The Connecticut Wits and Other Essays. Beers Henry Augustin
or address, he put together such passages as would dovetail, without too anxious a concern for unity; and that from all these sources, by a double distillation, his perfected essays were finally evolved.
Accordingly, many pages are here omitted which are to be found in his published works, but a great wealth of matter remains – chips from his workshop – which will be new to the reader. And as he always composed carefully, even when writing only for his own eye, and as consecutiveness was never his long suit, these entries may be read with a pleasure and profit hardly less than are given by his finished writings.
The editors, with excellent discretion, have sometimes allowed to stand the first outlines, in prose or verse, of work long familiar in its completed shape. Here, for instance, is the germ of a favorite poem:
“It is very grateful to my feelings to go into a Roman cathedral, yet I look as my countrymen do at the Roman priesthood. It is very grateful to me to go into an English church and hear the liturgy read. Yet nothing would induce me to be the English priest. I find an unpleasant dilemma in this nearer home.”
This dilemma is “The Problem.” And here again is the original of “The Two Rivers,” “as it came to mind, sitting by the river, one April day” (April 5, 1856):
“Thy Voice is sweet, Musketaquid; repeats the music of the rain; but sweeter rivers silent flit through thee, as thou through Concord plain.
“Thou art shut in thy banks; but the stream I love, flows in thy water, and flows through rocks and through the air, and through darkness, and through men, and women. I hear and see the inundation and eternal spending of the stream, in winter and in summer, in men and animals, in passion and thought. Happy are they who can hear it.
“I see thy brimming, eddying stream, and thy enchantment. For thou changest every rock in thy bed into a gem; all is real opal and agate, and at will thou pavest with diamonds. Take them away from thy stream, and they are poor shards and flints: So is it with me to-day.”
These journals differ from common diaries in being a chronicle of thoughts, rather than of events, or even of impressions. Emerson is the most impersonal of writers, which accounts in part, and by virtue of the attraction of opposites, for the high regard in which he held that gossip, Montaigne. Still, there are jottings enough of foreign travel, lecture tours, domestic incidents, passing public events, club meetings, college reunions, walks and talks with Concord neighbors, and the like, to afford the material of a new biography,2 which has been published uniformly with the ten volumes of journals. And the philosopher held himself so aloof from vulgar curiosity that the general reader, who breathes with difficulty in the rarefied air of high speculations, will perhaps turn most readily to such more intimate items as occur. As where his little son – the “deep-eyed boy” of the “Threnody” – being taken to the circus, said à propos of the clown, “Papa, the funny man makes me want to go home.” Emerson adds that he and Waldo were of one mind on the subject; and one thereupon recalls a celebrated incident in the career of Mark Twain. The diarist is not above setting down jests – even profane jests – with occasional anecdotes, bons mots, and miscellaneous witticisms like “an ordinary man or a Christian.” I, for one, would like to know who was the “Miss – of New Haven, who on reading Ruskin’s book [presumably “Modern Painters”], said ‘Nature was Mrs. Turner.’ ” Were there such witty fair in the New Haven of 1848?
In the privacy of his journals, every man allows himself a license of criticism which he would hardly practise in public. The limitations or eccentricities of Emerson’s literary tastes are familiar to most; such as his dislike of Shelley and contempt for Poe, “the jingle man.” But here is a judgment, calmly penned, which rather takes one’s breath away: “Nathaniel Hawthorne’s reputation as a writer is a very pleasing fact, because his writing is not good for anything, and this is a tribute to the man.” This, to be sure, was in 1842, eight years before the appearance of “The Scarlet Letter.” Yet, to the last, the romancer’s obsession with the problem of evil affected the resolved optimist as unwholesome. Indeed he speaks impatiently of all novels, and prophesies that they will give way by and by to autobiographies and diaries. The only exception to his general distaste for fiction is “The Bride of Lammermoor,” which he mentions repeatedly and with high praise, comparing it with Aeschylus.
The entry concerning Moore’s “Life of Sheridan” is surprisingly savage – less like the gentle Emerson than like his truculent friend Carlyle: “He details the life of a mean, fraudulent, vain, quarrelsome play-actor, whose wit lay in cheating tradesmen, whose genius was used in studying jokes and bons mots at home for a dinner or a club, who laid traps for the admiration of coxcombs, who never did anything good and never said anything wise.”
Emerson’s biographers make a large claim for him. One calls him “the first of American thinkers”: another, “the only great mind in American literature.” This is a generous challenge, but I believe that, with proper definition, it may be granted. When it is remembered that among American thinkers are Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, William James, and Willard Gibbs, one hesitates to subscribe to so absolute a verdict. Let it stand true, however, with the saving clause, “after the intuitional order of thought.” Emerson dwelt with the insights of the Reason and not with the logically derived judgments of the Understanding. (He capitalizes the names of these faculties, which translate the Kantian Vernunft and Verstand.) Dialectics he eschewed, professing himself helpless to conduct an argument. He announced truths, but would not undertake to say by what process of reasoning he reached them. They were not the conclusions of a syllogism: they were borne in upon him – revelations. At New Bedford he visited the meetings of the Quakers, and took great interest in their doctrine of the inner light.
When the heresies of the “Divinity School Address” (1838) were attacked by orthodox Unitarians (if there is such a thing as an orthodox Unitarian) like Andrews Norton in “The Latest Form of Infidelity,” and Henry Ware in his sermon on “The Personality of God,” Emerson made no attempt to defend his position. In a cordial letter to Ware he wrote: “I could not possibly give you one of the ‘arguments’ you cruelly hint at, on which any doctrine of mine stands; for I do not know what arguments are in reference to any expression of a thought. I delight in telling what I think; but if you ask me how I dare say so, or why it is so, I am the most helpless of mortal men.”
Let me add a few sentences from the noble and beautiful passage written at sea, September 17, 1833: “Yesterday I was asked what I mean by morals. I reply that I cannot define, and care not to define… That which I cannot yet declare has been my angel from childhood until now… It cannot be defeated by my defeats. It cannot be questioned though all the martyrs apostatize… What is this they say about wanting mathematical certainty for moral truths? I have always affirmed they had it. Yet they ask me whether I know the soul immortal. No. But do I not know the Now to be eternal?.. Men seem to be constitutionally believers and unbelievers. There is no bridge that can cross from a mind in one state to a mind in the other. All my opinions, affections, whimsies, are tinged with belief, – incline to that side… But I cannot give reasons to a person of a different persuasion that are at all adequate to the force of my conviction. Yet when I fail to find the reason, my faith is not less.”
No doubt most men cherish deep beliefs for which they can assign no reasons: “real assents,” rather than “notional assents,” in Newman’s phrase. But Emerson’s profession of inability to argue need not be accepted too literally. It is a mask of humility covering a subtle policy: a plea in confession and avoidance: a throwing off of responsibility in forma pauperis. He could argue well, when he wanted to. In these journals, for example, he exposes, with admirable shrewdness, the unreasonableness and inconsistency of Alcott, Thoreau, and others, who refused to pay taxes because Massachusetts enforced the fugitive slave law: “As long as the state means you well, do not refuse your pistareen. You have a tottering cause: ninety parts of the pistareen it will spend for what you think also good: ten parts for mischief. You cannot fight heartily for a fraction… The state tax does not pay the Mexican War. Your coat, your sugar, your Latin and French and German book, your watch does. Yet these you do not stick at buying.”
Again,