Part 19 (1/2)
After Hawthorne's death, Emerson made the following entry in his journal: ”I thought him a greater man than any of his works betray; there was still a great deal of work in him, and he might one day show a purer power. It would have been a happiness, doubtless, to both of us, to come into habits of unreserved intercourse. It was easy to talk with him; there were no barriers; only he said so little that I talked too much, and stopped only because, as he gave no indication, I feared to exceed. He showed no egotism or self-a.s.sertion; rather a humility, and at one time a fear that he had written himself out. I do not think any of his books worthy his genius. I admired the man, who was simple, amiable, truth-loving, and frank in conversation, but I never read his books with pleasure; they are too young.”
Emerson was greedy for ideas, and the pure, limpid literature of Hawthorne did not satisfy him.
Hawthorne's estimate of Emerson was far more just and penetrating; he described him very correctly as ”a great original thinker”
whose ”mind acted upon other minds of a certain const.i.tution with wonderful magnetism, and drew many men upon long pilgrimages to speak with him face to face. Young visionaries--to whom just so much of insight had been imparted as to make life all a labyrinth around them--came to seek the clew that should guide them out of their self-involved bewilderment. Gray-headed theorists--whose systems, at first air, had finally imprisoned them in an iron framework--travelled painfully to his door, not to ask deliverance, but to invite the free spirit into their own thraldom. People that had lighted on a new thought, or a thought that they fancied new, came to Emerson, as the finder of a glittering gem hastens to a lapidary to ascertain its quality and value. Uncertain, troubled, earnest wanderers through the midnight of the moral world beheld his intellectual face as a beacon burning on a hill-top, and, climbing the difficult ascent, looked forth into the surrounding obscurity more hopefully than hitherto.
For myself, there had been epochs in my life when I, too, might have asked of this prophet the master word that should solve me the riddle of the universe, but, now, being happy, I feel as if there were no question to be put, and therefore admired Emerson as a poet of deep and austere beauty, but sought nothing from him as a philosopher. It was good nevertheless to meet him in the wood-paths, or sometimes in our avenue, with that pure, intellectual gleam diffused about his presence like the garment of a s.h.i.+ning one; and he, so quiet, so simple, so without pretension, encountering each man alive as if expecting to receive more than he could impart.”
It was fortunate for Hawthorne, doubly fortunate for us who read him, that he could withstand the influence of Emerson, and go on writing in his own way; his dreams and fancies were undisturbed by the clear vision which sought so earnestly to distract him from his realm of the imagination.
On first impressions Emerson rated Alcott very high. ”He has more of the G.o.dlike than any man I have ever seen, and his presence rebukes, and threatens, and raises. He is a teacher.” ”Yesterday Alcott left us after a three days' visit. The most extraordinary man, and the highest genius of his time.” This was in 1835. Seven years later Emerson records this impression. ”He looks at everything in larger angles than any other, and, by good right, should be the greatest man. But here comes in another trait; it is found, though his angles are of so generous contents, the lines do not meet; the apex is not quite defined. We must allow for the refraction of the lens, but it is the best instrument I have ever met with.”
Alcott visited Concord first in October, 1835, and found that he and Emerson had many things in common, but he entered in his diary, ”Mr. Emerson's fine literary taste is sometimes in the way of a clear and hearty acceptance of the spiritual.” Again, he naively congratulates himself that he has found a man who could appreciate his theories. ”Emerson sees me, knows me, and, more than all others, helps me,--not by noisy praise, not by low appeals to interest and pa.s.sion, but by turning the eye of others to my stand in reason and the nature of things. Only men of like vision can apprehend and counsel each other.”
With the exception of Hawthorne, there was among the men of Concord a tendency to over-estimate one another. For the most part, they took themselves and each other very seriously; even Emerson's subtle sense of humor did not save him from yielding to this tendency, which is ill.u.s.trated in the following page from Hawthorne's journal:
”About nine o'clock (Sunday) Hilliard and I set out on a walk to Walden Pond, calling by the way at Mr. Emerson's to obtain his guidance or directions. He, from a scruple of his eternal conscience, detained us until after the people had got into church, and then he accompanied us in his own ill.u.s.trious person.
We turned aside a little from our way to visit Mr. Hosmer, a yeoman, of whose homely and self-acquired wisdom Mr. Emerson has a very high opinion.” ”He had a fine flow of talk, and not much diffidence about his own opinions. I was not impressed with any remarkable originality in his views, but they were sensible and characteristic. Methought, however, the good yeoman was not quite so natural as he may have been at an earlier period. The simplicity of his character has probably suffered by his detecting the impression he makes on those around him. There is a circle, I suppose, who look up to him as an oracle, and so he inevitably a.s.sumes the oracular manner, and speaks as if truth and wisdom were attiring themselves by his voice. Mr. Emerson has risked the doing him much mischief by putting him in print,--a trial few persons can sustain without losing their unconsciousness. But, after all, a man gifted with thought and expression, whatever his rank in life and his mode of uttering himself, whether by pen or tongue, cannot be expected to go through the world without finding himself out; and, as all such discoveries are partial and imperfect, they do more harm than good to the character. Mr.
Hosmer is more natural than ninety-nine men out of a hundred, and is certainly a man of intellectual and moral substance. It would be amusing to draw a parallel between him and his admirer,--Mr.
Emerson, the mystic, stretching his hand out of cloudland in vain search for something real; and the man of st.u.r.dy sense, all whose ideas seem to be dug out of his mind, hard and substantial, as he digs his potatoes, carrots, beets, and turnips out of the earth.
