His adoration of his wife was fully justified, for rarely have I seen a woman in whom a Juno-like dignity and serenity were so wedded to personal beauty and to the fine culture of brain and heart, which commanded reverence from the most ordinary acquaintance, as in her. No one who had seen her at home could ever forget the splendid vision, and the last time I ever saw her, so far as I remember, was in summer time, when she and her two daughters, all in white muslin, like creatures of another world, evanescent, translucent, stood in the doorway to say good-by to me. In the same costume, a little later, she met death. She was making impressions in sealing-wax, to amuse her daughters, when a flaming drop fell on the inflammable stuff, and in an instant she was in flames, burned to death before help could come.
It was then that they found that Longfellow was not the cold man they had generally believed him. He never recovered from the bereavement, and shortly after he became a Spiritualist, and, until he in his glad turn pa.s.sed the gates of death, he lived in what he knew to be the light of her presence. And certainly if such a thing as communion across that grim threshold can be, this was the occasion which made it possible. There was something angelic about them both, even in this life,--a natural innocence and large beneficence and equanimity which, in the chance and contradiction of life, could rarely be found in wedded state.
One of the most notable personages of that little world, whom I knew in connection with Longfellow, was his brother-in-law,--Thomas G.
Appleton,--a most distinguished amateur of art; a subtle, if sometimes vagarious, critic, poet, and thinker: the wit to whom most of the clever things said in Boston came naturally in time to be attributed.
The famous saying that "Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris,"
is generally supposed to be his, though Oliver Wendell Holmes told me one day that he himself was really the author of it; but, if a keen witticism was floating about fatherless in the Boston circles it drifted to Tom Appleton as putative parent. His, too, was a kindly nature, and many a rising artist found his way to a larger recognition by Appleton"s un.o.btrusive aid. He, like Longfellow, was a sincere Spiritualist. One of the most remarkable of this group of men was Professor Peirce, mathematician, of whose flights into the higher regions of the science of numbers and quant.i.ties many interesting things were told. He had written a book to show, if I remember right after so many years, that the square root of minus one was a right angle
__ (/-1=90),
which was said to have been read only by a mathematician who presided over an observatory in the Ural Mountains. He had an extraordinary power of making his abstruse results clear to the ordinary intellect, and was in various directions a brilliant conversationalist. One day, going into Boston in the omnibus with him, I questioned him as to the famous problem. To my astonishment he went through a demonstration adapted to my intelligence which made me understand the nature of the subst.i.tution and the solution before our half hour"s transit was ended. I did not understand the mathematical statement, but he put it in common-sense terms, which I apprehended perfectly, though I never could repeat them.
My Adirondack experiences and studies having excited the desire on the part of several Cambridge friends to visit the Wilderness, I made up a party which comprised Lowell and his two nephews, Charles and James Lowell (two splendid young New Englanders afterwards killed during the Civil War), Dr. Estes Howe, Lowell"s brother-in-law, and John Holmes, the brother of Oliver Wendell, considered by many of the Cambridge set the wittier and wiser of the two, but who, being extremely averse to publicity, was never known in literature. We made a flying journey of inspection through the Saranac Lakes and down the Raquette River to Tupper"s Lake, and then across a wild and at that day a little explored section to the head of Raquette Lake, and down the Raquette River back to the Saranacs; the party returning home and I back to the headwaters of the Raquette to spend the summer painting. I built a camp on a secluded bay, which still bears my name amongst the men of the section, and there I worked in a solitude sometimes complete and sometimes shared by my guide, who pa.s.sed his time between the camp and the settlement at Saranac, whence I drew all my supplies beyond those which the lake and the forest furnished us with. The solitude of the Wilderness at that time can be no longer found anywhere in the vast woodland which, much mutilated and scarred by fires and clearings, still covers the district between the springs of the Mohawk and the rivers which empty into the St. Lawrence. There was one settler on the lake, from whom I could, when necessary, get a loaf of bread, but the solitude for nine days out of ten was not broken by a strange footfall. My camp was a shelter of bark, raised on poles, open in front to the morning sun, just sufficing to shed the rain, while my bed was a layer of the branches of the fir-trees that grew around.
Trout from the lake, broiled on the coals of the camp-fire, with a piece of bread, was the usual and sufficient fare, though we now and then killed a deer when Steve, my guide, was with me; at other times the dog was my only company, and in this monotonous life I found the most complete content that my experience has given me. Here wolves abounded, but only on one occasion did they attempt to disturb me, which was when I had left by the lake sh.o.r.e a deer we had killed in the morning, and they came at night to steal the meat. Bears were abundant, but even shyer than the wolves; and though we heard, now and then, the cry of a panther (puma), we never saw one.
