THE INFLUENCE OF 
 EMERSON 
 
 BY 
 
 EDWIN D. MEAD 
 
 BOSTON 
 
 AMERICAN UNITARIAN ASSOCIATION 
 1903 
 
,. , , . COPYRIGHT 1003 
 AMERICA* UNITARIAN! 
 
 . 
 
 ^A:i : - : i : 
 
TO 
 
 EDWARD EVERETT HALE 
 
 THE FRIEND OF EMERSON 
 
 THE FRIEND AND AIDER OF A MULTITUDE OF US, 
 WHO LOVE HIM AND REVERE HIM 
 
 " HE IS OUR BISHOP, AND WE HAVE NOT DONE WITH HIM YET." 
 
These papers, touching a few of the many influences of 
 Emerson, philosophical, religious, literary, and political, 
 have served, the last t e wo many times, as public addresses. 
 Parts of all of them are twenty years old, and all of them 
 have grown in the years. Some parts have changed much 
 more than others; and if they continued to lie on the table, 
 answering calls, for some years yet, all might see greater 
 changes still. I have found that fevj studies of Emerson 
 bring out his thought and attitude more clearly or impressively 
 than those in vohich we vievj him in relation to Parker, 
 with whom among religious teachers in his time his sym 
 pathies were closest, and to Carlyle, with whom his affinities 
 and contrasts are equally striking and didactic, There are 
 doubtless repetitions in the papers here and there ; and this, 
 and much besides, their original character and purpose must 
 excuse. They are brought together here, such as they are, in 
 the hope that they may do their part, with the many words 
 that will be said in this centennial time, to prompt young 
 men and women to such new companionship with Emerson 
 as shall give them a larger portion of his idealism and 
 lofty spirit in religion and philosophy and in the service of 
 mankind. 
 
Contents 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. THE PHILOSOPHY OF EMERSON . . 3 
 
 II. EMERSON AND THEODORE PARKER . 91 
 
 III. EMERSON AND CARLYLE . . . . 157 
 
I 
 
 The Philosophy of Emerson 
 
THE PHILOSOPHY OF EMERSON 
 
 TRANSCENDENTALISM is the popular term 
 for the philosophy of Emerson, with those 
 who recognize that he had a philosophy. 
 Men call him a Transcendentalist, as they 
 called him and his friends sixty years ago. 
 He did not like the term, and thought that 
 most people who used it knew little about 
 what it meant. As commonly used by 
 the intelligent man sixty years ago or now, 
 and as accepted by Emerson, it is simply 
 another word for Idealist. " What is popu-j 
 larly called Transcendentalism among us," 
 he said himself, in the midst of the Tran 
 scendental movement in New England, " is 
 Idealism, Idealism as it appears in 1842." 
 " The Idealism of the present day," he said, 
 " acquired the name of Transcendental from 
 the use of that term by Immanuel Kant, of 
 Konigsberg, who replied to the sceptical 
 philosophy of Locke, which insisted that 
 there was nothing in the intellect which 
 was not previously in the experience of 
 
4 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 the senses, by showing that there was a very 
 important class of ideas, or imperative forms, 
 which did not come by experience, but 
 through which experience was acquired ; 
 that these were intuitions of the mind 
 itself; and he denominated them Tran 
 scendental forms. The extraordinary pro 
 foundness and precision of that man s 
 thinking have given vogue to his nomen 
 clature, in Europe and America, to that 
 extent, that whatever belongs to the class 
 of intuitive thought is popularly called at 
 the present day Transcendental." 
 
 " As thinkers," says Emerson, " mankind 
 have ever divided into two sects, Materialists 
 and Idealists ; the first class founded on ex 
 perience, the second on consciousness ; they 
 perceive that the senses are not final ; they 
 give us representations of things, but what 
 are the things themselves they cannot tell. 
 The materialist insists on facts, on history, 
 on the force of circumstances, and the ani 
 mal wants of man ; the idealist, on the 
 power of Thought and of Will, on inspira 
 tion, on miracle, on individul culture. The 
 idealist concedes all that the other affirms, 
 
The Philosophy of Emerson 5 
 
 . . . and then asks him for his grounds of 
 assurance that things are as his senses repre 
 sent them. But I, he says, affirm facts not 
 affected by the illusions of sense, facts which 
 are of the same nature as the faculty which 
 reports them. . . . He does not deny the 
 sensuous fact : by no means ; but he will 
 not see that alone." 
 
 Most of us have a philosophy of some 
 sort, although most of us are not philoso 
 phers. We have known have we not 
 country parsons not a few who had a far bet 
 ter philosophy than not a few men famous, 
 and deservedly so, as original and powerful 
 philosophers. It is common enough for 
 men to say that Emerson was not a philoso 
 pher; and they tell us what the titles of a 
 man s books must be, the order of his argu 
 ment, and the fashion of his phrase, to make 
 him a philosopher. They remark Emer 
 son s own impatience with the metaphysi 
 cians. "What sensible man ever looked 
 twice into a metaphysical book ? " to 
 which question of his the answer is of 
 course: He himself, not two times, but 
 seventy times two ; for Kant and Plato and 
 
6 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 Plotinus are metaphysicians. They say he 
 was a poet, not a philosopher, as if one 
 could not be the other, and as if he were 
 not many things besides a poet. Plato was 
 a poet. The indubitable philosophers have 
 chosen many forms. One writes a dialogue 
 which he calls " Phsedrus " or " Alciphron," 
 another a poem on " The Nature of Things," 
 another a treatise on " Prior Analytics " or a 
 " Novum Organum," another an " Epistle 
 to the Romans," another a " City of God," 
 another a " Summa Theologize," another a 
 commentary, another a sermon, another a 
 book on the Unknowable. The " father 
 of philosophy " did not write at all, but 
 talked about water or some soul or force in 
 water as the original principle of all things. 
 The thought and purpose, not the form and 
 method, are what determine. The contents 
 of poetry are as various as the forms of 
 philosophy ; and a man may be a very great 
 poet and not properly a philosopher at all. 
 But Dante was a philosopher, and Milton and 
 Goethe and Browning, in their poetry and 
 out of it, because their thought is con 
 cerned, as truly as Plato s or Spinoza s, with 
 
The Philosophy of Emerson 7 
 
 the original principle of things, the great 
 problems of the universe and of the soul. 
 This was true of Emerson, and true in 
 higher and more memorable way than of 
 any other poet or thinker of America. He 
 was poet plus philosopher ; although he 
 would not thank any of us for the argu 
 ment, and although none surely would aver 
 that he wrote like Locke or Leibnitz, or 
 deny that he chose to fly where some choose 
 to walk and some have to. In truth, as 
 usual, so here, he has stated his own posi 
 tion far better than any of us could state it 
 for him. " I think metaphysics a gram 
 mar," he said in his first lecture on <c The 
 Natural History of Intellect," "to which, 
 once read, we seldom return. My meta 
 physics are to the end of use. This watch 
 ing of the intellect, in season and out of sea 
 son, to see the mechanics of the thing, is a 
 little of the detective. The analytic process 
 is cold and bereaving and, shall I say it? 
 somewhat mean, as spying. There is some 
 thing surgical in metaphysics as we treat it. 
 Were not an ode a better form ? The poet 
 sees wholes and avoids analysis; the meta- 
 
8 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 physician, dealing as it were with the mathe 
 matics of the mind, puts himself out of the 
 way of the inspiration, loses that which is 
 the miracle and creates the worship. I think 
 that philosophy is still rude and elementary. 
 It will one day be taught by poets. The 
 poet is in the natural attitude ; he is believ 
 ing, the philosopher, after some struggle, 
 having only reasons for believing." The 
 same thought appears in his essay on Plu 
 tarch, the thought of the menace of an 
 exclusive devotion to metaphysics for any 
 but the broadest minds. " We are always 
 interested in the man who treats the intel 
 lect well. We expect it from the philoso 
 pher from Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza and 
 Kant ; but we know that metaphysical 
 studies in any but minds of large horizon 
 and incessant aspiration have their dangers. 
 One asks sometimes whether a metaphy 
 sician can treat the intellect well. The 
 central fact is the superhuman intelligence, 
 pouring into us from its unknown fountain, 
 to be received with religious awe, and de 
 fended from any mixture of our will. But 
 this high Muse comes and goes; and the 
 
The Philosophy of Emerson 9 
 
 danger is that, when the Muse is wanting, 
 the student is prone to supply its place 
 with microscopic subtleties and logomachy." 
 " Philosophy of the People " was the sub 
 ject of one of his courses of lectures, per 
 haps a development of the " First Philoso 
 phy " with which his mind was occupied the 
 year before he published " Nature " ; and 
 philosophy of or for the people he felt 
 must be concrete and immediately related 
 to activity and life. " To great results 
 of thought and morals/ he said, "the 
 steps are not many ; and it is not the 
 masters who spin the ostentatious continu 
 ity." Nevertheless, the masters do spin 
 continuity, some of them; and it is well 
 for us that they do. The logic of Kant is 
 as necessary as the insight of Emerson ; and 
 to the one Transcendentalist we pay honor 
 as to the other. 
 
 In estimating any philosophy, there is 
 nothing which illuminates and tests it better 
 than its application to the distinctive ten 
 dencies and problems of the time. How do 
 our science and society look in its light, and 
 how does it bear theirs ? The dominant 
 
io The Influence of Emerson 
 
 and distinctive doctrine of our time, per 
 vading every field, nature, physics, psy 
 chology, anthropology, history, politics, 
 ethics, and religion, has been the doctrine 
 of evolution. How does the philosophy 
 of Emerson dispose of that, and how does 
 that deal with it ? 
 
 In speaking of Emerson and the doctrine 
 of evolution, there is, of course, no intention 
 to imply that we have here an instance of 
 the old antithesis between Idealism and Ma 
 terialism. Emerson and Darwin, to name 
 the name most conspicuously identified in 
 our time with the doctrine of evolution, 
 represent no such opposition. It is, indeed, 
 scarcely legitimate to speak of Darwin as 
 having to do directly with philosophy or the 
 problem and original principle of the uni 
 verse at all. He was not a philosopher, but 
 a wise student of the processes of nature, 
 whose results make immediately neither for 
 nor against the principles either of Idealism 
 or Materialism, and were urged for and 
 against neither. Certainly do not make 
 against Idealism, as it is not extravagant 
 to say that Darwin s truth lies in Emerson s 
 
The Philosophy of Emerson n 
 
 philosophy as a natural and essential moment 
 of it. Emerson is precisely a philosopher, 
 ever approaching the problem of the 
 universe both from the soul-side and the 
 nature-side, ever standing, confident and 
 patient, in the presence of the sphinx. 
 Much more than philosopher, but, as I 
 have said, essentially philosopher, and our 
 greatest, perhaps our only great, philosopher. 
 "The poet," he says, "differs from the 
 philosopher only herein, that the one pro 
 poses Beauty as his main end, the other 
 Truth. But the philosopher, not less than 
 the poet, postpones the apparent order and 
 relations of things to the empire of thought. 
 f The problem of philosophy/ according to 
 Plato, c is, for all that exists conditionally, to 
 find a ground unconditioned and absolute/ 
 And it is worthy of noting, when we think 
 of Emerson as approaching the world- 
 problem from the side of mind and of 
 Darwin as a student of the principles of 
 nature, that Emerson s own most energetic 
 and systematic attempt to find and formu 
 late the absolute ground of things is the 
 essay on not the Soul, but Nature. 
 
