Part 1 (2/2)
I heard him once say to a student who propounded to him some glittering theoretic generality. And on a similar occasion he gave an admonition that must have sunk deep into the heart of him to whom it was addressed. ”Mr. X, some people perhaps now consider you a bright young man; but when you are fifty years old, if they ever speak of you then, what they will say will be this: 'That X,--oh, yes, I know him; he used to be a very bright young man!'” Happy is the conceited youth who at the proper moment receives such salutary cold water therapeutics as this from one who, in other respects, is a kind friend. We cannot all escape from being abstractionists. I myself, for instance, have never been able to escape; but the hours I spent with Aga.s.siz so taught me the difference between all possible abstractionists and all livers in the light of the world's concrete fulness, that I have never been able to forget it. Both kinds of mind have their place in the infinite design, but there can be no question as to which kind lies the nearer to the divine type of thinking.
Aga.s.siz's view of Nature was saturated with simple religious feeling, and for this deep but unconventional religiosity he found at Harvard the most sympathetic possible environment. In the fifty years that have sped since he arrived here our knowledge of Nature has penetrated into joints and recesses which his vision never pierced. The causal elements and not the totals are what we are now most pa.s.sionately concerned to understand; and naked and poverty-stricken enough do the stripped-out elements and forces occasionally appear to us to be. But the truth of things is after all their living fulness, and some day, from a more commanding point of view than was possible to any one in Aga.s.siz's generation, our descendants, enriched with the spoils of all our a.n.a.lytic investigations, will get round again to that higher and simpler way of looking at Nature. Meanwhile as we look back upon Aga.s.siz, there floats up a breath as of life's morning, that makes the work seem young and fresh once more. May we all, and especially may those younger members of our a.s.sociation who never knew him, give a grateful thought to his memory as we wander through that Museum which he founded, and through this University whose ideals he did so much to elevate and define.
[1] Words spoken at the reception of the American Society of Naturalists by the President and Fellows of Harvard College at Cambridge, December 30, 1896. Printed in _Science_, N. S. V. 285.
II
ADDRESS AT THE EMERSON CENTENARY IN CONCORD[1]
The pathos of death is this, that when the days of one's life are ended, those days that were so crowded with business and felt so heavy in their pa.s.sing, what remains of one in memory should usually be so slight a thing. The phantom of an att.i.tude, the echo of a certain mode of thought, a few pages of print, some invention, or some victory we gained in a brief critical hour, are all that can survive the best of us. It is as if the whole of a man's significance had now shrunk into the phantom of an att.i.tude, into a mere musical note or phrase suggestive of his singularity--happy are those whose singularity gives a note so clear as to be victorious over the inevitable pity of such a diminution and abridgment.
An ideal wraith like this, of Emerson's personality, hovers over all Concord to-day, taking, in the minds of those of you who were his neighbors and intimates a somewhat fuller shape, remaining more abstract in the younger generation, but bringing home to all of us the notion of a spirit indescribably precious. The form that so lately moved upon these streets and country roads, or awaited in these fields and woods the beloved Muse's visits, is now dust; but the soul's note, the spiritual voice, rises strong and clear above the uproar of the times, and seems securely destined to exert an enn.o.bling influence over future generations.
What gave a flavor so matchless to Emerson's individuality was, even more than his rich mental gifts, their singularly harmonious combination. Rarely has a man so accurately known the limits of his genius or so unfailingly kept within them. ”Stand by your order,” he used to say to youthful students; and perhaps the paramount impression one gets of his life is of his loyalty to his own personal type and mission. The type was that of what he liked to call the scholar, the perceiver of pure truth; and the mission was that of the reporter in worthy form of each perception. The day is good, he said, in which we have the most perceptions. There are times when the cawing of a crow, a weed, a snowflake, or a farmer planting in his field become symbols to the intellect of truths equal to those which the most majestic phenomena can open. Let me mind my own charge, then, walk alone, consult the sky, the field and forest, sedulously waiting every morning for the news concerning the structure of the universe which the good Spirit will give me.