Here the morbid pa.s.sion of solitude grew on me. The serene silence was seldom broken save by the cry of an eagle or an osprey, high overhead, the chirping of the chickadee flitting about the camp to find a crumb, or the complaining note of the Canada jay, most friendly of all wild birds, seeking for the sc.r.a.ps of venison we used to throw out for him.
No other birds came to us, and one of the most striking features in the Wilderness was the paucity of bird life and voice. As I sat painting, I would see the gray eagle come down, with his long cycloidal swoop, skimming along the surface of the water, and catch, as he pa.s.sed, the trout that sunned itself on the surface; or the osprey seizing it with his direct plunge into the lake, from which, after a struggle that lasted sometimes a minute, the only sign of his presence being the agitated water, he would emerge with the fish in his claws and sail aloft, hurrying to escape to the forest with his prey lest the eagle, always watching from the upper air, should rob him of his hard-earned booty. Once I saw the eagle make the mighty plunge from far above, the frightened osprey dropping the fish to escape the shock, and the eagle catching it in midair as it fell.
The little incidents of woodland life took the place of all other diversions and left no hour void of interest. I broke up the camp only when the autumn was so far advanced that it was uncomfortable to live in the open air. It is difficult for one who has not had the experience to understand the fascination of this absolute solitude, or the impressiveness of the silence, unbroken sometimes through whole days. I had absolutely no desire for human society, and I broke camp with reluctance, to return to my studio at Cambridge.
The next summer the party was formed which led to the foundation of the Adirondack Club, and the excursion it made is commemorated by Emerson in his poem "The Adirondacs." The company included Emerson, Aga.s.siz, Dr. Howe, Professor Jeffries Wyman, John Holmes,--who became as fond as I was of this wild life,--Judge h.o.a.r (later Attorney-General in the cabinet of President Grant), Horatio Woodman, Dr. Binney, and myself. Of this company, as I write, I am the only survivor. I did my best to enroll Longfellow in the party, but, though he was for a moment hesitating, I think the fact that Emerson was going with a gun settled him in the determination to decline. "Is it true that Emerson is going to take a gun?" he asked me; and when I said that he had finally decided to do so, he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, "Then somebody will be shot!" and would talk no more of going.
Perhaps the final reason, or that which would in any case have indisposed him to join the company, was his want of sympathy with Emerson. Emerson and he were in fact of antagonistic intellectuality, both in the quality of the exquisite courtesy which distinguished them equally, and in the fibre of intellectual working and the quality of mental activity. Longfellow was of the most refined social culture, disciplined to self-control under all circ.u.mstances and difficulties; sensitive in the highest degree to the forms of courtesy, and incapable by nature as by training of an act or word which could offend the sensibilities of even a discourteous interlocutor,--capable at worst of an indignant silence, but incapable of invading the personality of another; not serene, but of an invincible tranquillity; with no sympathy for mystery or obscurity; supremely above the general and commonplace by the exquisite refinement to which he carried the expression of what the general and commonplace world felt and thought; remote from roughness in the form or the substance of his thought; in short, the _ne plus ultra_ of refinement as man and poet. Emerson was too serene ever to be discourteous, and was capable of the hottest antagonism without rudeness, and the most intense indignation without quickening his speech or raising his tone; grasping and exhausting with imaginative activity whatever object furnished him with matter for thought, and throwing to the rubbish heap whatever was superficial; indifferent to form or polish if only he could find a diamond; reveling in mystery, and with eyes that penetrated like the X-ray through all obscurities, and found at the bottom of them what there was to find; arrested by no surfaces, inflexible in his devotion to truth, and indifferent to all personalities or artificial conditions of men or things. Nothing but the roots of things, their inmost anatomy, attracted him; he brushed away contemptuously the beauties on which Longfellow spent the tenderness of his character, and threw aside like an empty nutsh.e.l.l the form to which an artist might have given the devotion of his best art, for the art"s sake.
In his temper there was no patience with shams, little toleration of forms. It would, I should think, be clear to one who was well acquainted with both men, that there was little in common between them beyond culture, but I never heard Emerson speak of Longfellow, and can only judge by induction that he never occupied himself much with him.
