Part 4 (1/2)

”Anti-scientific, antisocial, anti-Christian” are the terms applied to him by one of his most penetrating critics. Yet I should prefer to say ”un-scientific,” ”unsocial,” and ”non-Christian,” in the sense in which Plato and Isaiah are non-Christian. Perhaps it would be still nearer the truth to say, as Mrs. Lincoln said of her husband, ”He was not a technical Christian.” He tends to underestimate inst.i.tutions of every kind; history, except as a storehouse of anecdote, and culture as a steady mental discipline. This is the price he pays for his transcendental insistence upon the supreme value of the Now, the moment of insight. But after all these limitations are properly set down, the personality of Ralph Waldo Emerson remains a priceless possession to his countrymen. The austere serenity of his life, and the perfection with which he represents the highest type of his province and his era, will ultimately become blended with the thought of his true Americanism.

A democrat and liberator, like Lincoln, he seems also destined like Lincoln to become increasingly a world's figure, a friend and guide to aspiring spirits everywhere. Differences of race and creed are negligible in the presence of such superb confidence in G.o.d and the soul.

Citizens of Concord in May, 1862, hearing that Henry Th.o.r.eau, the eccentric bachelor, had just died of consumption in his mother's house on Main Street, in his forty-fifth year, would have smiled cannily at the notion that after fifty years their townsman's literary works would be published in a sumptuous twenty-volume edition, and that critics in his own country and in Europe would rank him with Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Yet that is precisely what has happened. Our literature has no more curious story than the evolution of this local crank into his rightful place of masters.h.i.+p. In his lifetime he printed only two books, ”A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers”--which was even more completely neglected by the public than Emerson's ”Nature”--and ”Walden,” now one of the cla.s.sics, but only beginning to be talked about when its shy, proud author penned his last line and died with the words ”moose” and ”Indian” on his lips.

Th.o.r.eau, like all thinkers who reach below the surface of human life, means many different things to men of various temperaments. Collectors of human novelties, like Stevenson, rejoice in his uniqueness of flavor; critics, like Lowell, place him, not without impatient rigor. To some readers he is primarily a naturalist, an observer, of the White of Selborne school; to others an elemental man, a lover of the wild, a hermit of the woods. He has been called the poet-naturalist, to indicate that his powers of observation were accompanied, like Wordsworth's, by a gift of emotional interpretation of the meaning of phenomena. Lovers of literature celebrate his sheer force and penetration of phrase. But to the student of American thought Th.o.r.eau's prime value lies in the courage and consistency with which he endeavored to realize the gospel of Transcendentalism in his own inner life.

Lovers of racial traits like to remember that Th.o.r.eau's grandfather was an immigrant Frenchman from the island of Jersey, and that his grandmother was Scotch and Quaker. His father made lead pencils and ground plumbago in his own house in Concord. The mother was from New Hamps.h.i.+re. It was a high-minded family. All the four children taught school and were good talkers. Henry, born in 1817, was duly baptized by good Dr. Ripley of the Old Manse, studied Greek and Latin, and was graduated at Harvard in 1837, the year of Emerson's Phi Beta Kappa address. Even in college the young man was a trifle difficult. ”Cold and unimpressible,” wrote a cla.s.smate. ”The touch of his hand was moist and indifferent. He did not care for people.” ”An unfavorable opinion has been entertained of his disposition to exert himself,” wrote President Quincy confidentially to Emerson in 1837, although the kindly President, a year later, in recommending Th.o.r.eau as a school-teacher, certified that ”his rank was high as a scholar in all the branches and his morals and general conduct unexceptionable and exemplary.”

Ten years pa.s.sed. The young man gave up school-keeping, thinking it a loss of time. He learned pencil-making, surveying, and farm work, and found that by manual labor for six weeks in the year he could meet all the expenses of living. He haunted the woods and pastures, explored rivers and ponds, built the famous hut on Emerson's wood-lot with the famous axe borrowed from Alcott, was put in jail for refusal to pay his polltax, and, to sum up much in little, ”signed off” from social obligations. ”I, Henry D. Th.o.r.eau, have signed off, and do not hold myself responsible to your multifarious uncivil chaos named Civil Government.” When his college cla.s.s held its tenth reunion in 1847, and each man was asked to send to the secretary a record of achievement, Th.o.r.eau wrote: ”My steadiest employment, if such it can be called, is to keep myself at the top of my condition and ready for whatever may turn up in heaven or on earth.” There is the motto of Transcendentalism, stamped upon a single coin.

