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
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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
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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.
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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,
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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.”
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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,
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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
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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
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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,
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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.
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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
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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,
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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.’”
