Henry Van Dyke

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I

A friend of mine, one of the Elder Bookmen of Harvard, told me some twenty years ago that he had only once seen Ralph Waldo Emerson vexed out of his transcendental tranquillity and almost Olympian calm. It was a Sunday afternoon in Concord, and the philosopher had been drawn from his study by an unwonted noise in the house. On the back porch he found his own offspring and some children of the neighbours engaged in a romping, boisterous game. With visible anger he stopped it, saying, “Even if you have no reverence for the day, you ought to have enough sense and manners to respect the traditions of your forefathers.”

Emerson’s puritanism was in the blood. Seven of his ancestors were ministers of New England churches of the early type. Among them was Peter Bulkley, who left his comfortable parish in Bedfordshire, England, to become the pastor of “the church in the wilderness” at Concord, Massachusetts; Father Samuel Moody of Agamenticus, Maine, who was such a zealous reformer that he pursued wayward sinners even into the alehouse to reprove them; Joseph Emerson of Malden, a “heroic scholar,” who prayed every night that no descendant of his might ever be rich; and William Emerson, the patriot preacher, who died while serving in the army of the Revolution. These were verily “soldiers of the Lord,” and from them and women of like stamina and mettle, Emerson inherited the best of puritan qualities: independence, sobriety, fearless loyalty to conscience, strenuous and militant virtue.

But he had also a super-gift which was not theirs. That which made him different from them, gave him a larger and more beautiful vision of the world, led him into ways of thinking and speaking which to them would have seemed strange and perilous, (though in conduct he followed the strait and narrow path,)—in short, that which made him what he was in himself and to countless other men, a seer, an inspirer, a singer of new light and courage and joy, was the gift of poetic imagination and interpretation. He was a puritan plus poetry.

Graduating from Harvard he began life as a teacher in a Boston school and afterwards the minister of a Boston church. But there was something in his temperament which unfitted him for the service of institutions. He was a servant of ideas. To do his best work he needed to feel himself entirely independent of everything except allegiance to the truth as God gave him to see it from day to day. The scholastic routine of a Female Academy irked him. The social distinctions and rivalries of city life appeared to him both insincere and tiresome. Even the mild formulas and regulations of a Unitarian church seemed to hamper him. He was a come-outer; he wished to think for himself, to proclaim his own visions, to act and speak only from the inward impulse, though always with an eye to the good of others. So he left his parish in Boston and became a preacher at large to “these United States.” His pulpit was the lecture-platform; his little books of prose and verse carried his words to a still larger audience; no man in America during his life had a more extended or a deeper influence; he became famous both as an orator and as a writer; but in fact he was always preaching. As Lamb said to Coleridge, “I never heard you do anything else.”

The central word of all his discourse is Self-reliance,—be yourself, trust yourself, and fear not! But in order to interpret this rightly one must have at least an inkling of his philosophy, which was profoundly religious and essentially poetical. He was a mystic, an intuitional thinker. He believed that the whole universe of visible things is only a kind of garment which covers the real world of invisible ideas and laws and principles. He believed also that each man, having a share in the Divine Reason which is the source of all things, may have a direct knowledge of truth through his own innate ideas and intuitive perceptions. Emerson wrote in his diary, “The highest revelation is that God is in every man.”

This way of thinking is called transcendentalism, because it overleaps logic and scientific reasoning. It is easy to see how such a philosophy might lead unbalanced persons into wild and queer and absurd views and practices. And so it did when it struck the neighbourhood of Boston in the second quarter of the 19th Century, and began to spread from that sacred centre.

But with these vagaries Emerson had little sympathy. His mysticism was strongly tinctured with common sense, (which also is of divine origin,) and his orderly nature recoiled from eccentric and irregular ways. Although for a time he belonged to the “Transcendental Club,” he frequently said that he would not be called a transcendentalist, and at times he made fun, in a mild and friendly spirit, of the extreme followers of that doctrine. He held as strongly as any one that the Divine light of reason in each man is the guide to truth; but he held it with the important reservation that when this inner light really shines, free from passion and prejudice, it will never lead a man away from good judgment and the moral law. All through his life he navigated the transcendental sea safely, piloted by a puritan conscience, warned off the rocks by a keen sense of humour, and kept from capsizing by a solid ballast of New England prudence.

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.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON.

From a photograph by Black, Boston.

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

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:

Or this:

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,—

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.

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.