same time. Sometimes he has a too debonair way of making light of the evils that are encountered by earnest people.

But those who look upon the optimism of Emerson as a part of the conventionalism of his time are, I think, superficial in their judgments. In the first place, he was not a Victorian, but an[Pg 18] American, who was not under the spell of the good queen and her court. No one was less disposed to imitate the literary conventions then dominant in England. He was no more a Victorian than was Abraham Lincoln. There was nothing smug in his optimism. He was not an apologist for the existing state of things, nor interested in proving that this is the best of all possible worlds. He did not try to make himself agreeable by calling evil good. He recognized the existence of an enormous number of bad and cruel things. “Nature as we know her is no saint.”

He taught that nature does not coddle us, nor provide ready-made houses or clothes. She leaves us to make these things for ourselves. And the process of experiment is never an easy one. It is a long and tedious way by which we travel toward truth. Nature does not tell us what is good for us; to discover this is part of our experience.

“I compared notes with one of my friends who expects everything of the Universe and is disappointed, [Pg 19]and I found that I began at the other extreme, expecting nothing, and am always full of thanks for moderate blessings.”

So far from denying or seeking to hide the darker and more painful aspects of the world, he admitted them and placed them where they belong, at the beginning. They belong to the realm of chaos and night.

But the outstanding fact is that there has been a gradual emergence from chaos. The existence of man as a reasoning creature becomes more wonderful as we think of the odds against it. No good thing can be had without effort.