12 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 "All that is separate from us, all which 
 philosophy distinguishes as the NOT ME, 
 that is, both nature and art, all other men 
 and my own body, must be ranked under 
 this name NATURE." 
 
 The little book on " Nature " was Emer 
 son s first authentic utterance. It came a 
 year before the address on the American 
 Scholar, two years before the address to the 
 Harvard Divinity School. It came the 
 year after the publication of Strauss s Life 
 of Jesus. Yet who divined, in the hubbub 
 of that tumbling of old sanctions, that in 
 spiration even then was speaking at the 
 door, fresh, faithful, positive, and jubilant, 
 pausing not so much as to note the collapse 
 of images, but simply speaking the word of 
 the soul under the soul s eternal forms, with 
 the soul s veritable and self-vouching ac 
 cent ? " The foregoing generations beheld 
 God and nature face to face; we, through 
 their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy 
 an original relation to the universe ? Why 
 should not we have a poetry and philosophy 
 of insight and not of tradition, and a religion 
 by revelation to us, and not the history of 
 
The Philosophy of Emerson 13 
 
 theirs? Why should we grope among the 
 dry bones of the past, or put the living 
 generation into masquerade out of its faded 
 wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. 
 There is more wool and flax in the fields." 
 
 It was a still, small voice, this little book, 
 which came without its author s name, still 
 as the coming of the green in May-time, 
 and few heard it (five hundred copies of the 
 book were disposed of, we are told, only 
 after twelve years) ; though as many as 
 heard and received it, to them it gave power 
 to become the sons of God, to know them 
 selves as such, a knowledge which had 
 become well-nigh lost and unauthentic in 
 churches and among men. Its accent was 
 almost drowned by the thunder of Carlyle s 
 Cf Sartor Resartus," which Emerson gave to 
 America at the same time, to preach, in a 
 way so different, the same Everlasting Yea. 
 
 Emerson s first authentic utterance, " Nat 
 ure " is also the most sufficient expression 
 of his general philosophy, and the noblest 
 possible expression of a pure idealism, to 
 my thinking, the most penetrating specula 
 tive wor4 yet spoken in our New World. 
 
14 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 It could almost be wished that there might 
 be professorships of this book, " Nature/ 
 and the correlated essays, in our colleges, a 
 not extravagant wish surely, when we re 
 member in how many professor of philos 
 ophy means for the greater part of the time 
 professor of some book so infinitely smaller 
 and poorer, by Herbert Spencer or another 
 Englishman or William Hamilton or an 
 other Scotchman. I think that any young 
 man going out into life with his mind well 
 opened to the real intension and extension 
 of those views of Nature as Commodity, 
 Beauty, Language, and Discipline would 
 have more to be grateful for and wherewith 
 to turn his chaos into cosmos than all 
 chapters on the limits of knowledge, the 
 rungs of the ladder, or the classes of the 
 faculties can possibly be made to yield. 
 What invitations everywhere, and provoca 
 tions, to excursions into the history of 
 speculation and of every science ! Where 
 should we find a more fruitful text for a 
 Kritik of Language, which Max Miiller used 
 to tell us, with some reason, is the Kritik 
 which our philosophy needs next? For 
 
The Philosophy of Emerson 15 
 
 here we have no mere formal and punctili 
 ous thinking, improved metric scheme of 
 classing Aryan and Semitic roots, but are 
 borne directly to that primary question, why 
 and how it is that spirit symbolizes and 
 bodies itself in nature and in words, and what 
 is the significance and scope of that speech 
 which man has evoked from himself and 
 which remains, firmly conserving his thought, 
 while the generations pass. Only Bushnell 
 in New England has thought with equal 
 subtlety and fruitfulness upon this question. 
 Where better or more natural ground from 
 which to consider Darwinism itself and the 
 modern statement of development? The 
 very motto of " Nature " might well be 
 adopted as the tersest and most pregnant 
 text for our evolution-philosophy : 
 
 " A subtle chain of countless rings 
 The next unto the farthest brings ; 
 The eye reads omens where it goes, 
 And speaks all languages the rose ; 
 And, striving to be man, the worm 
 Mounts through all the spires of form." 
 
 We are brought by " Nature " into con- 
 
1 6 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 tact with the apostolic succession of the 
 lords of thought, from the Egyptians and 
 the Brahmins to Bacon and Swedenborg. 
 Brought into contact especially with the 
 great modern Germans. They are not 
 cited ; but " Nature," written fresh from 
 the reading of the Germans, of Coleridge 
 and Carlyle, is so instinct with the spirit 
 and purpose of the Transcendental Philos 
 ophy, that it were well enough to direct the 
 mind unsatisfied with the book s own fresh 
 and simple word, and craving statement in 
 syllogistic #, b, c, and corollaries of the 
 manner of Emerson s approach to the 
 world-problem, to the pages of Kant and 
 Hegel and Fichte. He takes us, in the 
 very beginning, to where Kant leaves us in 
 that last page of his Ethics. " If a man 
 would be alone, let him look at the stars. . . . 
 One might think the atmosphere was made 
 transparent with this design, to give man, in 
 the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence 
 of the sublime." " Undoubtedly," he says, 
 " we have no questions to ask which are 
 unanswerable. We must trust the perfec 
 tion of the creation so far as to believe that 
 
The Philosophy of Emerson 17 
 
 whatever curiosity the order of things has 
 awakened in our minds the order of things 
 can satisfy." " I maintain," Kant had said, 
 in his great Kritik, " that no question re 
 ferring to an object of pure reason can be 
 insoluble for the same human reason ; and 
 that no excuse of inevitable ignorance on 
 our side, or of unfathomable depth on the 
 side of the problem, can release us from the 
 obligation to answer it thoroughly and com 
 pletely ; because the same concept which 
 enables us to ask the question must qualify 
 us to answer it, considering that the object 
 itself does not exist except in the concept." 
 " Beauty," says Emerson in " Nature," " in 
 its largest and profoundest sense, is one 
 expression for the universe. God is the 
 All-fair. Truth and goodness and beauty 
 are but different faces of the same All." 
 This is another utterance, if we please, of 
 that Hegelian principle, that God is Being, 
 Essence, Idea, and whether we say this or 
 that is not a question of false or true, but 
 of completer or less complete definition, 
 a question of the gradation of circles and 
 of the circumference and penetration of 
 
1 8 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 the present thought. It should be said in 
 general that there is almost nothing new in 
 principle in Emerson s philosophy. We 
 are everywhere in the same philosophic 
 atmosphere which we breathe with Plato 
 and Plotinus and with the post-Kantian 
 idealists. Everything easily falls into har 
 mony with the great Greeks and the great 
 Germans. The fundamental principle of 
 "The Natural History of Intellect," that 
 " every law of nature is a law of mind," is 
 precisely the central principle of Hegel s 
 Logic and Philosophy of Nature, there de 
 veloped and applied with a pertinacity and 
 rigor entirely foreign to Emerson s inspira 
 tional genius. Emerson s virtue is in il 
 lumination and the immediate marriage of 
 the truth clearly apprehended to poetry and 
 life. 
 
 At the beginning of the chapter on Ideal 
 ism in " Nature," Emerson speaks with 
 kindness and with warmth of the extreme 
 subjective theory, for which Fichte stood in 
 the first period of his thought, or, indeed, 
 for the very illusionism of Berkeley, and 
 condemns the frivolous who make merry with 
 
The Philosophy of Emerson 19 
 
 the theory, as if its consequences were bur 
 lesque and as if it affected the stability of 
 nature. Fichte, viewing all human life as 
 moral evolution, conceived the outer world 
 as the mere ethical gymnasium provided for 
 the mind and belonging to it by its very 
 constitution. "A noble doubt," Emerson 
 says, " perpetually suggests itself, whether 
 the end of Discipline be not the Final Cause 
 of the Universe, and whether nature out 
 wardly exists. It is a sufficient account of 
 that Appearance we call the World, that 
 God will teach a human mind, and so makes 
 it the receiver of a certain number of con 
 gruent sensations, which we call sun and 
 moon, man and woman, house and trade. 
 What difference does it make whether Orion 
 is up there in heaven, or some god paints 
 the image in the firmament of the soul ? " 
 " To the senses and the unrenewed under 
 standing," he says, " belongs a sort of in 
 stinctive belief in the absolute existence of 
 nature. Things are ultimates. But the 
 presence of Reason mars this faith. Time 
 and space relations vanish as laws are known. 
 The first effort of thought tends to relax 
 
20 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 the despotism of the senses, and shows us 
 nature aloof and, as it were, afloat." This 
 is Hegel s Pbenomenologie in other dialect. 
 Turgot said, "He that has never doubted 
 the existence of matter may be assured he 
 has no aptitude for metaphysical inquiries." 
 " It is the uniform effect of culture on the 
 human mind," says Emerson, " not to shake 
 our faith in the stability of particular phe 
 nomena," any distrust of the permanence 
 of laws, he says, would paralyze the faculties 
 of man, " but to lead us to regard nature 
 as a phenomenon, not a substance." Ideas, 
 he says, speaking in Platonic phrase, 
 immortal, necessary, uncreated natures, are 
 accessible to few men, as objects of science, 
 although all men are capable of being raised 
 by piety or by passion into their region ; 
 and in their presence " we think of nature as 
 an appendix to the soul." " Both religion 
 and ethics," he says, " put nature under foot. 
 The first and last lesson of religion is, c The 
 things that are seen are temporal ; the things 
 that are unseen are eternal/ 
 
 To a pure subjective idealism, however, 
 Emerson does not commit himself, either in 
 
The Philosophy of Emerson 21 
 
 " Nature " or anywhere else. At the very 
 beginning he saw clearly the full circle which 
 it took Fichte his whole lifetime to describe, 
 and the Universal Spirit, constituting and 
 informing all individuals, as all nature, is as 
 distinctly recognized and fundamental in this 
 first utterance as in u Worship " and " The 
 Over-Soul," or as in Fichte s " Way to the 
 Blessed Life." "Idealism," he says, 
 subjective idealism, " acquaints us with the 
 total disparity between the evidence of our 
 own being and the evidence of the world s 
 being. The one is perfect; the other in 
 capable of any assurance. . . . Yet, if Ideal 
 ism only deny the existence of matter, it 
 does not satisfy the demands of the spirit. 
 It leaves God out of me. Then the heart 
 resists it, because it balks the affections in 
 denying substantive being to men and 
 women. Nature is so pervaded with human 
 life, that there is something of humanity in 
 all, and in every particular. But this theory 
 makes nature foreign to me, and does not 
 account for that consanguinity which we 
 acknowledge in it." Its significance and 
 value, therefore, for Emerson, are simply 
 
22 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 this : that it serves " to apprise us of the 
 eternal distinction between the soul and the 
 world," vouching the mind to be of the 
 fundamental nature of things. But a com 
 plete philosophy demands much more. 
 Emerson s own philosophy goes much be 
 yond. Would we have a just statement, in 
 one word, of that philosophy, we have it in 
 this same " Nature." I know of no other 
 passage where so much of his fundamental 
 thought is so well balanced and compacted 
 as in this following : 
 
 "Man is conscious of an universal soul 
 within or behind his individual life, wherein, 
 as in a firmament, the natures of Justice, 
 Truth, Love, Freedom, arise and shine. 
 This universal soul he calls Reason : it is 
 not mine or thine, or his, but we are its ; 
 we are its property and men. And the blue 
 sky in which the private earth is buried, the 
 sky with its eternal calm, and full of ever 
 lasting orbs, is the type of Reason. That 
 which, intellectually considered, we call Rea 
 son, considered in relation to nature, we call 
 Spirit. Spirit is the creator. Spirit hath 
 life in itself. And man in all ages and 
 
The Philosophy of Emerson 23 
 
 countries embodies it in his language, as the 
 FATHER." 
 