We tried also to get Dr. Holmes to join us; but the Doctor was devoted to Boston, and could not have lived long out of its atmosphere, and with the woods and savagery he had no sympathy. He loved his Cambridge friends serenely, Lowell, Aga.s.siz, and Wyman, I think, above others; but he enjoyed himself most of all, and Boston more than any other thing on earth. He was lifted above ennui and discontent by a most happy satisfaction with the rounded world of his own individuality and belongings. Of the three men whom I have personally known in the world who seemed most satisfied with what fate and fortune had made them,--viz., Gladstone, Professor Freeman, and Holmes,--I think Holmes enjoyed himself the most. There was a tinge of dandyism in the Doctor; not enough to be considered a weakness, but enough to show that he enjoyed his personal appearance and was content with what he had become, and this in so delightful a way that one accepted him at once at his own terms. The Doctor stood for Boston as Lowell for Cambridge, the archetype of the Hub. n.o.body represented it as he did. Tom Appleton was nearest him, but Tom loved Paris better, and was a "globe-trotter," as often in Europe as in Ma.s.sachusetts, while the Doctor hardly left the Hub even for a vacation; there was nothing beyond it that was of great import to him. He was the sublimation of Yankee wit as Lowell was of Yankee humor and human nature, and he made of witticism a study; polished, refined, and prepared his "_bons mots_", and, at the best moment, led the conversation round to the point at which it was opportune to fire them off. He had a large medical knowledge of human nature and intellectual pathology, but I could never realize that he was a physician; I should not have trusted myself to his doctoring. As with Longfellow, his family affections were absorbing, and his love for his son, the present Mr. Justice Holmes, and his pride in him, were very pleasant to see, and they ran on the surface of his nature like his love for Boston; but I could never feel that his feeling for his outside friends was more than a mild, sunny glow of kindliness and vivid intellectual sympathy. Of course I judge him from a difficult standard, that of the Cambridge circle, in which the personal relations were very warm, and especially comparing him with Lowell and the Nortons, with whom friendship was a religion.
Holmes and Lowell were the ant.i.theses of the New England intellect, and this more in their personality than in their writing. If Lowell could have acquired Holmes"s respect for his work, he would have left a larger image in the American Walhalla; but he never gave care to the perfection of what he wrote, for his mind so teemed with material that the time to polish and review never came. Holmes, like a true artist, loved the _limae labor_. He was satisfied, it seemed to me, to do the work of one lifetime and then rest, while Lowell looked forward to a succession of lifetimes all full of work, and one can hardly conceive him as ever resting or caring to stop work. Lowell"s was a generous, widely sympathizing nature, from which radiated love for humanity, and the broadest and most catholic helpfulness for every one who asked for his help, with a special fund for his friends. Holmes drew a line around him, within which he shone like a winter sun, and outside of which his care did not extend. The one was best in what he did, the other in what he was. Holmes always seemed to me cynical to the general world; Lowell to have embodied the antique sentiment, "I am a man, and hold nothing human as indifferent to me." Both were adored by those around them, and the adoration kindled Holmes to a warmer reflection to the adorers; Lowell felt it as the earth feels sunshine, which sinks into the fertile soil and bears its fruit in a richer harvest.
Excepting Holmes, Norton, and Longfellow, our company included most of what was most distinct in the world in which we lived, with some who were eminent only in their social relations, and who neither cared to be nor ever became of interest to the general world. The care of arranging the details of the excursion was left to me, and I had, therefore, to precede the company to the Wilderness, and so missed what must have been to the others a very amusing experience. The rumor of the advent of the party spread through the country around Saranac, and at the frontier town where they would begin the journey into the woods the whole community was on the _qui vive_ to see, not Emerson or Lowell, of whom they knew nothing, but Aga.s.siz, who had become famous in the commonplace world through having refused, not long before, an offer from the Emperor of the French of the keepership of the Jardin des Plantes and a senatorship, if he would come to Paris and live.
Such an incredible and disinterested love for America and science in our hemisphere had lifted Aga.s.siz into an elevation of popularity which was beyond all scientific or political dignity, and the selectmen of the town appointed a deputation to welcome Aga.s.siz and his friends to the region. A reception was accorded, and they came, having taken care to provide themselves with an engraved portrait of the scientist, to guard against a personation and waste of their respects. The head of the deputation, after having carefully compared Aga.s.siz to the engraving, turned gravely to his followers and said, "Yes, it"s him;" and they proceeded with the same gravity to shake hands in their order, ignoring all the other luminaries.
I had in the mean time been into the Wilderness and selected a site for the camp on one of the most secluded lakes, out of the line of travel of the hunters and fisherfolk,--a deep _cul de sac_ of lake on a stream that led nowhere, known as Follansbee Pond. There, with my guide, I built a bark camp, prepared a landing-place, and then returned to Saranac in time to meet the arriving guests. I was unfortunately prevented from accompanying them up the lakes the next morning, because a boat I had been building for the occasion was not ready for the water, and so I missed what was to me of the greatest interest,--the first impressions of Emerson of the Wilderness, absolute nature. I joined them at night of the first day"s journey, in a rainstorm such as our summer rarely gives in the mountains, and we made the unique and fascinating journey down the Raquette River together; Aga.s.siz taking his place in my boat, each other member of the party having his own guide and boat.