For ”to be ready for whatever may turn up” is Th.o.r.eau's racier, homelier version of Emerson's ”endless seeker”; and Th.o.r.eau, more easily than Emerson, could venture to stake everything upon the quest. The elder man had announced the programme, but by 1847 he was himself almost what Th.o.r.eau would call a ”committed man,” with family and household responsibilities, with a living to earn, and bound, like every professional writer and speaker, to have some measure of regard for his public. But Th.o.r.eau was ready to travel lightly and alone. If he should fail in the great adventure for spiritual perfection, it was his own affair. He had no intimates, no confidant save the mult.i.tudinous pages of his ”Journal,” from which--and here again he followed Emerson's example--his future books were to be compiled. Many of his most loyal admirers will admit that such a quest is bound, by the very conditions of the problem, to be futile. Hawthorne allegorized it in ”Ethan Brand,”

and his quaint ill.u.s.tration of the folly of romantic expansion of the self apart from the common interests of human kind is the picture of a dog chasing its own tail. ”It is time now that I begin to live,” notes Th.o.r.eau in the ”Journal,” and he continued to say it in a hundred different ways until the end of all his journalizing, but he never quite captured the fugitive felicity. The haunting pathos of his own allegory has moved every reader of ”Walden:” ”I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail.” Precisely what he meant it is now impossible to say, but surely he betrays a doubt in the ultimate efficacy of his own system of life. He bends doggedly to the trail, for Henry Th.o.r.eau is no quitter, but the trail leads nowhere, and in the latest volumes of the ”Journals” he seems to realize that he has been pursuing a phantom. He dived fearlessly and deep into himself, but somehow he failed to grasp that pearl of great price which all the transcendental prophets a.s.sured him was to be had at the cost of diving.

This is not to say that this austere and strenuous athlete came up quite empty-handed. Far from it. The byproducts of his toil were enough to have enriched many lesser men, and they have given Th.o.r.eau a secure fame. From his boyhood he longed to make himself a writer, and an admirable writer he became. ”For along time,” he says in ”Walden,” ”I was reporter to a journal, of no very wide circulation, whose editor has never seen fit to print the bulk of my contributions, and, as is too common with writers, I got only my labor for my pains. However, in this case my pains were their reward.” Like so many solitaries, he experienced the joy of intense, long-continued effort in composition, and he was artist enough to know that his pages, carefully a.s.sembled from his note books, had pungency, form, atmosphere. No man of his day, not even Lowell the ”last of the bookmen,” abandoned himself more unreservedly to the delight of reading. Th.o.r.eau was an accomplished scholar in the Greek and Roman cla.s.sics, as his translations attest.

He had some acquaintance with several modern languages, and at one time possessed the best collection of books on Oriental literature to be found in America. He was drenched in the English poetry of the seventeenth century. His critical essays in the ”Dial,” his letters and the bookish allusions throughout his writings, are evidence of rich harvesting in the records of the past. He left some three thousand ma.n.u.script pages of notes on the American Indians, whose history and character had fascinated him from boyhood. Even his antiquarian hobbies gave him durable satisfaction. Then, too, he had deep delight in his life-long studies in natural history, in his meticulous measurements of river currents, in his notes upon the annual flowering of plants and the migration of birds. The more thoroughly trained naturalists of our own day detect him now and again in error as to his birds and plants, just as specialists in Maine woodcraft discover that he made amusing, and for him unaccountable, blunders when he climbed Katahdin. But if he was not impeccable as a naturalist or woodsman, who has ever had more fun out of his enthusiasm than Th.o.r.eau, and who has ever stimulated as many men and women in the happy use of their eyes? He would have had slight patience with much of the sentimental nature study of our generation, and certainly an intellectual contempt for much that we read and write about the call of the wild; but no reader of his books can escape his infection for the freedom of the woods, for the stark and elemental in nature. Th.o.r.eau's pa.s.sion for this aspect of life may have been selfish, wolflike, but it is still communicative.

Once, toward the close of his too brief life, Th.o.r.eau ”signed on” again to an American ideal, and no man could have signed more n.o.bly. It was the cause of Freedom, as represented by John Brown of Harper's Ferry.

The French and Scotch blood in the furtive hermit suddenly grew hot.