This was the first half of Emerson, but only half; for genius, as he said, is insatiate for expression, and truth has to be clad in the right verbal garment. The form of the garment was so vital with Emerson that it is impossible to separate it from the matter. They form a chemical combination--thoughts which would be trivial expressed otherwise, are important through the nouns and verbs to which he married them. The style is the man, it has been said; the man Emerson's mission culminated in his style, and if we must define him in one word, we have to call him Artist. He was an artist whose medium was verbal and who wrought in spiritual material.
This duty of spiritual seeing and reporting determined the whole tenor of his life. It was to s.h.i.+eld this duty from invasion and distraction that he dwelt in the country, that he consistently declined to entangle himself with a.s.sociations or to enc.u.mber himself with functions which, however he might believe in them, he felt were duties for other men and not for him. Even the care of his garden, ”with its stoopings and fingerings in a few yards of s.p.a.ce,” he found ”narrowing and poisoning,” and took to long free walks and saunterings instead, without apology. ”Causes” innumerable sought to enlist him as their ”worker”--all got his smile and word of sympathy, but none entrapped him into service. The struggle against slavery itself, deeply as it appealed to him, found him firm: ”G.o.d must govern his own world, and knows his way out of this pit without my desertion of my post, which has none to guard it but me. I have quite other slaves to face than those Negroes, to wit, imprisoned thoughts far back in the brain of man, and which have no watchman or lover or defender but me.” This in reply to the possible questions of his own conscience. To hot-blooded moralists with more objective ideas of duty, such a fidelity to the limits of his genius must often have made him seem provokingly remote and unavailable; but we, who can see things in more liberal perspective, must unqualifiably approve the results. The faultless tact with which he kept his safe limits while he so dauntlessly a.s.serted himself within them, is an example fitted to give heart to other theorists and artists the world over.
The insight and creed from which Emerson's life followed can be best summed up in his own verses:
”So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is G.o.d to man!”
Through the individual fact there ever shone for him the effulgence of the Universal Reason. The great Cosmic Intellect terminates and houses itself in mortal men and pa.s.sing hours. Each of us is an angle of its eternal vision, and the only way to be true to our Maker is to be loyal to ourselves. ”O rich and various Man!” he cries, ”thou palace of sight and sound, carrying in thy senses the morning and the night and the unfathomable galaxy; in thy brain the geometry of the city of G.o.d; in thy heart the bower of love and the realms of right and wrong.”
If the individual open thus directly into the Absolute, it follows that there is something in each and all of us, even the lowliest, that ought not to consent to borrowing traditions and living at second hand. ”If John was perfect, why are you and I alive?” Emerson writes; ”As long as any man exists there is some need of him; let him fight for his own.”
This faith that in a life at first hand there is something sacred is perhaps the most characteristic note in Emerson's writings. The hottest side of him is this non-conformist persuasion, and if his temper could ever verge on common irascibility, it would be by reason of the pa.s.sionate character of his feelings on this point. The world is still new and untried. In seeing freshly, and not in hearing of what others saw, shall a man find what truth is. ”Each one of us can bask in the great morning which rises out of the Eastern Sea, and be himself one of the children of the light.” ”Trust thyself, every heart vibrates to that iron string. There is a time in each man's education when he must arrive at the conviction that imitation is suicide; when he must take himself for better or worse as his portion; and know that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nouris.h.i.+ng corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which it was given him to till.”
The matchless eloquence with which Emerson proclaimed the sovereignty of the living individual electrified and emanc.i.p.ated his generation, and this bugle-blast will doubtless be regarded by future critics as the soul of his message. The present man is the aboriginal reality, the Inst.i.tution is derivative, and the past man is irrelevant and obliterate for present issues. ”If anyone would lay an axe to your tree with a text from 1 John, v, 7, or a sentence from Saint Paul, say to him,” Emerson wrote, ”'My tree is Yggdrasil, the tree of life.' Let him know by your security that your conviction is clear and sufficient, and, if he were Paul himself, that you also are here and with your Creator.” ”Cleave ever to G.o.d,” he insisted, ”against the name of G.o.d;”--and so, in spite of the intensely religious character of his total thought, when he began his career it seemed to many of his brethren in the clerical profession that he was little more than an iconoclast and desecrator.