 Nature, to Emerson, " always speaks of 
 Spirit. . . It is a great shadow pointing al 
 ways to the sun behind us." " The aspect 
 of nature is devout. Like the figure of 
 Jesus, she stands with bended head, and 
 hands folded upon the breast. . . . The 
 noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the 
 apparition of God. It is the organ through 
 which the universal spirit speaks to the indi 
 vidual, and strives to lead back the individ 
 ual to it." " The world proceeds from the 
 same spirit as the body of man. It is a re 
 moter and inferior incarnation of God, a 
 projection of God in the unconscious. But 
 it is not, like the body, now subjected to the 
 human will. Its serene order is inviolable 
 by us. It is therefore, to us, a fixed point 
 whereby we may measure our departure. 
 We are as much strangers in nature as we 
 are aliens from God." 
 
 This last thought Emerson returns to 
 more than once. " Man is fallen," he says, 
 in a later essay ; " nature is erect and serves 
 as a differential thermometer, detecting the 
 
24 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 presence or absence of the divine sentiment 
 in man. By fault of our dulness and self 
 ishness we are looking up to nature, but 
 when we are convalescent nature will look 
 up to us. We see the foaming brook with 
 compunction : if our own life flowed with 
 the right energy, we should shame the 
 brook." 
 
 An embodiment of God, this, then, is 
 what the universe is to Emerson. " There 
 seems to be a necessity in spirit," he says, 
 " to manifest itself in material forms ; and 
 day and night, river and storm, beast and 
 bird, acid and alkali pre-exist in necessary 
 Ideas in the mind of God, and are what they 
 are by virtue of preceding affections in the 
 world of spirit." "In the divine order," he 
 says, in the address on " The Method of 
 Nature," " intellect is primary ; nature, sec 
 ondary ; it is the memory of the mind. 
 That which once existed in intellect as pure 
 law has now taken body as Nature. It ex 
 isted already in the mind in solution ; now, 
 it has been precipitated, and the bright sedi 
 ment is the world." This is pure Plato. 
 Nature he views purely as the projection 
 
The Philosophy of Emerson 25 
 
 and symbol of spirit. " Every natural fact 
 is a symbol of some spiritual fact." " Every 
 object rightly seen unlocks a new faculty 
 of the soul." If you wish to understand 
 intellectual philosophy, he said, study nat 
 ural science. Every time you discover a law 
 of things you discover a principle of mind. 
 Every law of nature, he said, in his lectures 
 on the "Natural History of the Intellect," is 
 a law of mind ; and it is quite indifferent, he 
 said boldly, in a connection where he would 
 not be misunderstood, whether we say <( all 
 is matter " or " all is spirit." For to him 
 matter is all spiritualized, is spirit s other. 
 Carlyle, it will be remembered, had a certain 
 kindness, as opposed to the old dualism, to 
 " your frightful theory of materialism, of 
 man s being but a body, and therefore at 
 least once more a unity." This, he said, 
 may be the paroxysm which was critical, and 
 the beginning of cure. 
 
 This thought, that everything in the phe 
 nomenal world takes place at once mechan 
 ically and metaphysically, the source of 
 the mechanical, however, being in the meta 
 physical, was a constant and fundamental 
 
26 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 thought with Emerson. " A perfect paral 
 lelism," he says, almost in the words of 
 Leibnitz, and exactly in the thought of 
 Hegel, " exists between nature and the 
 laws of thought." " The whole of nature 
 agrees with the whole of thought." Pre 
 cisely herein, indeed, is Emerson s key to 
 the interpretation of nature, as we shall con 
 sider more carefully. " Things are know- 
 able," he says, in the essay on Plato, cc be 
 cause, being from one, things correspond. 
 There is a scale ; and the correspondence of 
 heaven to earth, of matter to mind, of the 
 part to the whole, is our guide." He elab 
 orates the thought in many ways in " The 
 Natural History of Intellect." " I believe 
 the mind is the creator of the world, and is 
 ever creating; that at last Matter is dead 
 Mind ; that mind makes the senses it sees 
 with ; that the genius of man is a continu 
 ation of the power that made him and that 
 has not done making him." Again, in a 
 passage of wonderful boldness : " As the 
 sun is conceived to have made our system 
 by hurling out from itself the outer rings of 
 diffuse ether which slowly condensed into 
 
The Philosophy of Emerson 27 
 
 earths and moons, by a higher force of the 
 same law the mind detaches minds, and a 
 mind detaches thoughts or intellections. 
 These again all mimic in their sphericity 
 the first mind, and share its power." As 
 he reasons forward, so he reasons backward. 
 " From whatever side we look at Nature we 
 seem to be exploring the figure of a dis 
 guised man." Nature is pervaded with 
 human nature. Man finds himself every 
 where : humanity is the translator of nature 
 and of God. Of all philosophers and theo 
 logians, he is, in a high but most real sense, 
 the most anthropomorphic. Does he make 
 us feel as almost no other the divinity of 
 man ? So does he see most penetratingly 
 the humanity of God. Man is the divine 
 revealer and interpreter. The poet, the 
 prophet, the high thinker, the Christs of 
 God, the completest flowerings of the divine 
 process and life, these are the real medi 
 ators with the divine Original. 
 
 The source of Nature in Universal Spirit, 
 says Emerson, is betrayed by that intimate 
 unity which so pervades all its forms as to 
 make each particle a microcosm, which faith- 
 
28 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 fully renders the likeness of the world. In 
 "The Sphinx," the first poem of his first 
 collection, thirty years before Tennyson 
 made his most compact expression of the 
 central truth, 
 
 u Flower in the crannied wall, . . . 
 Little flower but if I could understand 
 What you are, root and all, and all in all, 
 I should know what God and man is,* 
 
 Emerson had put it in this wise : 
 
 " Through a thousand voices 
 
 Spoke the universal dame : 
 Who telleth one of my meanings 
 Is master of all I am." 
 
 "A leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of 
 time," says Emerson in " Nature," " is related 
 to the whole, and partakes of the perfection 
 of the whole." " The granite is differenced 
 in its laws only by the more or less of heat 
 from the river that wears it away. The 
 river, as it flows, resembles the air that flows 
 over it; the air resembles the light which 
 traverses it with more subtile currents ; the 
 light resembles the heat which rides with it 
 through space. Each creature is only a 
 
The Philosophy of Emerson 29 
 
 modification of the other." To this great 
 fact of the correlation and the transmutation 
 of forces he returns ever, and to the truth 
 beyond, that all force is quickly driven where 
 it must be spoken of ideally, in terms of 
 thought, of will and intellect. He observes 
 how the law of harmonic sounds reappears 
 in the harmonic colors. He dwells with 
 interest on the fact that that picture which 
 we have of outer nature is no more condi 
 tioned by the landscape than by the eye 
 itself. The structure of this it is which 
 determines outline, color, motion, and group 
 ing. Nature, too, is always herself plus our- 
 self: we are always inextricably interwoven 
 as one element, larger or smaller, in the sum 
 total of impression. In scientific mood we 
 reduce the personal element to the vanishing 
 point ; but in naive and common life nature 
 "always wears the colors of the spirit." 
 " The same scene which yesterday breathed 
 perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the 
 nymphs is overspread with melancholy to 
 day. To a man laboring under calamity, 
 the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. 
 There is a kind of contempt of the landscape 
 
30 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 felt by him who has just lost by death a dear 
 friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts 
 down over less worth in the population." 
 
 " There is nothing lucky or capricious 
 in these analogies," says Emerson. " This 
 relation between the mind and matter is not 
 fancied by some poet, but stands in the will 
 of God, and so is free to be known by all 
 men. It appears to men, or it does not 
 appear. A ray of relation passes from all 
 other being to man ; and neither can man be 
 understood without these objects, nor these 
 objects without man." 
 
 As with the intellectual, so, too, with the 
 moral. " The laws of moral nature," says 
 Emerson, " answer to those of matter as face 
 to face in a glass." This thought was* funda 
 mental in his ethics, and he lost no good 
 occasion to emphasize and urge it. It was 
 part of that grand creed which he spoke 
 from the platform of the Free Religious 
 Association a generation ago : " The moral 
 sentiment speaks to every man the law after 
 which the universe was made." It was the 
 last word of the famous Harvard address of 
 1838: "I look for the new Teacher, that 
 
The Philosophy of Emerson 31 
 
 shall follow so far those shining laws, that he 
 shall see them come full circle ; shall see the 
 world to be the mirror of the soul ; shall see 
 the identity of the law of gravitation with 
 purity of heart; and shall show that the 
 Ought, that Duty, is one thing with Science, 
 with Beauty, and with Joy." It is hinted in 
 " The Preacher," which, read to the Har 
 vard students of religion forty years after the 
 first address, somehow echoes every senti 
 ment of that : " The next age will recog 
 nize the true eternity of the law, its presence 
 to you and me, its equal energy in what is 
 called brute nature as in what is called sacred 
 history." But the whole thought was already 
 firmly grasped and clearly formulated in 
 " Nature." " All things are moral," he said 
 here, " and in their boundless changes have 
 an unceasing reference to spiritual nature." 
 " Every natural process is a version of a 
 moral sentence. The moral law lies at the 
 centre of nature and radiates to the circum 
 ference." Every chemical change, every 
 change of vegetation, every animal function, 
 " shall hint or thunder to man the laws of 
 right and wrong and echo the Ten Com- 
 
32 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 mandments." He cannot doubt that the 
 moral sentiment which thus scents the air, 
 grows in the grain, and impregnates the 
 waters of the world is caught from them by 
 man. " Who can guess," he says, " how 
 much firmness the sea-beaten rock has taught 
 the fisherman ? how much tranquillity has 
 been reflected to man from the azure sky, 
 over whose unspotted deeps the winds for 
 evermore drive flocks of stormy clouds, and 
 leave no wrinkle or stain ? how much indus 
 try and providence and affection we have 
 caught from the pantomime of brutes ? " 
 The whole chapter upon Discipline is iter 
 ation and reiteration of this thought. Nature 
 is a discipline, he says, school alike for the 
 understanding and for morals. As Fichte 
 said, Nature is the objectified material of 
 duty. 
 