The scene, like the company, exists no longer. There is a river which still flows where the other flowed; but, like the water that has pa.s.sed its rapids, and the guests that have gone the way of all those who have lived, it is something different. Then it was a deep, mysterious stream, meandering through unbroken forests, walled up on either side in green shade, the trees of centuries leaning over to welcome and shelter the voyager, flowing silently in great sweeps of dark water, with, at long intervals, a lagoon setting back into the wider forest around, enameled with pond lilies and sagittaria, and the refuge of undisturbed waterfowl and browsing deer. Our lake lay at the head of such a lagoon, a devious outlet of the basin of which the lake occupied the princ.i.p.al expanse, reached through three miles of no-man"s route, framed in green hills forest-clad up to their summits.
The camp was a shelter of spruce bark, open wide in front and closed at the ends, drawn on three faces of an octohedron facing the fireplace. The beds were made of layers of spruce and other fir branches spread on the ground and covered with the fragrant twigs of the arbor vitae. Two huge maples overhung the camp, and at a distance of twenty feet from our lodge we entered the trackless, primeval forest. The hills around furnished us with venison, and the lake with trout, and there we pa.s.sed the weeks of the summer heats. We were ten, with eight guides, and while we were camping there we received the news that the first Atlantic cable was laid, and the first message sent under the sea from one hemisphere to the other,--an event which Emerson did not forget to record in n.o.ble lines.
CHAPTER XIII
THE ADIRONDACK CLUB--EMERSON AND AGa.s.sIZ
In the main, our occupations were those of a vacation, to kill time and escape from the daily groove. Some took their guides and made exploration, by land or water; after breakfast there was firing at a mark, a few rounds each, for those who were riflemen; then, if venison was needed, we put the dog out on the hills; one boat went to overhaul the set lines baited the evening before for the lake trout. When the hunt was over we generally went out to paddle on the lake, Aga.s.siz and Wyman to dredge or botanize or dissect the animals caught or killed; those of us who had interest in natural history watching the naturalists, the others searching the nooks and corners of the pretty sheet of water with its inlet brooks and its bays and recesses, or bathing from the rocks. Lunch was at midday, and then long talks, discussions _de omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis_; and it was surprising to find how many subjects we found germane to our situation.
Emerson has told the daily life in verse in "The Adirondacs," adding his own impressions of the place and time. It is not generally considered among the most interesting of his poems, being a narrative with reflections, and such a subject could hardly rise above the interest of the subject of the narration, which was only a vacation study; but there are in it some pa.s.sages which show the character of Emerson"s intellect better than anything else he has written. His insight into nature, like that of the primitive mind as we find it in the Greek poetry, the instinctive investment of the great mother with the presence and attribute of personality, the re-creation from his own resources of Pan and the nature-powers, the groping about in that darkness of the primeval forest for the spiritual causes of the things he felt,--all this is to me evident in the poem; and it is the sufficient demonstration of the antique mould of his intellect, serene, open-eyed to natural phenomena, seeing beyond the veil they are, to the something beyond, but always questioning, hardly concluding, and with no theories to limit his thought or bend it to preconceived solutions. Knowing that all he saw in this undefiled natural world, this virgin mother of all life (for around Follansbee Pond, at the time we went, there was the primeval woodland, where the lumberer had not yet penetrated, and the grove kept still the immaculacy of the most ancient days), that all this was the mask of things, he was ever on the watch if perchance he might catch some hint of the secret,--secret never to be discovered, and therefore more pa.s.sionately sought. This seems to me contained in "The Adirondacs" as in no other work of the philosopher. And to me the study of the great student was the dominant interest of the occasion. I was Aga.s.siz"s boatman on demand, for while all the others had their personal guides and attendants, I was his; but often when Emerson wanted a boat I managed to provide for Aga.s.siz with one of the unoccupied guides, and take the place of Emerson"s own guide. Thus Emerson and I had many hours alone on the lake and in the wood. He seemed to be a living question, perpetually interrogating his impressions of all that there was to be seen. The rest of us were always at the surface of things,--even the naturalists were only engaged with their anatomy; but Emerson in the forest, or looking at the sunset from the lake, seemed to be looking through the phenomena, studying them by their reflections on an inner speculum.
In such a great solitude, stripped of the social conventions and seeing men as they are, mind seems open to mind as it is quite impossible for it to be in society, even the most informal. Aga.s.siz remarked, one day, when a little personal question had shown the limitations of character of one of the company, that he had always found in his Alpine experiences, when the company were living on terms of compulsory intimacy, that men found each other out quickly. And so we found it in the Adirondacks: disguises were soon dropped, and one saw the real characters of his comrades as it was impossible to see them in society. Conventions faded out, masks became transparent, and for good or for ill the man stood naked before the questioning eye,--pure personality. I think I gathered more insight into the character of my companions in our greener Arden, in the two or three weeks" meetings of the club, than all our lives in the city could have given me.