Mr. Emerson is a great searcher for facts, but they seem to melt away and become unsubstantial in his grasp.”
They took that extraordinary creature, Margaret Fuller, seriously, and they took a vast deal of poor poetry seriously. Because a few could write, nearly every one in the village seemed to think he or she could write, and write they did to the extent of a small library most religiously shelved and wors.h.i.+pped in its own compartment in the town library.
Genius is egotism; the superb confidence of these men, each in the sanct.i.ty of his own mission, in the plenitude of his own powers, in the inspiration of his own message, made them what they were.
The last word was Alcott's because he outlived them all, and his last word was that, great as were those who had taken their departure, the greatest of them all had fallen just short of appreciating him, the survivor. A man penetrates every one's disguise but his own; we deceive no one but ourselves. The insane are often singularly quick to penetrate the delusions of others; the man who calls himself George Was.h.i.+ngton ridicules the claim of another that he is Julius Caesar.
Between Hawthorne and Th.o.r.eau there was little in common. In 1860, the latter speaks of meeting Hawthorne shortly after his return from Europe, and says, ”He is as simple and childlike as ever.”
Of Th.o.r.eau, Mrs. Hawthorne wrote in a letter, ”This evening Mr.
Th.o.r.eau is going to lecture, and will stay with us. His lecture before was so enchanting; such a revelation of nature in all its exquisite details of wood-thrushes, squirrels, suns.h.i.+ne, mists and shadows, fresh vernal odors, pine-tree ocean melodies, that my ear rang with music, and I seemed to have been wandering through copse and dingle! Mr. Th.o.r.eau has risen above all his arrogance of manner, and is as gentle, simple, ruddy, and meek as all geniuses should be; and now his great blue eyes fairly outs.h.i.+ne and put into shade a nose which I thought must make him uncomely forever.”
In his own journal Hawthorne said, ”Mr. Th.o.r.eau dined with us. He is a singular character,--a young man with much of wild, original nature still remaining in him; and so far as he is sophisticated, it is in a way and method of his own. He is as ugly as sin, long-nosed, queer-mouthed, and with uncouth and somewhat rustic, though courteous, manners, corresponding very well with such an exterior. But his ugliness is of an honest and agreeable fas.h.i.+on, and becomes him much better than beauty.”
Alcott helped build the hut at Walden, and he and Emerson spent many an evening there in conversation that must have delighted the G.o.ds--in so far as they understood it.
Of Alcott and their winter evenings, Th.o.r.eau has said, ”One of the last of the philosophers. Connecticut gave him to the world,--he peddled first his wares, afterwards, as he declares, his brains; these he peddles still, prompting G.o.d and disgracing man, bearing for fruit his brain only, like the nut in the kernel. His words and att.i.tude always suppose a better state of things than other men are acquainted with, and he will be the last man to be disappointed as the ages revolve. A true friend of man, almost the only friend of human progress. He is perhaps the sanest man and has the fewest crotchets of any I chance to know,--the same yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow. Ah, such discourse as we had, hermit and philosopher, and the old settler I have spoken of,--we three; it expanded and racked my little home;”--to say nothing of the universe, which doubtless felt the strain.
Referring to the same evening, Alcott said,--probably after a chastening discussion,--”If I were to proffer my earnest prayer to the G.o.ds for the greatest of all human privileges, it should be for the gift of a severely candid friend. Intercourse of this kind I have found possible with my friends Emerson and Th.o.r.eau; and the evenings pa.s.sed in their society during these winter months have realized my conception of what friends.h.i.+p, when great and genuine, owes to and takes from its objects.”
Nearly twenty years after Th.o.r.eau's death, Alcott, while walking towards the close of day, said, ”I always think of Th.o.r.eau when I look at a sunset.”
Emerson was fourteen years older than Th.o.r.eau, but between the two men there existed through life profound sympathy and affection.
Emerson watched him develop as a young man, and delivered the address at his funeral; for two years they lived in the same house, and concerning him Emerson wrote in 1863, a year after his death, ”In reading Henry Th.o.r.eau's journal, I am very sensible of the vigor of his const.i.tution. That oaken strength which I noted whenever he walked or worked, or surveyed wood-lots, the same unhesitating hand with which a field laborer accosts a piece of work which I should shun as a waste of strength, Henry shows in his literary task. He has muscle, and ventures in and performs feats which I am forced to decline. In reading him I find the same thoughts, the same spirit that is in me, but he takes a step beyond and ill.u.s.trates by excellent images that which I should have conveyed in a sleepy generalization. 'Tis as if I went into a gymnasium and saw youths leap and climb and swing with a force unapproachable, tho these feats are only continuations of my initial grapplings and jumps.” One is reminded of Mrs. Hawthorne's vivid characterization of the two men as she saw them on the ice of the Musketaquid twenty years before.
In our reverence for a place where a great man for a time has had his home, we must not forget that, while death may mark a given spot, life is quite another matter. A man may be born or may die in a country, a city, a village, a house, a room, or,--narrower still,--a bed; for birth and death are physical events, but life is something quite different. Birth is the welding of the soul to a given body; death is the dissolution of that connection; life is the relation of the imprisoned soul to its environment, and the content of that environment depends largely upon the individual; it may be as narrow as the village in which he lives, or it may stretch beyond the uttermost stars. A man may live on a farm, or he may visit the cities of the earth,--it does not matter much; his life is the sum total of his experiences, his sympathies, his loves, of his hopes and ambitions, his dreams and aspirations, his beliefs and convictions.