 The notion is abroad, and is fashionable 
 almost to the point of orthodoxy, reports 
 itself perennially in the newspaper and the 
 omnibus, that Idealism is unpractical, 
 without hands, careless of fact, even inimical 
 to exact science. Renan has said that every 
 position has so much to say for itself and is 
 
The Philosophy of Emerson 33 
 
 so plausible from some point that, could a 
 man live long enough with his mind fresh 
 and virile, he would doubtless champion 
 successively every doctrine and belong to 
 every sect. Thus for each one of us may be 
 reserved the mumps-and-measles period of 
 a believed antinomy between piety and com 
 mon sense and between thought and fact. 
 Lowell well said, with specific reference to 
 the Pilgrim Fathers, the most energetic ship 
 load of idealists in history, that " men anxious 
 about their souls have not been by any 
 means the least skilful in providing for the 
 wants of the body " ; and Switzerland, Hol 
 land, Scotland, and England say their various 
 Amens. " To a sound judgment," says 
 Emerson, " the most abstract truth is the 
 most practical." The word of your rigorous 
 and vigorous henchman of " fact " is : Come 
 down from the barren heights of speculation 
 and out of the clouds, to the firm ground of 
 the physical and positive. Shut your Kritik 
 of Reason and open your Palaeontology, 
 that so we may have some reliable and useful 
 knowledge. In like manner we hear sincere 
 and earnest men counsel, Give up belief in 
 
34 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 God, that you may economize your forces 
 for humanity ; give up believing in the im 
 mortal nature of you, that so you may con 
 centrate on a new earth. They think the 
 law of parsimony rules the soul, instead of 
 that other, that to him that hath shall be 
 given, and that giving is getting and qualify 
 ing for giving more. Stop this sending of 
 gospel and schoolmaster to Asia and Africa 
 and the black belt of Alabama, they say, and 
 attend to the ignorance and squalor round 
 the corner ; and they ridicule the missionary 
 society. Yet they have to blush more than 
 this other when asked for the census of their 
 own neighborhood activities and self-sacrifices 
 and for the page of their cash-book which 
 chronicles their dealings with the local vice. 
 
 The positivist s appeal to the idealist to 
 leave his idealism to strengthen the ranks of 
 reform and regenerate society is irony s ne 
 plus ultra. Its answer is Moses and the 
 prophets ; its answer is Christ and the 
 Church ; its answer is Luther and Calvin 
 and John Knox ; its answer is Cromwell and 
 Milton and Vane, Plymouth Rock, and Bun 
 ker Hill ; its answer is Rousseau and Turgot, 
 
The Philosophy of Emerson 35 
 
 the voice of Fichte amidst Napoleon s drums, 
 Cobden and the Corn-law Rhymer, Mazzini 
 and Gladstone ; its answer is Garrison, the 
 Emancipation Proclamation, and the scaffold 
 of John Brown ; its answer is the Transcen 
 dental Movement in New England. Never 
 in New England, it seems, was such a turn 
 out of men to regenerate society as in those 
 two decades. Each man inoculated with the 
 " new views " straightway appears with a 
 recipe for the divine commonwealth in his 
 pocket. It shall come by Brook Farm, by 
 eating potatoes, by temperance, by conven 
 tions, a perennial Anniversary Week, 
 but it shall come somehow. The labor of 
 those men and women for a new earth was 
 as energetic as their faith in its coming was 
 indefectible and buoyant. But for their labor 
 and their faith the cause of reform among 
 us would be infinitely behind where it is to 
 day. On the whole, it seems to some of us, 
 in the light of our own history and thought, 
 that, if our social reformers desiderate in the 
 people a zeal according to knowledge, they 
 had better pray for a new influx of Transcen 
 dentalism rather than seek to minimize what 
 
36 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 we have. If the time ever should come 
 when Transcendentalism should be " at bay " 
 in America, that is the corner where some 
 body in mild glee has recently been locating 
 it, then Reform would simply find that it 
 had killed its goose. 
 
 The same answer which is given him who 
 seeks to antagonize Idealism and philan 
 thropy stands for him who seeks to show 
 a conflict between speculation and science. 
 The answer is Aristotle and Bacon, Des 
 cartes and Leibnitz, Kant, Goethe and Em 
 erson. Kant, and not Laplace, was the true 
 author of the nebular hypothesis ; and his 
 name will ultimately be identified with it as 
 completely as Newton s with the law of 
 gravitation. He, too, distinctly enunciated 
 the doctrine although he called it " a daring 
 adventure of reason " of the descent of all 
 organic beings from a common original 
 mother, as an hypothesis which " alone is in 
 harmony with the principle of the mechan 
 ism of nature, without which a science of 
 nature is altogether impossible." Goethe 
 said, " Nothing could hinder me from boldly 
 maintaining this ( adventure of reason, as 
 
The Philosophy of Emerson 37 
 
 the sage of Konigsberg calls it " ; and 
 Goethe s own " Metamorphosis of Plants/ 
 his " Metamorphosis of Animals," and the 
 whole body of his valuable works in mor 
 phology, biology, and geology are clear an 
 ticipations, and much more than anticipa 
 tions, of Darwinism and our evolution 
 theory. " What kind of God," said Goethe, 
 " were he who impelled things only from 
 outside, and let the universe twirl round his 
 finger? God moves the world inwardly, 
 cherishes nature in himself, himself in nat 
 ure, so that whatever lives and works and 
 exists in him never misses his power nor his 
 spirit." And again : " All members form 
 themselves according to eternal laws, and the 
 rarest form preserves in secret the primitive 
 type. The form determines the animal s 
 mode of life, while, reciprocally, the mode of 
 life reacts powerfully on all form." 
 
 Some have raised the objection that these 
 and similar passages of Goethe are no 
 " scientific truths," but only poetical or rhe 
 torical flourishes and images ; the type he 
 meant was only an " ideal pro-type," no real 
 genealogical form. " This objection," says 
 
38 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 Professor Haeckel, and the answer, no 
 matter what the philosophy behind it, serves 
 for similar objections to Emerson, "be 
 trays little understanding of the greatest 
 German genius. He who is acquainted with 
 Goethe s thoroughly objective mode of 
 thought, who appreciates his thoroughly liv 
 ing and realistic view of nature, will entertain 
 no doubt that under that c type was in 
 tended a perfectly real descent of kindred 
 organisms from common genealogical form." 
 Emerson himself, in describing the great 
 changes which came in New England 
 thought in the thirties and forties, and ex 
 pressing the opinion that " the paramount 
 source of the religious revolution was Mod 
 ern Science," pays special tribute to the in 
 fluence of Goethe and the Germans in the 
 matter. " Unexpected aid from high quarters 
 came to the iconoclasts. The German poet 
 Goethe revolted against the science of the 
 day, against French and English science, 
 declared war against the great name of 
 Newton, proposed his own new and simple 
 optics ; in botany, his simple theory of meta 
 morphosis, the eye of a leaf is all, every 
 
The Philosophy of Emerson 39 
 
 part of the plant from root to fruit is only a 
 modified leaf, the branch of a tree is nothing 
 but a leaf whose serratures have become 
 twigs. He extended this into anatomy and 
 animal life, and his views were accepted. 
 The revolt became a revolution. Schelling 
 and Oken introduced their ideal natural 
 philosophy ; Hegel, his metaphysics, and 
 extended it to civil history. The result in 
 literature and the general mind was a return 
 to law." 
 
 This truth, that the great pioneering and 
 revolutionizing work in science and the 
 study of nature has so commonly been done 
 by those who have approached the problem 
 of the universe on the thought-side, is cer 
 tainly interesting and significant. To the 
 man who thinks, not at all a strange thing, 
 yet something surely worth making a note_ 
 of by the stickler for " facts." "Man," says 
 Emerson, " carries the world in his head, 
 the whole astronomy and chemistry sus 
 pended in a thought. Because the history 
 of nature is charactered in his brain, there 
 fore is he the prophet and discoverer of her 
 secrets. Every known fact in natural science 
 
40 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 was divined by the presentiment of some 
 body, before it was actually verified." He 
 quotes with pleasure George Herbert s 
 quaint and pregnant lines upon man s 
 " private amity " with the herbs and the 
 stars. He might have quoted those lines of 
 Milton, which Channing quotes : 
 
 " One Almighty is, from whom 
 All things proceed, and up to him return, 
 If not depraved from good, created all 
 Such to perfection, one first matter all 
 Indued with various forms, various degrees 
 Of substance, and, in things that live, of life : 
 But more refined, more spirituous and pure, 
 As nearer to him placed or nearer tending, 
 Each in their several active spheres assigned, 
 Till body up to spirit work, in bounds 
 Proportioned to each kind. So from the root 
 Springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the 
 
 leaves 
 
 More aery, last the bright consummate flower 
 Spirits odorous breathes ; flowers and their fruit, 
 Man s nourishment, by gradual scale sublimed, 
 To vital spirits aspire, to animal, 
 To intellectual." 
 
 Paradise Lost, Book V., lines 469-485. 
 
The Philosophy of Emerson 41 
 
 The following Platonic lines from Milton he 
 
 does quote : 
 
 " What if earth 
 
 Be but the shadow of Heaven, and things therein 
 Each to the other more like than on earth is 
 thought ? " 
 
 But nothing could illustrate so strikingly 
 the truth that the method of thought is 
 the method of nature as what is called 
 the " Darwinism " of Emerson himself, the 
 anticipations and clear expression everywhere 
 of that view of development which our 
 science has adopted and made so cardinal. 
 Of this Darwinism in Emerson much has 
 been made, yet not too much. Darwin 
 ism, as we have already noticed, was made 
 the very motto of " Nature," twenty years 
 before " The Origin of Species " was written. 
 " Nature " is full of Darwinism. "It is 
 essential to a true theory of nature and of 
 man," Emerson said, " that it should con 
 tain somewhat progressive " ; and in the 
 essay on " Fate " he says, " No statement 
 of the universe can have any soundness 
 which does not admit its ascending effort." 
 His quick interest in the questions of natural 
 
42 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 science declares itself in " Nature " as gen 
 uinely as his interest in the soul and life. 
 Curiously, his earliest public lectures were 
 upon subjects in natural history, " The 
 Relation of Man to the Globe," " Water," 
 etc. " Open any recent journal of science," 
 he said in " Nature," " and weigh the prob 
 lems suggested concerning Light, Heat, 
 Electricity, Magnetism, Physiology, Geol 
 ogy." But he has slight regard for that 
 physiology or physics which merely con 
 cerns itself with particulars and heaps up 
 facts, with no curiosity or thought concern 
 ing relations, tendency, and end. " Empiri 
 cal science," he says, "is apt to cloud the 
 sight and, by the very knowledge of func 
 tions and processes, to bereave the student 
 of the manly contemplation of the whole." 
 " There are far more excellent qualities in 
 the student," he says, " than preciseness and 
 infallibility. It is not so pertinent to man 
 to know all the individuals of the animal 
 kingdom as it is to know whence and 
 whereto is this tyrannizing unity in his 
 constitution, which evermore separates and 
 classifies things, endeavoring to reduce the 
 
The Philosophy of Emerson 43 
 
 most diverse to one form. When I be 
 hold a rich landscape, it is less to my pur 
 pose to recite correctly the order and super 
 position of the strata than to know why all 
 thought of multitude is lost in a tranquil 
 sense of unity. I cannot greatly honor 
 minuteness in details so long as there is no 
 hint to explain the relation between things 
 and thoughts ; no ray upon the metaphysics 
 of conchology, of botany, of the arts, to 
 show the relation of the forms of flowers, 
 shells, animals, architecture, to the mind, 
 and build science upon ideas. * 
 
 The exact sciences were not Emerson s 
 favorite field, and what mathematics he had 
 cost him " hours of melancholy." But he 
 had that primary merit of the scientific man 
 which consists in fronting fact and truth 
 confidently and without reserve, in declin 
 ing anxiety about any immediate inconsis 
 tencies which appear during research and 
 change, and in refusing to accept or approve 
 as known anything which is not known. 
 " The moment you putty and plaster your 
 expressions to make them hang together," he 
 said to a young friend, " you have begun 
 
44 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 a weakening process. Take it for granted 
 the truths will harmonize ; and, as for the 
 falsities and mistakes, they will speedily die 
 of themselves." " I do not wish," he said 
 to Frederika Bremer, " that people should 
 pretend to know or to believe more than 
 they really do know and believe." Apply 
 ing this to the discussion of immortality, 
 " we carry the pledges of this in our own 
 breast," he maintained that "we cannot 
 say in what form or in what manner our 
 existence will be continued." " He is faith 
 ful," comments Miss Bremer, "to the law 
 in his own breast, and speaks out the truth 
 which he inwardly recognizes. He does 
 right. By this means he will prepare the 
 way for a more true comprehension of re 
 ligion and of life." 
 