Emerson's belief that the individual must in reason be adequate to the vocation for which the Spirit of the world has called him into being, is the source of those sublime pages, hearteners and sustainers of our youth, in which he urges his hearers to be incorruptibly true to their own private conscience. Nothing can harm the man who rests in his appointed place and character. Such a man is invulnerable; he balances the universe, balances it as much by keeping small when he is small, as by being great and spreading when he is great. ”I love and honor Epaminondas,” said Emerson, ”but I do not wish to be Epaminondas. I hold it more just to love the world of this hour than the world of his hour. Nor can you, if I am true, excite me to the least uneasiness by saying, 'He acted and thou sittest still.' I see action to be good when the need is, and sitting still to be also good. Epaminondas, if he was the man I take him for, would have sat still with joy and peace, if his lot had been mine. Heaven is large, and affords s.p.a.ce for all modes of love and fort.i.tude.” ”The fact that I am here certainly shows me that the Soul has need of an organ here, and shall I not a.s.sume the post?”
The vanity of all superserviceableness and pretence was never more happily set forth than by Emerson in the many pa.s.sages in which he develops this aspect of his philosophy. Character infallibly proclaims itself. ”Hide your thoughts!--hide the sun and moon. They publish themselves to the universe. They will speak through you though you were dumb. They will flow out of your actions, your manners and your face. . . . Don't say things: What you are stands over you the while and thunders so that I cannot say what you say to the contrary. . . .
What a man _is_ engraves itself upon him in letters of light.
Concealment avails him nothing, boasting nothing. There is confession in the glances of our eyes; in our smiles; in salutations; and the grasp of hands. His sin bedaubs him, mars all his good impression.
Men know not why they do not trust him, but they do not trust him. His vice gla.s.ses the eye, casts lines of mean expression in the cheek, pinches the nose, sets the mark of the beast upon the back of the head, and writes, O fool! fool! on the forehead of a king. If you would not be known to do a thing, never do it; a man may play the fool in the drifts of a desert, but every grain of sand shall seem to see.--How can a man be concealed? How can he be concealed?”
On the other hand, never was a sincere word or a sincere thought utterly lost. ”Never a magnanimity fell to the ground but there is some heart to greet and accept it unexpectedly. . . . The hero fears not that if he withstood the avowal of a just and brave act, it will go unwitnessed and unloved. One knows it,--himself,--and is pledged by it to sweetness of peace and to n.o.bleness of aim, which will prove in the end a better proclamation than the relating of the incident.”
The same indefeasible right to be exactly what one is, provided one only be authentic, spreads itself, in Emerson's way of thinking, from persons to things and to times and places. No date, no position is insignificant, if the life that fills it out be only genuine:--
”In solitude, in a remote village, the ardent youth loiters and mourns.
With inflamed eye, in this sleeping wilderness, he has read the story of the Emperor, Charles the Fifth, until his fancy has brought home to the surrounding woods the faint roar of cannonades in the Milanese, and marches in Germany. He is curious concerning that man's day. What filled it? The crowded orders, the stern decisions, the foreign despatches, the Castilian etiquette? The soul answers--Behold his day here! In the sighing of these woods, in the quiet of these gray fields, in the cool breeze that sings out of these northern mountains; in the workmen, the boys, the maidens you meet,--in the hopes of the morning, the ennui of noon, and sauntering of the afternoon; in the disquieting comparisons; in the regrets at want of vigor; in the great idea and the puny execution,--behold Charles the Fifth's day; another, yet the same; behold Chatham's, Hampden's, Bayard's, Alfred's, Scipio's, Pericles's day,--day of all that are born of women. The difference of circ.u.mstance is merely costume. I am tasting the self-same life,--its sweetness, its greatness, its pain, which I so admire in other men. Do not foolishly ask of the inscrutable, obliterated past what it cannot tell,--the details of that nature, of that day, called Byron or Burke;--but ask it of the enveloping Now. . . . Be lord of a day, and you can put up your history books.”
”The deep to-day which all men scorn,” receives thus from Emerson superb revindication. ”Other world! there is no other world.” All G.o.d's life opens into the individual particular, and here and now, or nowhere, is reality. ”The present hour is the decisive hour, and every day is doomsday.”
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