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 shining 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 worshipped 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 Washington 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, sunshine, 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 outshine 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 fashion, 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 friendship, 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.
To live is to love, and to think, and to dream, and to believe, and to act as one loves and thinks and dreams and believes, that is life; and, therefore, no man"s life is bounded by physical confines, no man lives in this place or that, in this house or that; but every man lives in the world he has conquered for himself, and no one knows the limits of the domains of another.
The farmer"s boy who sows the seed and watches the tender blades part with volcanic force the surface of the earth, making it to heave and tremble, who sees the buds and flowers of the spring ripen into the fruit and foliage of autumn, who follows with sympathetic vision all the mysterious processes of nature, lives a broader and n.o.bler life than the merchant who sees naught beyond the four walls of his counting-room, or the traveller whose superficial eye marks only the strange and the curious.
In the eyes of those about them Hawthorne "lived" a scant mile from Emerson; in reality they did not live in the same spheres; the boundaries of their worlds did not overlap, but, like two far-separate stars, each felt the distant attraction and admired the glow of the other, and that was all. The real worlds of Th.o.r.eau and Alcott and Emerson did at times so far overlap that they trod on common ground, but these periods were so brief and the s.p.a.ces in common so small that soon they wandered apart, each circling by himself in an orbit of his own.
Words at best are poor instruments of thought; the more we use them the more ambiguous do they become; no man knows exactly what another means from what he says; every word is qualified by its context, but the context of every word is eternity. How long shall we listen to find out what a speaker meant by his opening sentence?--an hour, a day, a week, a month?--these periods are all too short, for with every added thought the meaning of the first is changed for him as well as for us.
"Life" in common speech may mean either mere organic existence or a metaphysical a.s.sumption; we speak of the life of a tree, and the life of a man, and the life of a soul, of the life mortal and the life immortal. Who can tell what we have in mind when we talk of life? No one, for we cannot tell ourselves. We speak of life one moment with a certain matter in mind, possibly the state of our garden; in the infinitesimal fraction of a second additional cells of our brain come into activity, additional areas are excited, and our ideas scale the walls of the garden and scatter over the face of the earth. If we attempt to explain, the very process implies the generation of new ideas and the modification of old, so that long before the explanation of what we meant by the use of a given word is finished, the meaning has undergone a change, and we perceive that what we thought we meant by no means included all that lurked in the mind.
In every-day speech we are obliged to distinguish by elaborate circ.u.mlocution between a man"s place of residence and that larger and truer life,--his sphere of sympathies. Emerson lived in Concord, Carlyle in Chelsea; to the casual reader these phrases convey the impression that the life of Emerson was in some way identified with and bounded by Concord; that the life of Carlyle was in some way identified with and bounded by Chelsea; that in some subtle manner the census of those two small communities affected the philosophy of the two men; whereas we know that for a long time the worlds in which they really did move and have their being so far overlapped that they were near neighbors in thought, much nearer than they would have been if they had "lived" in the same village and met daily on the same streets.
The directory gives a man"s abode, but tells us nothing, absolutely nothing, about his life; the number of his house does not indicate where he lives. It is possible to live in London, in Paris, in Rome without ever having visited any one of those places; in truth, millions of people really live in Rome in a truer sense than many who have their abodes there; of the inhabitants of Paris comparatively few really live there, comparatively few have any knowledge of the city, its history, its traditions, its charms, its treasures, but outside Paris there are thousands of men and women who spend many hours and days and weeks of their time in reading, learning, and thinking about Paris and all it contains,--in very truth living there.
Many a worthy preacher lives so exclusively in Jerusalem that he knows not his own country, and his usefulness is impaired; many an artist lives so exclusively in Paris that his work suffers; many an architect lives so long among the buildings of other days that he can do nothing of his own. In fact, most men who are devoted to intellectual, literary, and artistic pursuits live anywhere and everywhere except at home.
The one great merit of Walt Whitman is that he lived in America and in the nineteenth century; he did not live in the past; he did not live in Europe; he lived in the present and in the world about him, his home was America, his era was his own.
If we have no national literature, it is because those who write spend the better part of their lives abroad; they may not leave their own firesides, but all their sympathies are elsewhere, all their inspiration is drawn from other lands and other times.
We have very little art, very little architecture, very little music of our own for the same reasons. We have any number of painters, sculptors, composers, but few of them live at home; their sympathies are elsewhere; they seem to have little or nothing in common with their surroundings. Now and then a clear, fresh voice is heard from out of the woods and fields, or over the city"s din, speaking with the convincing eloquence of immediate knowledge and first-hand observation; but there are so few of these voices that they do not amount to a chorus, and a national literature means a chorus.
All this will gradually change until some day the preacher will return from Jerusalem, the painter from Paris, the poet from England, the architect from Rome, and the overwhelming problems presented by the unparalleled development and opportunities of America will absorb their attention to the exclusion of all else.