And Emerson was such a study as can but rarely be given any one. The crystalline limpidity of his character, free from all conventions, prejudices, or personal color, gave a facility for study of the man, limited only by the range of vision of the student. How far my vision was competent for this study is not for me to decide; so far as it went I profited, and so far as my experience of men goes he is unique, not so much from intellectual power, for I should be indisposed to accept his as the mind of the greatest calibre among those I have known, but as one of absolute transparency of intellect, perfect receptivity, and devotion to the truth. In the days of persecution and martyrdom Emerson would have gone to the stake smiling and undismayed, but questioning all the time, even as to the nature of his own emotions. It was this serene impa.s.sibility in his study of human nature which gave the common impression of his coldness,--an impression which is shown, by the anecdote I have elsewhere recorded of Longfellow, to have been shared by one who might have been supposed to know him well for years. But Emerson was not cold or disposed to make mere subjects of a.n.a.lysis of his friends, as Longfellow thought; he was an eager student of men as of nature, but superficial men he tired of and dropped, nothing being to be learned from them, though where he found what he looked for in a character he never tired of it.
His friendships were of the most constant because of this temper, and it was only their serenity and almost impersonality that made them seem frigid to those whose temperament was widely different. Wrong, injustice to man or beast, roused his warmth in indignation,--he could be hot enough on occasion; though the quiet warmth of his affection for his friends was like the sun of May. But undoubtedly his greater pa.s.sion was for the truth in whatever form he could find it.
Of all the mental experiences of my past life nothing else survives with the vividness of my summers in the Adirondacks with Emerson. The last sight I had of him was when, on his voyage to Egypt, he came to see me at my home in London, aged and showing the decay of age, but as alert and interrogative as ever with his insatiate intellectual activity. And as I look back from the distance of years to the days when we questioned together, he rises above all his contemporaries as Mont Blanc does above the intervening peaks when seen from afar, not the largest in ma.s.s, but loftiest in climb, soaring higher if not occupying the s.p.a.ce of some of his companions, even in our little a.s.semblies. Emerson was the best listener I ever knew, and at the other meeting-place where I saw him occasionally, the Sat.u.r.day Club, his attention to what others were saying was far more notable than his disposition to enter into the discussions. Now and then he flashed out with a comment which lit up the subject as an electric spark might, but in general he shone unconsciously. I remember that one day when, at the club, we were discussing the nature of genius, some one turned to Emerson and asked him for a definition of the thing, and he instantly replied, "The faculty of generalizing from a single example;" and n.o.body at the table could give so good and concise a definition. There is a portrait of him by Rowse, who knew and loved him well, which renders this side of Emerson in a way that makes it the most remarkable piece of portraiture I know, the listening Emerson.
His insatiability in the study of human nature was shown curiously in our first summer"s camp. He had the utmost tenderness of animal life and had no sympathy with sport in any form,--he "named the birds without a gun,"--and when we were making up the outfit for the outing he at first refused to take a rifle; but, as the discussion of make, calibre, and quality went on, and everybody else was provided, he at length decided, though no shot, to conform, and purchased a rifle.
And when the routine of camp life brought the day of the hunt, the eagerness of the hunters and the pa.s.sion of the chase, the strong return to our heredity of human primeval occupation gradually involved him, and made him desire to enter into this experience as well as the rest of the forest emotions. He must understand this pa.s.sion to kill.
One Sunday morning, when all the others went out for the drive of the deer,--necessary for the larder, as the drive the day before had failed,--Emerson asked me to take him out on the lake to some quiet place for meditation. We landed in a deep bay, where the seclusion was most complete, and he went into the woods to meditate. Presently we heard the baying of the hound as he circled round the lake, on the hillsides, for the deer at that season were reluctant to take to the water, and gave a long chase; and, as he listened, he began to take in the excitement of the hunters, and finally broke out abruptly, "Let us go after the deer;" and down the lake we went, flying at our best, but we arrived too late,--Lowell had killed the deer.
He said to me later, and emphatically, "I must kill a deer;" and one night we went out "jack-hunting" to enable him to realize that ambition. This kind of hunting, as most people know, is a species of pot-hunting, much employed by the hunters for the market, and so destructive to the deer that it is now forbidden by the law in all the Adirondack country. The deer are stalked by night along the sh.o.r.es, where they come in to feed, the hunter carrying in his boat a light so shaded that it illuminates only the s.p.a.ce directly in front of the boat, the glare blinding the animal so that he does not see the boat or the boatman. In this way the deer may be approached within a few yards if the paddler is skillful; but as he stands perfectly still, and is difficult to see in the dim light, the tyro generally misses him. We paddled up to within twenty yards of a buck, and the guide gave the signal to shoot; but Emerson could see nothing resembling a deer, and finally the creature took fright and ran, and all we got of him was the sound of galloping hoofs as he sped away, stopping a moment, when at a safe distance, to snort at the intruders, and then off again. We kept on, and presently came upon another, toward which we drifted even nearer than to the first one, and still Emerson could see nothing to distinguish the deer from the boulders among which he stood; and we were scarcely the boat"s length from him, when, Emerson being still unable to see him, and not caring to run the risk of losing him, for we had no venison in camp and the luck of the morning drive was always uncertain, I shot him. We had no other opportunity for the "jack-hunt," and so Emerson went home unsatisfied in this ambition,--glad, no doubt, when he recalled the incident, that he had failed.