Instead of renouncing in disgust the ”uncivil chaos called Civil Government,” Th.o.r.eau challenged it to a fight. Indeed he had already thrown down the gauntlet in ”Slavery in Ma.s.sachusetts,” which Garrison had published in the ”Liberator” in 1854. And now the death upon the scaffold of the old fanatic of Ossawatomie changed Th.o.r.eau into a complete citizen, arguing the case and glorifying to his neighbors the dead hero. ”It seems as if no man had ever died in America before; for in order to die you must first have lived.... I hear a good many pretend that they are going to die.... Nonsense! I'll defy them to do it. They haven't got life enough in them. They'll deliquesce like fungi, and keep a hundred eulogists mopping the spot where they left off. Only half a dozen or so have died since the world began.” Such pa.s.sages as this reveal a very different Th.o.r.eau from the Th.o.r.eau who is supposed to have spent his days in the company of swamp-blackbirds and woodchucks. He had, in fact, one of the highest qualifications for human society, an absolute honesty of mind. ”We select granite,” he says, ”for the underpinning of our houses and barns; we build fences of stone; but we do not ourselves rest on an underpinning of granite truth, the lowest primitive rock. Our sills are rotten.... In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the postoffice.

You may depend upon it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from himself this long time.”

This hard, basic individualism was for Th.o.r.eau the foundation of all enduring social relations, and the dullest observer of twentieth century America can see that Th.o.r.eau's doctrine is needed as much as ever. His sharp-edged personality provokes curiosity and p.r.i.c.ks the reader into dissent or emulation as the case may be, but its chief ethical value to our generation lies in the fact that here was a Transcendentalist who stressed, not the life of the senses, though he was well aware of their seductiveness, but the stubborn energy of the will.

The scope of the present book prevents more than a glimpse at the other members of the New England Transcendental group. They are a very mixed company, n.o.ble, whimsical, queer, impossible. ”The good Alcott,” wrote Carlyle, ”with his long, lean face and figure, with his gray worn temples and mild radiant eyes; all bent on saving the world by a return to acorns and the golden age; he comes before one like a venerable Don Quixote, whom n.o.body can laugh at without loving.” These words paint a whole company, as well as a single man. The good Alcott still awaits an adequate biographer. Connecticut Yankee, peddler in the South, school-teacher in Boston and elsewhere, he descended upon Concord, flitted to the queer community of Fruitlands, was starved back to Concord, inspired and bored the patient Emerson, talked endlessly, wrote ineffective books, and had at last his apotheosis in the Concord School of Philosophy, but was chiefly known for the twenty years before his death in 1888 as the father of the Louisa Alcott who wrote ”Little Women.” ”A tedious archangel,” was Emerson's verdict, and it is likely to stand.

Margaret Fuller, though sketched by Hawthorne, a.n.a.lyzed by Emerson, and painted at full length by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, is now a fading figure--a remarkable woman, no doubt, one of the first of American feminists, suggesting George Eliot in her physical unattractiveness, her clear brain, her touch of sensuousness. She was an early-ripe, over-crammed scholar in the cla.s.sics and in modern European languages.

She did loyal, unpaid work as the editor of the ”Dial,” which from 1840 to 1844 was the organ of Transcendentalism. She joined the community at Brook Farm, whose story has been so well told by Lindsay Swift. For a while she served as literary editor of the ”New York Tribune” under Horace Greeley. Then she went abroad, touched Rousseau's ma.n.u.scripts at Paris with trembling, adoring fingers, made a secret marriage in Italy with the young Marquis Ossoli, and perished by s.h.i.+pwreck, with her husband and child, off Fire Island in 1850.

Theodore Parker, like Alcott and ”Margaret,” an admirable Greek scholar, an idealist and reformer, still lives in Chadwick's biography, in Colonel Higginson's delightful essay, and in the memories of a few liberal Bostonians who remember his tremendous sermons on the platform of the old Music Hall. He was a Lexington farmer's son, with the temperament of a blacksmith, with enormous, restless energy, a good hater, a pa.s.sionate lover of all excellent things save meekness. He died at fifty, worn out, in Italy.

But while these three figures were, after Emerson and Th.o.r.eau, the most representative of the group, the student of the Transcendental period will be equally interested in watching its influence upon many other types of young men: upon future journalists and publicists like George William Curtis, Charles A. Dana, and George Ripley; upon religionists like Orestes Brownson, Father Hecker, and James Freeman Clarke; and upon poets like Jones Very, Christopher. P. Cranch, and Ellery Channing.