The danger of travel, the danger of learning, the danger of reading, of profound research and extensive observation, lies in the fact that some age, city, or country, some man or coterie of men, may gain too firm a hold, may so absorb the attention and restrict the imagination that the sense of proportion is lost. It requires a level head to withstand the allurements of the past, the fascination of the foreign. Nothing disturbed Shakespeare"s equanimity. Neither Stratford nor London bounded his life. On the wings of his imagination he visited the known earth and penetrated beyond the blue skies, he made the universe his home; and yet he was essentially and to the last an Englishman.
When we stopped before "Orchard House" it was desolate and forsaken, and the entrance to the "Hillside Chapel," where the "Concord School of Philosophy and Literature" had its home for nine years, was boarded up.
Parts of the house had been built more than a century and a half when Mrs. Alcott bought it in 1857. In her journal for July, 1858, the author of "Little Women" records, "Went into the new house and began to settle. Father is happy; mother glad to be at rest; Anna is in bliss with her gentle John; and May busy over her pictures.
I have plans simmering, but must sweep and dust and wash my dishpans a while longer till I see my way."
Meanwhile the little women paper and decorate the walls, May in her enthusiasm filling panels and every vacant place with birds and flowers and mottoes in old English.
"August. Much company to see the new house. All seem to be glad that the wandering family is anch.o.r.ed at last. We won"t move again for twenty years" (prophetic soul to name the period so exactly) "if I can help it. The old people need an abiding place, and now that death and love have taken two of us away, I can, I hope, soon manage to take care of the remaining four."
It is one of the ironies of fate that the fame of Bronson Alcott should hang upon that of his gifted daughter. It was not until she made her great success with "Little Women" in 1868 that the outside world began to take a vivid interest in the father. From that time his lectures and conversations began to pay; he was seized anew with the desire to publish, and from 1868 until the beginning of his illness in 1882 he printed or reprinted nearly his entire works,--some eight or ten volumes; it is no disparagement to the kindly old philosopher that his books were bought mainly on the success of his daughter"s.
The Summer School of Philosophy was the last ambitious attempt of a spirit that had been struggling for half a century to teach mankind.
The small chapel of plain, unpainted boards, nestling among the trees on the hillside, has not been opened since 1888. It stands a pathetic memento to a vision. Twenty years ago the "school" was an overshadowing reality,--to-day it is a memory, a minor incident in the progress of thought, a pa.s.sing phase in intellectual development. Many eminent men lectured there, and the scope of the work is by no means indicated by the humble building which remains; but, while strong in conversation and in the expression of his own views, Alcott was not cut out for a leader. All reports indicate that he had a wonderful facility in the off-hand expression of abstruse thought, but he had no faculty whatsoever for so ordering and systematizing his thoughts as to furnish explosive material for belligerent followers; the intellectual ammunition he put up was not in the convenient form of cartridges, nor even in kegs or barrels, but just poured out on the ground, where it disintegrated before it could be used.
Leaning on the gate that bright, warm, summer afternoon, it was not difficult to picture the venerable, white-haired philosopher seated by the doorstep arguing eloquently with some congenial visitor, or chatting with his daughter. One could almost see a small throng of serious men and women wending their way up the still plainly marked path to the chapel, and catch the measured tones of the lecturer as he expounded theories too recondite for this practical age and generation.
Philosophy is the sarcophagus of truth; and most systems of philosophy are like the pyramids,--impressive piles of useless intellectual masonry, erected at prodigious cost of time and labor to secrete from mankind the truth.
A little farther on we came to the fork in the road where Lincoln Street branches off to the southeast. Emerson"s house fronts on Lincoln and is a few rods from the intersection with Lexington Street. Here Emerson lived from 1835 until his death in 1882.
It is singular the fascination exercised by localities and things identified with great men. It is not enough to simply see, but in so far as possible we wish to place ourselves in their places, to walk where they walked, sit where they sat, sleep where they slept, to merge our petty and obscure individualities for the time being in theirs, to lose our insignificant selves in the atmosphere they created and left behind. Is it possible that subtile** distillations of personality penetrate and saturate inanimate things, so that aromas imperceptible to the sense are given off for ages and affect all who come in receptive mood within their influence? It is quite likely that what we feel when we stand within the shadow of a great soul is all subjective, that our emotions are but the workings of our imaginations stirred by suggestive surroundings; but who knows, who knows?
When this house was nearly destroyed by fire in July, 1872, friends persuaded Emerson to go abroad with his daughter, and while they were away, the house was completely restored.
His son describes his return: "When the train reached Concord, the bells were rung and a great company of his neighbors and friends accompanied him, under a triumphal arch, to his restored house. He was greatly moved, but with characteristic modesty insisted that this was a welcome to his daughter, and could not be meant for him. Although he had felt quite unable to make any speech, yet, seeing his friendly townspeople, old and young, in groups watching him enter his own door once more, he turned suddenly back and going to the gate said, "My friends! I know this is not a tribute to an old man and his daughter returned to their home, but to the common blood of us all--one family--in Concord.""