 Emerson remarks upon "that wonderful 
 congruity which subsists between man and 
 the world of which he is the lord, not be 
 cause he is the most subtile inhabitant, but 
 because he is its head and heart, and finds 
 something of himself in every great and 
 small thing." This view, thus clear and 
 explicit at the very beginning, in the pages 
 
The Philosophy of Emerson 45 
 
 of " Nature," becomes ever more pro 
 nounced and prominent in his maturer 
 thought. Half a dozen years later he says : 
 " We can point nowhere to anything final, 
 but tendency appears on all hands ; planet, 
 system, constellation, total nature is grow 
 ing like a field of maize in July, is be 
 coming somewhat else. The embryo does 
 not more strive to be man than yonder burr 
 of light we call a nebula tends to be a 
 ring, a comet, a globe, and a parent of new 
 suns." This process of evolution, he says, 
 " publishes itself in creatures, reaching from 
 particles to spicula, through transformation 
 on transformation, to the highest symme 
 tries, arriving at consummate results with 
 out a shock or a leap. . . . How far off is 
 the trilobite, how far the quadruped ! How 
 inconceivably remote is man ! All duly 
 arrive, and then race after race of men. It 
 is a long way from granite to oyster ; farther 
 yet to Plato, and the preaching of the im 
 mortality of the soul. Yet all must come, 
 as surely as the first atom has two sides." 
 This, note, twenty years before men heard 
 of Darwinism. " In ignorant ages," says 
 
46 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 Emerson, "it was common to vaunt the 
 human superiority by underrating the in 
 stinct of other animals. Better discern 
 ment finds that the only difference is of 
 less and more/ Again, fc Tis a long scale 
 from the gorilla to the gentleman, from 
 the gorilla to Plato, Newton, Shakespeare, 
 to the sanctities of religion, to the re 
 finements of legislation, the summits of 
 science, art, and poetry. The beginnings 
 are slow and infirm, but tis an always ac 
 celerated march." 
 
 Passages of this sort could of course be 
 multiplied indefinitely. The reference in 
 " Bacchus " to the ascent of life from form 
 to form still remains incomparable, as Mr. 
 Stedman has observed, for terseness and 
 poetic illumination : 
 
 " I, drinking this, 
 Shall hear far Chaos talk with me ; 
 Kings unborn shall walk with me ; 
 And the poor grass shall plot and plan 
 What it will do when it is man." 
 
 Lines in "Woodnotes" put the same 
 in different phrase. Perhaps the most defi- 
 
The Philosophy of Emerson 47 
 
 nite and sufficient statement of the doctrine 
 by Emerson is that in the second essay on 
 Plato. " Modern science," he said here, 
 this was ten years before Darwin, " by the 
 extent of its generalizations has learned to 
 indemnify the student of man for the de 
 fects of individuals, by tracing growth and 
 ascent in races, and, by the simple expedi 
 ent of lighting up the vast background, 
 generates a feeling of complacency and hope. 
 The human being has the saurian and the 
 plant in his rear. His arts and sciences, 
 the easy issue of his brain, look glorious 
 when prospectively beheld from the distant 
 brain of ox, crocodile, and fish. It seems 
 as if nature, in regarding the geologic night 
 behind her, when, in five or six millen 
 niums, she has turned out five or six men, 
 as Homer, Phidias, Menu, and Columbus, 
 was nowise discontented with the result. 
 These samples attested the virtue of the 
 tree. These were a clear amelioration of 
 trilobite and saurus, and a good basis for 
 further proceeding. With this artist, time 
 and space are cheap, and she is insensible 
 to what you say of tedious preparation. 
 
48 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 She waited tranquilly the flowing periods 
 of palaeontology for the hour to be struck 
 when man should arrive." 
 
 " It is a misconception," says John Morley, 
 " to pretend that Emerson was a precursor 
 of the Darwinian theory" ; and he emphasizes 
 the special character of Darwin s scientific 
 hypothesis. " Evolution, as a possible ex 
 planation of the ordering of the universe," 
 he says, " is a great deal older than either 
 Emerson or Darwin." None knew that 
 better than Emerson himself; and before 
 he was twenty years old he wrote of " the 
 circumstance which almost invariably attends 
 the promulgation of a philosophical theory, 
 that authors start up to prove its antiquity, 
 and that it is the identical theory which 
 Pythagoras, Plato, or Epicurus propounded 
 before." The point of interest here is 
 that Emerson spoke about evolution in 
 entirely new phrase ; and it was no mere 
 "good fortune" by which his strong propo 
 sitions harmonize with "the new and most 
 memorable drift of science which set in by 
 his side," as Mr. Morley clearly recognizes 
 they do. It was the " fatal gift of penetra- 
 
The Philosophy of Emerson 49 
 
 tion " which enabled him to see and to pro 
 claim early and in universals that which 
 was in the air and which Darwin presently 
 should avouch in particulars. 
 
 If Idealism be a true philosophy, then it 
 was but natural and regular that Emerson 
 should see and say this betimes. If Dar 
 winism be a true theory of the origin of 
 species and the descent of man, then this in 
 sight and conclusion bear notable witness to 
 the primary virtue and validity of Emerson s 
 method. Indeed, if we consider, upon what 
 presupposition are this insight and conclu 
 sion, if they be true, so likely and so clear as 
 upon his ? 
 
 "The possibility of interpretation," he 
 says, " lies in the identity of the observer 
 with the observed. Each material thing 
 has its celestial side ; has its translation, 
 through humanity, into the spiritual and nec 
 essary sphere." " The reason why man 
 knows about them is that he is of them ; he 
 has just come out of nature, or from being a 
 part of that thing." cc I announce the good 
 of being interpenetrated by the mind that 
 made nature ; this benefit, namely, that it 
 
50 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 can understand nature, which it made and 
 maketh. Nature is good, but intellect is 
 better : as the law-giver is before the law- 
 receiver." In religion it is the thought of 
 what may best be named the humanity of 
 God. With sympathy he quotes the word 
 of George Fox, that, " though he read of 
 Christ and God, he knew them only from 
 the like spirit in his own soul." The 
 human is the door to the divine. 
 
 Intellect is the supernatural, the creator 
 and the sap of nature. Intellect is the divine, 
 it is the mind in man. " Man must look at 
 nature with a supernatural eye," says Emer 
 son. " Every natural fact is an emanation. 
 Not the cause, but an ever novel effect, 
 nature descends always from above. The 
 beauty of these fair objects is imparted into 
 them from a metaphysical and eternal spring. 
 In all animal and vegetable forms, no chem 
 istry, no mechanics, can account for the 
 facts ; but a mysterious principle of life must 
 be assumed, which not only inhabits the 
 organ, but makes the organ." This is the 
 metaphysics of evolution, its philosophy, 
 with Emerson. 
 
The Philosophy of Emerson 51 
 
 And what of man in nature, what of the 
 mind ? We are brought by this word to 
 Emerson s point of view. Man is the pro 
 jection of God in the self-conscious. "The 
 foundations of man," says Emerson, "are 
 not in matter, but in spirit " ; and u the 
 element of spirit is eternity." <c Man pre 
 tends to give account of himself to himself, 
 but at last what has he to recite but the fact 
 that there is a Life not to be described 
 or known otherwise than by possession ? 
 What account can he give of his essence more 
 than so it was to be ? The royal reason, the 
 Grace of God, seems the only description of 
 our multiform but ever identical fact." 
 
 "A God-intoxicated man " is a term which 
 might be applied to Emerson as justly as it 
 was applied to Spinoza. It is an impress 
 ive account which Mr. Woodbury gives of 
 the meditation and discussion up under the 
 shadow of Greylock, in which Emerson, after 
 a long pause, exclaimed, lifting his head, 
 " God ? It is all God ! " marvelling how 
 any thinker contemplating the universe could 
 hold otherwise. But he was not a pantheist, 
 although Theodore Parker was quite wrong 
 
52 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 in saying that " no man is farther from it.* 
 There is almost no great modern religious 
 thinker in whom the pantheistic element is 
 so large ; but he is always the theist, always 
 thoughtful of the personality, the conscious 
 ness, and the response. His pages throb 
 with multiplied expressions of it. Has any 
 believer in the personality of God, well asks 
 Whipple in one of his Emerson essays, 
 ever hit upon a better definition than " Con 
 scious Law/ in that inspired line in " Wood- 
 notes," " Conscious Law is King of kings ?" 
 Indeed there is not in all of Emerson s 
 pages a loftier, more poetic, or more philo 
 sophic expression of his conception of evolu 
 tion in its divine genesis and eternal energy 
 than the page which ends with this great 
 line. 
 
 " I praise with wonder," he says, " this great 
 reality, this Supreme Presence, which seems 
 to drown all things in the deluge of its light. 
 What man, seeing this, can lose it from 
 his thoughts, or entertain a meaner subject? 
 The entrance of this into his mind seems to 
 be the birth of man. We cannot describe 
 the natural history of the soul, but we know 
 
The Philosophy of Emerson 53 
 
 that it is divine. I cannot tell if these won 
 derful qualities which house to-day in this 
 mortal frame shall ever reassemble in equal 
 activity in a similar frame, or whether they 
 have before had a natural history like that 
 of this body ; but this one thing I know, 
 that these qualities did not now begin to ex 
 ist, cannot be sick with my sickness, nor 
 buried in any grave ; but that they circulate 
 through the Universe : before the world was, 
 they were. Nothing can bar them out, or 
 shut them in ; they penetrate the ocean and 
 land, space and time, form and essence, 
 and hold the key to universal nature. I 
 draw from this faith courage and hope. All 
 things are known to the soul. It is not to 
 be surprised by any communication. Noth 
 ing can be greater than it." 
 
 " Every scripture is to be interpreted by 
 the same spirit which gave it forth/ this, 
 observes Emerson, is the fundamental law 
 of criticism. And is it not apparent that 
 all man s efforts to interpret the universe are 
 at once vain and inexplicable, unless it be 
 that he himself is of the same spirit which 
 gave forth the universe, and eternally gives 
 
54 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 forth ? The fact that man " doth philoso 
 phize, and must," must ever ask the ques 
 tions which have their answers in infinity, is 
 the blazing evidence of his oneness with the 
 Mind by which the worlds are and were 
 created. 
 