There was a sunny side of the whole movement, as T. W. Higginson and F. B. Sanborn, two of the latest survivors of the ferment, loved to emphasize in their talk and in their books; and it was shadowed also by tragedy and the pathos of unfulfilled desires. But as one looks back at it, in the perspective of three-quarters of a century, it seems chiefly something touchingly fine. For all these men and women tried to hitch their wagon to a star.

CHAPTER VII. ROMANCE, POETRY, AND HISTORY

Moving in and out of the Transcendentalist circles, in that great generation preceding the Civil War, were a company of other men--romancers, poets, essayists, historians--who shared in the intellectual liberalism of the age, but who were more purely artists in prose and verse than they were seekers after the unattainable.

Hawthorne, for example, sojourned at Concord and at Brook Farm with some of the most extreme types of transcendental extravagance. The movement interested him artistically and he utilized it in his romances, but personally he maintained an att.i.tude of cool detachment from it.

Longfellow was too much of an artist to lose his head over philosophical abstractions; Whittier, at his best, had a too genuine poetic instinct for the concrete; and Lowell and Holmes had the saving gift of humor.

Cultivated Boston gentlemen like Prescott, Motley, and Parkman preferred to keep their feet on the solid earth and write admirable histories. So the mellow years went by. Most of the widely-read American books were being produced within twenty miles of the Boston State House. The slavery issue kept growling, far away, but it was only now and then, as in the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, that it was brought sharply home to the North. The ”golden forties” were as truly golden for New England as for idle California. There was wealth, leisure, books, a glow of harvest-time in the air, though the spirit of the writers is the spirit of youth.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, our greatest writer of pure romance, was Puritan by inheritance and temperament, though not in doctrine or in sympathy. His literary affiliations were with the English and German Romanticists, and he possessed, for professional use, the ideas and vocabulary of his transcendental friends. Born in Salem in 1804, he was descended from Judge Hawthorne of Salem Witchcraft fame, and from a long line of sea-faring ancestors. He inherited a morbid solitariness, redeemed in some measure by a physical endowment of rare strength and beauty. He read Spenser, Rousseau, and the ”Newgate Calendar,” was graduated at Bowdoin, with Longfellow, in the cla.s.s of 1825, and returned to Salem for thirteen brooding lonely years in which he tried to teach himself the art of story-writing. His earliest tales, like Irving's, are essays in which characters emerge; he is absorbed in finding a setting for a preconceived ”moral”; he is in love with allegory and parable. His own words about his first collection of stories, ”Twice-Told Tales,” have often been quoted: ”They have the pale tint of flowers that blossomed in too retired a shade.” Yet they are for the most part exquisitely written. After a couple of years in the Boston Custom-House, and a residence at the socialistic community of Brook Farm, Hawthorne made the happiest of marriages to Sophia Peabody, and for nearly four years dwelt in the Old Manse at Concord. He described it in one of the ripest of his essays, the Preface to ”Mosses from an Old Manse,” his second collection of stories. After three years in the Custom-House at Salem, his dismissal in 1849 gave him leisure to produce his masterpiece, ”The Scarlet Letter,” published in 1850. He was now forty-six. In 1851, he published ”The House of the Seven Gables,” ”The Wonder-Book,” and ”The Snow Image, and Other Tales.” In 1852 came ”The Blithedale Romance,” a rich ironical story drawn from his Brook Farm experience. Four years in the American Consulate at Liverpool and three subsequent years of residence upon the Continent saw no literary harvest except carefully filled notebooks and the deeply imaginative moral romance, ”The Marble Faun.” Hawthorne returned home in 1860 and settled in the Wayside at Concord, busying himself with a new, and, as was destined, a never completed story about the elixir of immortality. But his vitality was ebbing, and in May, 1864, he pa.s.sed away in his sleep. He rests under the pines in Sleepy Hollow, near the Alcotts and the Emersons.