The guides--rude men of the woods, rough and illiterate, but with all their physical faculties at a maximum acuteness, senses on the alert and keen as no townsman could comprehend them--were Emerson"s avid study. This he had never seen,--the man at his simplest terms, unsophisticated, and, to him, the nearest approach to the primitive savage he would ever be able to examine; and he studied every action.
When the dinner was over, and the twilight coming on, he sometimes asked me to row him out on the lake to see the nightfall and watch the "procession of the pines," that weird and ghostly phenomenon I have before alluded to.
More than a generation has pa.s.sed since then. Twenty-five years afterward I went back to the scene of the meeting. Except myself, the whole company are dead, and the very scene of our acting and thinking has disappeared down to its geological basis, pillaged, burnt, and become a horror to see; but, among the memories which are the only realities left to it, this image of Emerson claiming kinship with the forest stands out alone, and I feel as if I had stood for a moment on a mount of transfiguration, and seen, as if in a vision, the typical American, the n.o.blest in the idealization of the American, of all the race. Lowell was of a more cosmopolitan type, of a wider range of sympathies and affections, accepted and bestowed, and to me a friend, loved as Jonathan loved David; but, as a unique, idealized individuality, Emerson looms up in that Arcadian dream more and more the dominant personality. It is as character, and not as accomplishment or education, that he holds his own in all comparisons with his contemporaries, the fine, crystallized mind, the keen, clear-faceted thinker and seer. I loved more Aga.s.siz and Lowell, but we shall have many a Lowell and Aga.s.siz before we see Emerson"s like again. Attainments will be greater, and discovery and accomplishments will surpa.s.s themselves as we go on, but to _be_, as Emerson was, is absolute and complete existence.
Aga.s.siz was, of all our company, the acknowledged master; loved by all, even to the unlettered woodsmen, who ran to meet his service as to no other of the company; by all the members of it reverenced as not even Emerson was; the largest in personality and in universality of knowledge of all the men I have ever known. No one who did not know him personally can conceive the hold he had on everybody who came into relations with him. His vast command of scientific facts, and his ready command of them for all educational purposes, his enthusiasm for science and the diffusion of it, even his fascinating way of imparting it to others, had even less to do with his popularity than the magnetism of his presence and the sympathetic faculty which enabled him to find at once the plane on which he should meet whomever he had to deal with. Of his scientific position I cannot speak, though I can see that his was the most powerful of the scientific influences of that epoch in America. When we were traveling it was always in my boat, and we moved as his investigations prompted, wherever there seemed to be a promise of some addition to his collections. We dredged and netted water and air wherever we went, and of course there arose a certain kind of intimacy, which was partly that of a _camaraderie_ in which we were approximately equals, that of the backwoods life in which I was, if a comparison were to be made, the superior, and partly that of teacher and pupil; for, with trifling attainments, I had the pa.s.sion of scientific acquisition, and all that Aga.s.siz needed to open the store of his knowledge was the willingness of another to learn.
The _odium scientific.u.m_, which I notice is no less bitter than the variety _theologic.u.m_, has, in these years, poured on Aga.s.siz the floods of its opprobrium, and even the little dogs of physical science bark at his name; but his greater contemporaries knew and esteemed him better. The revival of the evolutionary hypothesis by Darwin, and the controversies growing out of it, then filled the air, and Aga.s.siz paid the penalty of his eminence and constancy to the system in which he had been grounded by his master, Cuvier. He was attacked and insulted by men who had never made an observation, and, what was more curious, as a panderer to the theological prejudices of the past. But in my mind was still the memory of a former outcry and theological persecution of him, because he had himself laid down what might be considered the forerunner of the doctrine of evolution,--the declaration that the human race could not have been the offspring of one Adam, but must have had a multiple beginning. The result of this was to bring on his head the execrations of the theological world in a storm which no one who had witnessed it was likely to forget or take for other than what it was, the proof of his absolute scientific honesty,--a proof needed by no one who knew him personally, but which, in view of the later animosity shown him, requires reaffirmation.
As I was much with him at this time, and perhaps, out of his family, the one to whom he talked with the greatest freedom and fullness on the subject, owing to my own intense interest in it, it cannot be amiss that I state his exact position as far as he let me see it. It must be remembered that the doctrine of evolution, as he knew it, and in the only form in which it was then stated, was simply and purely that of development by natural selection acting on chance variation, and differing mainly by this from the doctrine of Lamarck, which had long been rejected by the scientific world at large. We have seen since then that this primitive doctrine has been largely supplemented by other theories, and that it no longer stands before the scientific world in the bare simplicity of Darwin"s original statement, though even he, at a later date, claimed natural selection not as the only but as the most influential agency of variation of species in creation; repudiating, however, a plan in the universe, and not demanding the influence of the conscious mind on creation. Aga.s.siz"s primary objection to the doctrine was that it left the creator out of creation, for it distinctly repudiated the element of design in it; and, though he did not recognize the Creator of Genesis, he could not dispense with the supreme mind.