 And that which is implied by speculation 
 is also vouched by freedom and the infinite 
 transformation wrought by Will. "The 
 world," says Emerson, "yields itself passive 
 to the educated Will." " From the child s 
 successive possession of his several senses up 
 to the hour when he saith, Thy will be 
 done ! he is learning the secret, that he can 
 reduce under his will, not only particular 
 events, but great classes, nay, the whole 
 series of events, and so conform all facts to 
 his character." Fate is unpenetrated cause. 
 The water drowns ship and sailor, like a 
 grain of dust; but learn to swim, trim 
 your bark, and the wave which drowned it 
 will carry it. " Steam, till the other day, 
 was the devil which we dreaded; but 
 Worcester, Watt, and Fulton bethought 
 themselves that, where was power, was not 
 devil, but was God. Could he lift pots and 
 
The Philosophy of Emerson 55 
 
 roofs so handily, he was the workman they 
 were in search of. The opinion of the mill 
 ion was the terror of the world ; and it was 
 attempted to hold it down with a layer of 
 soldiers, over that a layer of lords, and a 
 king on the top. But the Fultons and Watts 
 of politics, by satisfying the million, have 
 made of this terror the most harmless and 
 energetic form of a State." " Every solid in 
 the universe is ready to become fluid on the 
 approach of the mind ; and the power to 
 flux it is the measure of the mind. . . . One 
 after another, man s victorious thought 
 comes up with and reduces all things, until 
 the world becomes, at last, only a realized 
 will the double of the man." 
 
 " Intellect annuls Fate," says Emerson. 
 
 >o far as a man thinks, he is free." I g& 
 find it difficult to understand, in spite of the 
 unrelieved determinism that to-day domin 
 ates and charms so many moralists and phil 
 osophic men, how one can see this doctrine 
 of freedom challenged without jealousy, so 
 fundamental does it appear to the intellectual 
 process and to the interpretation and the 
 very fact of the moral life. The vehemence 
 
56 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 of the denial of free will by Luther and Cal 
 vin and many great religious minds is in 
 deed known to us ; and the subtlety and 
 energy of the theologians arguments we rec 
 ognize and deeply feel. They would em 
 phasize Providence, they would humble 
 themselves entirely, they would empty 
 themselves of all claim to merit, and know 
 themselves only as chosen instruments 
 through which God works his purposes. 
 But freedom makes all the reverence and 
 humility and grace and sonship and disciple- 
 ship greater, and not less. Indeed, if we 
 will ponder, are these even possible save as 
 our wills are ours to make them God s ? I 
 lately read a paper by a thoughtful man, in 
 opposition to the principle that the freedom 
 of the will is the corner-stone of ethics, and 
 marvelled at the argument, to which Grote 
 and Voltaire and John Fiske were all made 
 to contribute. " The free agent " was gro 
 tesquely defined, in the language of Grote, 
 as " one who can neither feel himself account 
 able nor be rendered accountable." " If the 
 volition of agents be not influenced by 
 motives," it was said, and who of us would 
 
The Philosophy of Emerson 57 
 
 dream of denying so trivial a truism ? " the 
 whole machinery of law becomes unavailing, 
 and punishment a purposeless infliction of 
 pain." " If, when a robber is executed," so 
 Voltaire was cited here, " his accomplice, who 
 sees him suffer, has the liberty of not being 
 frightened at the punishment, he will go 
 from the foot of the scaffold to assassinate 
 on the high-road ; if, struck with horror, he 
 experiences an insurmountable terror, the 
 punishment of his companion will become 
 useful to him, and moreover prove to so 
 ciety that his will is not free. * " Substitute 
 for the unmeaning phrase, c freedom of the 
 will/" Mr. Fiske was quoted as saying, 
 " the accurate phrase, c lawlessness of vo 
 lition, and the theory already looks less 
 plausible." " To write history," so Mr. 
 Fiske was also quoted, " on any method fur 
 nished by the free-will doctrine would be 
 utterly impossible." Surely, one could but 
 say, Mr. Fiske could never have said this, 
 save in his apprentice period. The expres 
 sion does occur in his " Cosmic Philosophy." 
 But the unfortunate word gives no adequate 
 idea of the purpose of the chapter, which is 
 
58 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 to show the lawful power of motives. To 
 whoever is inclined to look upon the reason 
 ing of Buckle as "equally legitimate and 
 conclusive with that of Darwin," another 
 contention of the critic, Mr. Fiske s own 
 essay upon Buckle s fallacies may be com 
 mended ; and, surely, the history of America, 
 which Mr. Fiske has done so much to illu 
 minate, can be based on no other doctrine 
 than that of freedom. " Does the reading 
 of history make us fatalists ? " says Emer 
 son. " What courage does not the opposite 
 opinion show ! A little whim of will to be 
 free gallantly contending against the universe 
 of chemistry." 
 
 " Substitute the accurate term lawlessness 
 for freedom, and the theory already looks 
 less plausible ! " Substitute lawlessness for 
 freedom! Substitute Preston Brooks for 
 Charles Sumner, substitute Alcibiades for 
 Plato, and Judas for Saint John ! The con 
 fusion is a monstrous one. Is the lawless 
 State the free State, or the State where 
 law is perfect and supreme ? Who is the 
 free citizen ? Is it a Lincoln or a Glad 
 stone, whose speech on each month s prob- 
 
The Philosophy of Emerson 59 
 
 lem we confidently prophesy, by knowledge 
 of the self-determined law of his mind, or 
 is it the Jingo of the music-hall, whose 
 whim next week or the week after is quite 
 incalculable ? Is it the obedient citizen, or 
 the capricious and he who does not feel 
 himself accountable ? As most of us under 
 stand it, this is he who finds himself in 
 jail. 
 
 Voltaire s identification of freedom with 
 caprice, with insulation from influences, from 
 motives and causality is a trivial thinking. 
 Carlyle s judgment, that " there is not one 
 great thought in all Voltaire s six and thirty 
 quartos," was a judgment too severe ; but 
 few will not own that he was " shallow " 
 upon occasion, when they find him ad 
 ducing the fact that the sight of a hanging 
 frightens a would-be murderer as a proof 
 that the will is not free ! This line of 
 thought and it is common, indeed pro 
 ceeds upon failure to analyze and define 
 motive. Stocks and stones have no motives, 
 and beasts and idiots next to none. Mo 
 tives multiply, grow definite, and grow 
 imperative precisely as freedom grows ; and 
 
60 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 the completer the freedom, the greater the 
 contribution of the mind to its own motive. 
 My motive is not apart from me : it is of 
 me. I share in the creation of my motive, 
 and this more and more with the evolution 
 of my freedom. " Will, pure and perceiv 
 ing, * says Emerson, < is not wilfulness. 
 When a man, through stubborness, insists 
 to do this or that, something absurd or 
 whimsical, only because he will, he is weak ; 
 he blows with his lips against the tempest." 
 "If we thought men were free in the sense 
 that in a single exception one fantastical 
 will could prevail over the law of things, 
 it were all one as if a child s hand could pull 
 down the sun/ " Let us build altars," he 
 said, " to the Beautiful Necessity, which 
 rudely or softly educates man to the percep 
 tion that there are no contingencies that 
 Law rules throughout existence." "If we 
 give it the high sense in which the poets use 
 it, even thought itself is not above Fate : 
 that, too, must act according to eternal laws, 
 and all that is wilful and fantastic in it is in 
 opposition to its fundamental essence." 
 Man may choose as he will, but he chooses 
 
The Philosophy of Emerson 61 
 
 the wrong at his peril, his error or his sin 
 in no wise earning deference from the moral 
 nature of things ; and the problem set to 
 man is to gladly will the universal, not to 
 do somehow that which gravitation and the 
 Ought command, that he must do some 
 how, or be ground up, but to do it volun 
 tarily, in the perceiving of its infallible ex 
 cellence and oneness with the deep base of 
 the life. "Thank God," said Lessing, 
 he who said, in its place, that deep correla 
 tive word, " No man must must," " that 
 I must, must do the right." Herein only 
 is freedom, in obedience, in harmony with 
 right. " The law of liberty," says Saint Paul. 
 " Our wills are ours," says Tennyson, in his 
 line, "to make them thine." "The last 
 lesson in life," says Emerson, in " Worship," 
 using almost Spinoza s word, " is a vol 
 untary obedience, a necessitated freedom." 
 "Morals," he says, "is the direction of the 
 will on universal ends." But " morals im 
 plies freedom and will. The will constitutes 
 the man." 
 
 Mr. Cabot states Emerson s position in 
 these words : " When man submits his will 
 
62 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 to the Divine inspiration, he becomes a 
 creator in the finite. If he is disobedient, 
 if he would be something in himself, he finds 
 all things hostile and incomprehensible. " I 
 quote this passage especially because it is 
 one which an accomplished English critic, 
 Mr. John M. Robertson, in an acute and 
 valuable essay upon Emerson, marred by 
 some curious complacencies about theism 
 and atheism, singles out as the acme of in 
 consistency. He accepts it as truly repre 
 senting Emerson, but exclaims, " How in 
 the name of reason can a human phenome 
 non be disobedient to the Universal Will ? " 
 The question itself ignores the central and 
 fundamental fact in Emerson s conception of 
 man. Man is not a phenomenon ; and, if 
 we must choose between calling the mind 
 primarily intellect or will, we must say 
 will. " The free-will or Godhead of men " 
 Emerson speaks of. A phenomenon can 
 be neither dutiful nor undutiful ; and the 
 obedience of a machine does not constitute 
 morality, but only the obedience of will, and 
 that precisely because it can decline obedi 
 ence. Morals implies freedom, Emerson 
 
The Philosophy of Emerson 63 
 
 says, as the immediate consciousness and 
 common sense of men have said from the 
 beginning, and the profoundest philosophy 
 from Plato and Aristotle on to Emerson. 
 We need no Kant to prove it by formulas 
 of metaphysics. What else mean the words 
 responsible, blame, retribution, indignation ? 
 Why else this difference in kind between 
 my feeling toward this stinging viper and 
 that toward this selfish coward or false 
 friend ? Aristotle s simple old argument, 
 in his cc Ethics," for the free will and con 
 sequent responsibility of man, by appeal 
 first to our own consciousness, and sec 
 ondly to the fact that in society we treat 
 each other as free agents, and must do 
 it, whatever our theory, has never been 
 laid nor transcended yet, and is not likely 
 to be in a hurry. But I know of no pro- 
 founder word upon this old knot of freedom 
 and necessity than that of Emerson, in the 
 essay on " Fate/ I think of no word so 
 profound as this, no metaphysic of ethics so 
 great, a system of ethics it is in fosse, 
 save, in somewhat, that of Kant s great 
 Kritik. A complete survey of Emerson s 
 
64 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 philosophy must give a cardinal place to 
 his ethics. I do not here develop at length 
 the ethical side, because I have done it 
 elsewhere.* I know of no other thinker who 
 so luminously points out the way to the 
 solution of the sundry antinomies, their 
 reconciliation in a higher synthesis, as Emer 
 son. Freedom and necessity, unity and 
 personality, individualism and common 
 wealth, transcendence and immanence, as 
 we come into " intimater intimacy " with the 
 mind of Emerson, the old puzzles puzzle 
 less and less, and we learn to verify and 
 chart what he discovers and declares. No 
 where is the reconciling synthesis more im 
 pressive or more useful, more necessary for 
 these times, than in the field of ethics. The 
 reconciliation is between the evolution of 
 institutions and the categorical imperative, 
 between, if we please, Herbert Spencer and 
 Immanuel Kant. Emerson fronts a kinder 
 and more co-operant universe than Kant. 
 Morals, he said while yet a mere boy, and 
 in ever firmer accent with the years, consti- 
 
 * Address upon "Emerson s Ethics," published in the volume 
 of Concord Lectures upon "The Genius and Character of Emerson." 
 