It is difficult for contemporary Americans to a.s.sess the value of such a man, who evidently did nothing except to write a few books. His rare, delicate genius was scarcely touched by pa.s.sing events. Not many of his countrymen really love his writings, as they love, for instance the writings of d.i.c.kens or Thackeray or Stevenson. Everyone reads, at some time of his life, ”The Scarlet Letter,” and trembles at its pa.s.sionate indictment of the sin of concealment, at its agonized admonition, ”Be true! Be true!” Perhaps the happiest memories of Hawthorne's readers, as of Kipling's readers, hover about his charming stories for children; to have missed ”The Wonder-Book” is like having grown old without ever catching the sweetness of the green world at dawn. But our public has learned to enjoy a wholly different kind of style, taught by the daily journals, a nervous, graphic, sensational, physical style fit for describing an automobile, a department store, a steams.h.i.+p, a lynching party. It is the style of our day, and judged by it Hawthorne, who wrote with severity, conscience, and good taste, seems somewhat old-fas.h.i.+oned, like Irving or Addison. He is perhaps too completely a New Englander to be understood by men of other stock, and has never, like Poe and Whitman, excited strong interest among European minds.

Yet no American is surer, generation after generation, of finding a fit audience. Hawthorne's genius was meditative rather than dramatic. His artistic material was moral rather than physical; he brooded over the soul of man as affected by this and that condition and situation. The child of a new a.n.a.lytical age, he thought out with rigid accuracy the precise circ.u.mstances surrounding each one of his cases and modifying it. Many of his sketches and short stories and most of his romances deal with historical facts, moods, and atmospheres, and he knew the past of New England as few men have ever known it. There is solid historical and psychological stuff as the foundation of his air-castles. His latent radicalism furnished him with a touchstone of criticism as he interpreted the moral standards of ancient communities; no reader of ”The Scarlet Letter” can forget Hawthorne's implicit condemnation of the unimaginative harshness of the Puritans. His own judgment upon the deep matters of the human conscience was stern enough, but it was a universalized judgment, and by no means the result of a Calvinism which he hated. Over-fond as he was in his earlier tales of elaborate, fanciful, decorative treatment of themes that promised to point a moral, in his finest short stories, such as ”The Ambitious Guest,” ”The Gentle Boy,” ”Young Goodman Brown,” ”The Snow Image,” ”The Great Stone Face,”

”Drowne's Wooden Image,” ”Rappacini's Daughter,” the moral, if there be one, is not obtruded. He loves physical symbols for mental and moral states, and was poet and Transcendentalist enough to retain his youthful affection for parables; but his true field as a story-teller is the erring, questing, aspiring, shadowed human heart.

”The Scarlet Letter,” for instance, is a study of a universal theme, the problem of concealed sin, punishment, redemption. Only the setting is provincial. The story cannot be rightly estimated, it is true, without remembering the Puritan reverence for physical purity, the Puritan reverence for the magistrate-minister--differing so widely from the respect of Latin countries for the priest--the Puritan preoccupation with the life of the soul, or, as more narrowly construed by Calvinism, the problem of evil. The word Adultery, although suggestively enough present in one of the finest symbolical t.i.tles ever devised by a romancer, does not once occur in the book. The sins dealt with are hypocrisy and revenge. Arthur Dimmesdale, Hester Prynne, and Roger Chillingworth are developing, suffering, living creatures, caught inextricably in the toils of a moral situation. By an incomparable succession of pictures Hawthorne exhibits the travail of their souls. In the greatest scene of all, that between Hester and Arthur in the forest, the Puritan framework of the story gives way beneath the weight of human pa.s.sion, and we seem on the verge of another and perhaps larger solution than was actually worked out by the logic of succeeding events. But though the book has been called Christless, prayerless, hopeless, no mature person ever reads it without a deepened sense of the impotence of all mechanistic theories of sin, and a new vision of the intense reality of spiritual things. ”The law we broke,” in Dimmesdale's ghostly words, was a more subtle law than can be graven on tables of stone and numbered as the Seventh Commandment.

The legacy of guilt is likewise the theme of ”The House of the Seven Gables,” which Hawthorne himself was inclined to think a better book than ”The Scarlet Letter.” Certainly this story of old Salem is impeccably written and its subtle handling of tone and atmosphere is beyond dispute. An ancestral curse, the visitation of the sins of the fathers upon the children, the gradual decay of a once sound stock, are motives that Ibsen might have developed. But the Norseman would have failed to rival Hawthorne's delicate manipulation of his shadows, and the no less masterly deftness of the ultimate mediation of a dark inheritance through the love of the light-hearted Phoebe for the latest descendant of the Maules. In ”The Blithedale Romance” Hawthorne stood for once, perhaps, too near his material to allow the rich atmospheric effects which he prefers, and in spite of the unforgetable portrait of Zen.o.bia and powerful pa.s.sages of realistic description, the book is not quite focussed. In ”The Marble Faun” Hawthorne comes into his own again.