Myself a convert to the doctrine of evolution, in as absolute a form as it is held even by the materialists, though differently, I am persuaded that if Aga.s.siz had lived long enough to see the latest development of it he would have accepted it, as did Professor Owen, who was, like Aga.s.siz, and possibly even more literally, a believer in the designer of the universe. The fundamental ground for Aga.s.siz"s rejection of it is stated by himself in one of the lectures delivered at Cambridge, as follows: "I believe that all these correspondences between the different aspects of animal life are the manifestations of mind acting consciously with intention towards one object from beginning to end. This view is in accordance with the working of our minds; it is an instinctive recognition of a mental power with which our own is akin, manifesting itself in nature. For this reason, more than any other, perhaps, do I hold that this world of ours was not the result of the action of unconscious organic forces, but the work of an intelligent, conscious power." Whatever might have been the process by which the orderly creation was produced (into which he did not inquire), it was the result of a definite plan and the work of design.
The immutability of species, _as he defined species_, was the logical consequence of this theory, and that, it seems to me, is the substantial difference between him and Darwin.
But Aga.s.siz was no sectarian, and held no other creed than a belief in the Creator. In the fibre of the man was the consciousness of the immanent deity, rooted, perhaps, in that influence of his early theological environage from which no man can ever escape, though he may rebel against it; and the almost universal deduction by the scientific world from Darwin"s theory then was that there could be no divine design in creation. It was this negation of the direction of the great artist in the process of creation against which Aga.s.siz rebelled; and although, at a later phase of the conflict, Darwin himself protested against the implication sometimes drawn from his theory, there can be no question that at that moment the general evolutionary opinion was that the hypothesis of a divine authorship of creation was superfluous. Aga.s.siz maintained the presence of "Conscious Mind in Creation;" Darwin did not deny it explicitly, nor did he admit it.
As a matter of observation, no case of a development of one species from another has ever been noted, and the evidence for it is precisely a.n.a.logous to that adduced by Aga.s.siz, "that it is in accordance with the working of our minds," still further illuminated by the side-lights which science has thrown on it since Aga.s.siz died. The ultimate decision in the individual mind will be according to the bias for or against the "conscious mind" or automatic creation; and it must not be forgotten that one of the most powerful arguments for a large evolution was the discovery by Aga.s.siz that the embryo of the highest organizations pa.s.ses through an evolution similar to that of the animal creation. Professor Martins--a leading French scientist and an evolutionist--says of Aga.s.siz: "Another of these precursors of modern science is Louis Aga.s.siz. The oldest fossil forms have a simpler organization than the later ones, and represent some stage of the embryonic development of the latter. This truth, established by Aga.s.siz, has, more than any other, enlightened the history of creation, and prepared for the generalization by which the whole may be comprehended. The oldest fishes known are all more or less related to the sharks and skates; their teeth and scales only, with small portions of the skeleton, have been preserved. Their form, widely different from that of the living species, recalls that of the embryo of our living fishes. This is a truth which Louis Aga.s.siz was the first to proclaim to the scientific world."[1]
[Footnote 1: _De l"Origine du Monde organique_.]
But, beyond this question as to the evidence of mutability of species which Aga.s.siz did not find, he took the position "that the hypothesis of the method of creation by evolution exceeded physical science and became theology, which belonged to the province of theology, into which he had no intention of venturing." That was his statement to me during the interval between the two attacks of brain trouble from the latter of which he died. Science, to his understanding, was observation and cla.s.sification, arrangement, and it had no function in investigating the causes or _modus operandi_ through which things became what they were.
Amongst the evolutionists whom I have known there have been several who did not accept without modification the theory of natural selection, and supplemented it by design, amongst whom I may mention the great American botanist, Asa Gray,--one of the most distinguished of Darwinians,--who accepted the method of evolution as the _modus operandi_ of the Supreme Intelligence. Professor Jeffries Wyman, the a.s.sociate of Aga.s.siz in the University, who was one of the doctors of our Adirondack company, accepted in a qualified manner the theory of evolution, but his premature and lamented death set the seal to his conclusions before they were complete, though I have always had the impression that his position was similar to that of Gray. To my question one day as to his conclusions, he replied, with a caution characteristic of the man and very unlike the resolute att.i.tude of Aga.s.siz before the question which the Sphinx proposes still, "An evolution of some sort there certainly was," but nothing more would he say. The loss to American science in his death can never be estimated, for his mind was of that subtle and inductive nature which is needed for such a study, fine to poetic delicacy, penetrating with all the ac.u.men of a true scientific imagination, but modest to excess, and personally so attached to Aga.s.siz that he would with reluctance give expression to a difference from him, though that he did differ was no occasion for abatement of their mutual regard. Wyman"s was the poetry of scientific research, Aga.s.siz"s its prose, and they offered a remarkable example of mental ant.i.thesis, from which, had Wyman lived, much might have been expected through their a.s.sociation in study.