The Philosophy of Emerson 65 
 
 tutes the " health integrity " of the universe ; 
 and morals is the health of the soul, the 
 activity befitting and commanding its nature. 
 The moral development of man is his proc 
 ess, prompted by inspiration and impera 
 tive from within and from without, toward 
 realization and obedience of the central law 
 of his own being, in which obedience he 
 finds freedom and efficiency and himself. 
 The " data of ethics " and sundry observa 
 tions of most of the moral philosophers of 
 evolution would be to the mind of Emer 
 son mere notes of results and processes, with 
 the purpose and dynamics still left to be 
 explained. The first principles of the Kant 
 ian ethics, the three cardinal doctrines of 
 the Kritik of Practical Reason, never received 
 such powerful summary statement as in 
 Emerson s famous lines : 
 
 u So nigh is grandeur to our dust, 
 
 So near is God to man, 
 When Duty whispers low, Thou must, 
 The youth replies, I can" 
 
 Here is the categorical imperative ; and 
 here the assurance, Thou canst, because 
 
66 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 thou shalt, because thou oughtest. Obligation 
 measures and defines capacity and freedom ; 
 and the absoluteness of the obligation il 
 lumines and defines the two great presup 
 positions, the grandeur of the eternal nat 
 ure thus commanded, and the completeness 
 of the divine support and guarantee. 
 
 Nature is no sentimentalist to Emerson. 
 He believes in no "pistareen Providence, 
 which, whenever the good man wants a 
 dinner, makes that somebody shall knock at 
 his door and leave a half-dollar." It is of 
 no use, he says, to " dress up that terrific 
 benefactor in the clean shirt and white neck 
 cloth of a student in divinity." The world 
 " will not mind drowning a man or woman." 
 Nor is there any underrating of external 
 influence or circumstance by Emerson. 
 " Every spirit makes its house," he says ; 
 " but afterwards the house confines the 
 spirit." " How shall a man escape from 
 his ancestors ? " " At the corner of the 
 street you read the possibility of each pas 
 senger, in the facial angle." " A crudity in 
 the blood will appear in the argument ; a 
 hump in the shoulder will appear in the 
 
The Philosophy of Emerson 67 
 
 speech and handiwork." You cannot make 
 a poet of " that little fatty face, pig-eye, and 
 squat form." " The election often goes, 
 probably, by avoirdupois weight and it 
 might be speedier to take the parties to the 
 hay-scales than to the ballot-box." Circum 
 stance, nature, the thick skull, is half. 
 " The book of Nature is the book of Fate." 
 Whatever limits us we call Fate ; and lim 
 itation runs through entire nature. Fate 
 is organization tyrannizing over character. 
 " But if Fate is so prevailing, man also," 
 says Emerson, " is part of it, and can con 
 front fate with fate. History is the action 
 and reaction of these two Nature and 
 Thought. Man cannot blink the free will. 
 To hazard the contradiction, freedom is 
 necessary. If you please to plant yourself 
 on the side of Fate, and say Fate is all ; 
 then we say, a part of Fate is the freedom 
 of man. Intellect annuls Fate. So far as a 
 man thinks, he is free. He who sees 
 through the design presides over it, and 
 must will that which must be. If the wall 
 remain adamant, it accuses the want of 
 thought. The one serious and formidable 
 
68 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 thing in nature is a will." " Tis written on 
 the gate of heaven," he quotes from Persian 
 Hafiz, " f Woe unto him who suffers him 
 self to be betrayed by Fate ! " 
 
 " It is wholesome to man to look not at 
 Fate," Emerson says, " but the other way : 
 the practical view is the other." This takes 
 us back to that place in " Nature " where he 
 declared the advantage of the ideal theory 
 to be that it presents the world in precisely 
 that view which is most desirable to the 
 mind, the view approved alike by philoso 
 phy and by virtue. And it indicates the 
 primary principle of his method of reform, 
 whether dealing with appetite or crime. We 
 have seen how fully he recognizes the power 
 of environment and circumstance. Envi 
 ronment itself is the creation of thought, 
 and it is ultimately and essentially in the 
 control of thought. It is right and signally 
 important that we should direct our efforts 
 to the amelioration of circumstance, that so 
 those results which conform to the results 
 of virtue may be facilitated and made more 
 constant. Indeed, this fact, that the melior 
 ation of circumstance is also in man s power 
 
The Philosophy of Emerson 69 
 
 and is his prescribed task, bears the same 
 witness to his freedom as his triumph over 
 circumstance. It is analogous to the crea 
 tion of motive, if, indeed, it be not a part of 
 that process. It is the triumph over circum 
 stance, only in broader circle, and vica 
 rious in somewhat. But this triumph over 
 circumstance in every circle is the command 
 of virtue, and the teaching of its necessity 
 and possibility is the cardinal ethical truth 
 of the ideal theory. Above and below and 
 within those seven ancestors wrapped up in 
 thy skin however we quibble and hedge, 
 this is the fatal, inescapable rescript alike of 
 common sense and high philosophy is 
 that new thing which thou art; and this, 
 and not chiefly those, is responsible for thy 
 depravity and fall. Thou art the doer of 
 this wrong, and not thy father rather ; and 
 deviltry is not all one with dyspepsia. It 
 were not possible for Emerson to write Car- 
 lyle s essay on the Model Prison; but in 
 his vocabulary also sinner and scoundrel and 
 scamp were not yet obsolete words nor syno 
 nyms of invalid. 
 
 The doctrine of evolution, the perception 
 
yo The Influence of Emerson 
 
 of the law of evolution working on and up 
 ward through all nature and through human 
 society, is one of the most fertilizing and in 
 spiring facts in the whole history of science. 
 A doctrine apprehended and vaguely pro 
 pounded at various times in the long history 
 of thought, it is peculiarly and definitely a 
 doctrine of our own time, and its distinctive 
 scientific doctrine. It was its misfortune 
 that it came into prominence at a time when 
 in England and Germany there prevailed a 
 poor, mechanical philosophy, and that with 
 this it became identified. I have spoken 
 elsewhere of the mischief wrought by this 
 unhappy alliance to the cause of ethics and 
 religion. The opposition of the churches 
 and religious men to the new truth, by 
 which in the fierce conflict they were routed 
 again and again, and could not fail to be 
 conscious of the defeats, had its deep war 
 rant; for the new truth was half-truth, and 
 the half which was lacking was the half 
 which they held with their falsehood, and 
 the most necessary half. In America it was 
 not until the publication of Mr. Fiske s 
 little treatise upon " The Destiny of Man " 
 
The Philosophy of Emerson 71 
 
 first read, it is interesting to remember, 
 at the Concord School of Philosophy, which 
 was so dear to Emerson, and of which he 
 may be said to have been the inspirer 
 that the doctrine was stated in a form which 
 satisfied the imperative religious and poet 
 ical demands of men, and was subsumed 
 under a worthy and measurably satisfying 
 philosophy. Religion and poetry to-day 
 have no quarrel with the doctrine of evolu 
 tion. In history, economics and politics the 
 reconciliation is more dilatory ; and it is 
 questionable whether it is not in these fields 
 that the mischief has been greatest. The 
 prostitution of political ideals which America 
 and England witnessed as the century closed 
 would never have been possible but for the 
 subtle and pervasive poisoning of the popu 
 lar consciousness by partial and false doc 
 trines of the principle and character of evo 
 lution. Catch-words about "survival of 
 the fittest," and notions that the fittest are 
 the strongest and that science had put its 
 imprimatur upon the history of evolution as 
 a history of remorseless competition and 
 chartered dominion by the " select," these 
 
72 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 have done, and will contine to do, their fatal 
 work. But this is not the true philosophy 
 of evolution. That philosophy compre 
 hends altruism also, and gives its scientific 
 exhibition the larger place, even as it holds 
 the larger and ever-increasing place in life. 
 Severe, indeed, has the long conflict been, 
 if ever less savage ; and the trail of blood is 
 over the forest and over the nations. Who 
 has phrased this side of it more strongly 
 than Emerson in his lines in " The World- 
 Soul " ? But through all creation and from 
 remotest beginnings, the sacrifice of strong 
 to weak, the mother s love, the mutual aid, 
 the social impulse have been along with the 
 struggle and the selfishness, have ever kept 
 the superior influence, thus alone making 
 life and evolution possible, and containing 
 the sure potency and promise of fruition in 
 the State whose ethics shall be those of 
 hearth and home, and in the family of 
 nations, the federation of the world. 
 
 It is the idealists, and they alone, who 
 have been able so to interpret evolution in 
 its bearings upon politics and human history. 
 A hundred years before John Fiske, at the 
 
The Philosophy of Emerson 73 
 
 Concord School of Philosophy, gave to the 
 doctrine of evolution a statement satisfying 
 to religion, Immanuel Kant, in his great 
 essay on " The Natural Principle of Political 
 Order," surveyed the movement of nature 
 and of human history, seeing the whole as 
 a ceaseless process of beneficent evolution, 
 and seeking to determine its final end. Said 
 Kant: "All the capacities implanted in a 
 creature by nature are destined to unfold 
 themselves, completely and conformably to 
 their end, in the course of time. ... In man, 
 as the only rational creature on earth, those 
 natural capacities which are directed toward 
 the use of his reason could be completely 
 developed only in the species, and not in the 
 individual. . . . The means which nature 
 employs to bring about the development of 
 all the capacities implanted in men is their 
 mutual antagonism in society ; but only so 
 far as this antagonism becomes at length the 
 cause of an order among them that is regu 
 lated by law. . . . The history of the human 
 race, viewed as a whole, may be regarded as 
 the realization of a hidden plan of nature to 
 bring about a perfect political constitution, 
 
74 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 as the only state in which all the capacities 
 implanted by her in mankind can be fully 
 developed." " The idea of human history," 
 he adds, " viewed as founded upon the as 
 sumption of a universal plan in nature, gives 
 us a new ground of hope, opening up to us 
 a consoling view of the future, in which the 
 human race appears in the far distance as 
 having worked itself up to a condition in 
 which all the germs implanted in it by nature 
 will be fully developed and its destiny here 
 on earth fulfilled. Such a justification of 
 nature or rather, let us say, of Providence 
 is no insignificant motive for choosing a 
 particular point of view in contemplating the 
 course of the world. For what avails it to 
 magnify the glory and wisdom of the crea 
 tion in the irrational domain of nature, and 
 to recommend it to devout contemplation, if 
 that part of the great display of the supreme 
 wisdom which presents the end of it all in 
 the history of the human race is to be viewed 
 as only furnishing perpetual objections to 
 that glory and wisdom ? " 
 
 Our New World Transcendentalist would 
 put the same question ; as he, too, saw and 
 
The Philosophy of Emerson 75 
 
 said that the fact that a theory meets the 
 mind s high demands, serves the positive 
 ends, and makes things fall into order in 
 stead of into discord is a persuasive attesta 
 tion of its virtue and its truth. He de 
 scribed in a moment and at the beginning the 
 whole course from " The Origin of Species " 
 to " The Destiny of Man " and beyond. 
 A dozen years after Darwin startled the 
 theologians he would have used the same 
 serene words which he used a dozen years 
 before it or would have used a dozen years 
 before that : " We have a better opinion of 
 the economy of nature than to fear that 
 those varying phases which humanity pre 
 sents ever leave out any of the grand springs 
 of human action. Mankind for the moment 
 seem to be in search of a religion. The 
 Jewish cultus is declining : the Divine or, as 
 some will say, the truly Human hovers, 
 now seen, now unseen, before us." The 
 period was cc propitious to those who believe 
 that man need not fear the want of re 
 ligion, because they know his religious con 
 stitution, that he must rest on the moral 
 and ^ligious sentiments, as the motion of 
 