Wyman had all the delicacy of a fine feminine organization, wedded unfortunately to a fragile const.i.tution, but the friendship he held for the robust and dominating character of the great Switzer was to the utmost reciprocated.
And Aga.s.siz"s disposition was as generous as large. He had absolutely no scientific jealousy or sectarian feeling. The rancor which was shown him by some of the Darwinians never disturbed his serenity an instant; for of the world"s opinion of him and his ideas, even when the "world" was scientific, he never took account other than to regret that science was the loser, by running off on what he considered side issues. We had much conversation on the question of evolution and allied topics, in which my part was naturally that of listener and only occasional questioner, and I remember the warm appreciation he always expressed for Darwin and his researches, for his fineness of observation and scientific honesty. He regarded the widespread acceptance of the theory of natural selection as one of the epidemics which have swept the scientific world from time to time, and looked with absolute serenity to the return of science one day to the conception of creation by design.
I am neither qualified nor disposed to pa.s.s judgment on Aga.s.siz as a scientist, or inst.i.tute any kind of comparison of his relative authority, and probably the time is far away at which his comparative eminence can be estimated impartially. I have only to do with his personality as it appeared to me in our relations, and, as the latest survivor of those who enjoyed that greenwood intimacy, to put on record my impression of the great, lovable, magnanimous man. Of his unbounded generosity and indifference to personal advantage, his freedom from scientific jealousy, everybody who came in contact with him was witness. He refused all offers of emolument from any quarter, and spent all his surplus earnings for the aggrandizement of the great natural-history museum he founded at Cambridge. The propositions of the Emperor Napoleon III. he had declined with thanks as soon as made, and without a thought. He had come to America to study natural history, and did not propose to be diverted from this purpose. To a lecturing agent who offered him a very large sum for delivering a course of lectures in the princ.i.p.al cities of the Union, he replied that he had no time to make money; and he died of overwork, insatiate in the pursuit of the completion of his museum and the cla.s.sification of his observations. I have heard him speak with pain of the animosity shown him by a Swiss a.s.sociate in his glacial investigations, who had once been his warm advocate, but there was no bitterness in his manner. I am convinced that there was no bitterness in him, and that all personal feeling was overshadowed and minimized by his absolute devotion to scientific truth, with his loyalty to which nothing ever interfered.
His influence even on the business men of the city of Boston and the legislature of the State of Ma.s.sachusetts was the most remarkable phenomenon of the kind ever witnessed in that frugal and matter-of-fact community, for he had only to announce that he wanted for his museum or department in the University a donation or an appropriation, to obtain either, so absolutely recognized was his unselfish devotion to science by all cla.s.ses. There are few of us left who can remember the sudden shadow that fell on our community at his unexpected death, and the universal grief that told of the hold he had on the entire nation; and the mourning extended far beyond the circle of personal acquaintance with Aga.s.siz. Even men who had no interest in physical science took it into consideration on account of him, carried away by his enthusiastic advocacy of its advancement. The religious world forgot the indignation at his repudiation of Adam in the refuge it found from absolute atheism in his affirmation of a Supreme Intelligence, as Creator of all things, though to theological contentions he never gave the slightest consideration.
It is needless to say that this was the effect, not of scientific education or of the capacity in the great majority of those who accepted his position to judge of a theory or a scientific line of demonstration, but of the dominance of personal character in the man, his inflexible honesty and disinterestedness. The last time I saw him was when he came to make me a brief visit in a glen of the White Mountains, where I was encamped near a subject which I was painting, and which was in part composed of huge boulders, dropped in the gorge by a primeval glacier, and brought, perhaps, from beyond Lake Superior. He had then had the first attack of the brain trouble, from which he was recovering, and was making a mountain trip where he could, if possible, study and rest at once. But his want of common prudence in regard to overwork prevented his recovery, and he died just as he was beginning to elaborate his conclusions on the doctrine of evolution, for which he had a colossal plan, cut short in its opening. He was always too hurried in his work, as if he knew that his life would not suffice for its completion, if indeed completion were possible in such work, and he persisted in acc.u.mulation of material without pause either to coordinate his ideas or to rest and reflect. I one day said to him that I was intending to write a little book, and he exclaimed: "Oh, I wish I had time to write a little book! All my books come large, and I have not the time to condense them."
CHAPTER XIV
LOWELL