76 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 bodies rests on geometry. In the rapid de 
 cay of what was called religion, timid and 
 unthinking people fancy a decay of the hope 
 of man. But the moral and religious senti 
 ments meet us everywhere, alike in markets 
 as in churches. . . . The conscience of man 
 is regenerated as is the atmosphere, so that 
 society cannot be debauched. The health 
 which we call Virtue is an equipoise which 
 easily redresses itself, and resembles those 
 rocking-stones which a child s finger can 
 move, and a weight of many hundred tons 
 cannot overthrow." It is to religion pecu 
 liarly that he applies the law of evolution, 
 and with results which do not bring dismay, 
 but joy and re-enforcement. c The Author 
 of Nature has not left himself without a 
 witness in any sane mind/ was the first 
 article of that great creed which he recited 
 from the platform of the Free Religious As 
 sociation in 1869 ; and two years before that, 
 he said in the same place, contrasting that 
 strong consciousness with the "mortifying 
 puerilities " which abound in religious his 
 tory and with which men have propped 
 their feeble faith, "As soon as every man 
 
The Philosophy of Emerson 77 
 
 is apprised of the Divine presence within his 
 own mind, is apprised that the perfect law 
 of duty corresponds with the laws of chemis 
 try, of vegetation, of astronomy, as face to 
 face in a glass ; that the basis of duty, the 
 order of society, the power of character, the 
 wealth of culture, the perfection of taste, all 
 draw their essence from this moral senti 
 ment, then we have a religion that exalts, 
 that commands all the social and all the pri 
 vate action." " There is a fear," he said else 
 where, " that pure truth, pure morals, will 
 not make a religion for the affections." This 
 fear was foolish, because, as he saw well, 
 biography and history and poetry ever wait 
 on inspiration and in good time bring the 
 ivy. " Whenever the sublimities of char 
 acter shall be incarnated in a man, we may 
 rely that law and love and insatiable curios 
 ity will follow his steps." . The history of all 
 in the past which makes just appeal to rev 
 erence and devotion is secure, a permanent 
 possession ; and new canonizations can only 
 make us richer, and not poorer. No true 
 divinity or saint can ever become less ; but 
 no universal truth of God can ever be long 
 
7 8 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 dependent, and it can never be contingent, 
 upon any individual bearer or embodiment 
 of it. " There was a time when Christianity 
 existed in one child ; but, if the child had 
 been killed by Herod, would the element 
 have been lost? God sends his message, if 
 not by one, then quite as well by another. 
 When the Master of the Universe has ends 
 to fulfil, he impresses his will on the struct 
 ure of minds." There are those who think 
 that but for Jesus the cardinal truths and 
 influences of what we call, and properly call, 
 Christianity would not be present among 
 men. The rejection of this view, as con 
 cerns not only Christianity, but every great 
 movement in history, in no way derogates 
 from the praise or merit of the thinker or 
 the doer who stands at the forefront of the 
 movement, or from the charm and inspira 
 tion of the heroic and prophetic life. It 
 simply affirms that universal truths of God 
 and the supply of humanity s cardinal de 
 mands are superior to contingency. We 
 find that the development of monotheism 
 among the Greeks follows much the same 
 course as its development among the He- 
 
The Philosophy of Emerson 79 
 
 brews, the independent parallel lines having 
 their origin and impulse in the common 
 mind of man. We may not believe that, 
 had there been no first Columbus, there 
 would have been no second ; that, had there 
 been no Kant, Fichte and Hegel would not 
 somehow have spoken ; without Adams and 
 Jefferson, no articulation of the demand for 
 independence ; without Garrison and Lin 
 coln, no emancipation. None the less do 
 we keep the saints days, and celebrate the 
 actual pioneers and heroes. Many currents 
 converge in the great man and movement, 
 and diverge from them. The currents are 
 numerous and calculable almost in ratio of 
 the greatness ; and the great soul most rev 
 erently recognizes its mediatorship and in 
 spiration, its obligations to the past and 
 their commandment for fulfilment. Emer 
 son himself speaks of the seven or eight 
 ancestors rolled up in each other s skin, 
 whom a man feels and represents, and who 
 contribute their variety of notes to that new 
 piece of music which his life is ; and as of 
 his personal inheritance, so he would have 
 spoken of the intellectual and spiritual, 
 
8o The Influence of Emerson 
 
 while recognizing in wonder and awe that 
 original and extra element, in no way to be 
 accounted for but by " the royal reason. 
 Marcus Aurelius, the Roman Emerson, 
 with all reverence for the direct inspiration 
 of the gods, knows well and piously wit 
 nesses how much in him is his grandfather 
 and his father, and how the compounding 
 with his own nature of the influence of 
 Apollonius and Rusticus and Maximus was 
 what had given him moral dignity, freedom 
 from superstition, love of philosophy, and 
 steadiness of purpose. And so Jesus, most 
 synthetic, inspiring and divine among the 
 sons of men, would warn us, when intellect 
 ual praise is intemperate and distorted, to 
 bethink us of Hosea and Isaiah, of Plato 
 and Zeno and Philo, to remember that the 
 mind of his time was surcharged with the 
 elements precipitated in him with such revo 
 lutionary power and charm, and not to doubt 
 that even without him God would somehow 
 have found his Pauls and Johns, his Augus- 
 tines and Bernards, his Calvins and Chan- 
 nings, to bear the message of divine love 
 and incarnation to the human race 
 
The Philosophy of Emerson 81 
 
 With the churches of his time, Emerson 
 came into opposition ; but the ground of 
 his opposition concerned what was accidental 
 and extrinsic. " I object to the claim of 
 miraculous dispensation, certainly not to 
 the doctrine of Christianity." The miracu 
 lous claim, to his mind, " impaired the sound 
 ness of him who makes it ; ... it is contrary 
 to that law of nature which all wise men 
 recognize, never to require a larger cause 
 than is necessary to the effect." It con 
 founded Christianity with " the fables of 
 every popular religion." We know divine 
 things only by the like spirit in ourselves, 
 and are repelled by any effort to enforce 
 acceptance of them by wonders or anything 
 extraneous or official instead of by pure 
 sympathy. The attempt to elevate Christ 
 out of humanity " takes his teachings out 
 of logic and out of nature," and distrust of 
 the story prompts distrust of the doctrine. 
 
 Emerson s opposition to the miraculous 
 theory was precisely that of Kant, who in 
 his " Religion of Reason " exhibited so con 
 vincingly that it is favorable neither to ethics 
 nor to faith. Churches have based belief in 
 
82 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 the immortality of the soul upon Christ s 
 resurrection, pronouncing the faith vain 
 without this. But the physical resurrection 
 of a supernatural Christ no more gives as 
 surance of the resurrection of the common 
 man than the fact that Christ raises Lazarus 
 from the dead proves that Matthew and 
 Mark could do it, or you and I. So the 
 perfect life of a being whose nature tran 
 scends ours has not the incitement nor im 
 perative for us of the less perfect life of one 
 who, howsoever transcending us in spiritual 
 insight and moral worth, is still of the same 
 nature, having the same essential roots in 
 the Divine. The historical justification of 
 the miraculous theory is indeed evident and 
 strong. By such particularization the gen 
 eral mind is leavened and lifted to the per 
 ception of the wonder of the world and the 
 spirituality of man. Until this perception 
 becomes reliable and influential in its uni 
 versal application, the particular object-les 
 son will continue to be distorted. The over 
 emphasis is nature s way out of no em 
 phasis. It is easy to say that men should 
 cease speaking of sacred and profane his- 
 
The Philosophy of Emerson 83 
 
 tory ; but it is also easy and common for 
 men to cease the distinction by making all 
 history profane. Until we learn to see that 
 all is sacred, that the sacred is perennial, and 
 that John Calvin and John Milton and the 
 " Mayflower" men are also Bible men, so long 
 the " Jewish cultus " or another must go on, 
 and Josias, Obadias, and the siege of Ai 
 weary the educated man by their exaggerated 
 prominence. The miracle will not " fade 
 out of history " till "faith and wonder and 
 the primal earth " are not alone " born into 
 the world with every child," but are of all men 
 known to be. The slow ages, keeping their 
 many steeds abreast, attend efficiently to the 
 conservations. We do not need, any of us, 
 to connive at the illusions and delays, al 
 though some of the anxious faithless seem to 
 think it. If the Daughters of Time can be at 
 once " hypocritic " and innocent, none of us 
 can be : we cannot be naive by calculation. 
 The highest skill for each of us is simple 
 truth, and we may safely leave it to the 
 divinities to weave our thread rightly into 
 the great pattern. This was the confidence 
 of Emerson. The highest churchman and 
 
84 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 the stoutest champion of infallibility are not 
 equally serene, equally neighborly with the 
 past and its oracles, or equally reposeful in 
 the future. Nowhere are the religious post 
 ulates so firm, yet nowhere is such concord 
 with the scientific process. He has no need 
 to interpose checks or diversions. New 
 Orthodoxies rise with their " Christo-cen- 
 tric " theories, thinking to eat their cake and 
 keep it too, putting slights on miracle at 
 the same time that they put it to use. 
 They have never learned to define Man, nor 
 seen what the definition involves. They 
 think of men ; and, even as concerns sin it 
 self, they have not taken in the full phi 
 losophy of the parable of the prodigal son. 
 Emerson sees clearly the fatuity of all this 
 thinking. It will go on until men know 
 their real nature as it is, and as Christ knew 
 it ; so long especially as the apprehension 
 and virtue of the soul s divinity are menaced 
 and shadowed by "the puppyism " it was 
 the most scornful word to which Emerson 
 was ever moved " of a pretension of look 
 ing down on the head of all human culture, 
 setting up against Jesus Christ every little 
 
The Philosophy of Emerson 85 
 
 self magnified." " It behooves the lover 
 of God to love that lover of God/ he 
 said with his great emphasis when he sus 
 pected popular reaction from exaggeration 
 to profaneness ; and as against any vulgar 
 definitions he would have been patient with 
 the age of superstition till the age of ra 
 tional reverence came. The religious mind 
 demands the objective ; and mankind does 
 well to glorify attainment while on its way 
 to the sanctity of a true understanding of 
 its own essence and potentiality. But Em 
 erson well knew that the emphatic and 
 peculiar features of the Church s ancient 
 system, its bibliology, cosmology, penol 
 ogy, eschatology and fellow ologies, its 
 Christology with the rest, were doomed, 
 the moment it was seen that Eden, in the 
 words of his disciple in her beautiful hymn, 
 
 " Is not ancient story told, 
 But a glowing prophecy." 
 
 Primeval history is the record of the rise of 
 man, not of his fall. The chasm of which 
 humanity has been so painfully sensible 
 and sought so strenuously to give account 
 
86 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 is between the creative archetypal Idea and 
 the first step of the evolutionary process 
 whose last step shall be the actualization 
 of the Idea in the Divine Commonwealth. 
 The first Eden is of heaven, heavenly, the 
 harrying divine thought implanted in the 
 mind of man at the beginning, the haunting 
 hint of his own definition ; the last Eden is 
 the Republic of God. Emerson saw the 
 path, the motive, the original and end ; and 
 he saw them in a way which made his 
 philosophy of religion harmonious with the 
 science of his time, and made him the true 
 friend and aider of all critical men who, in 
 a critical age, would live in the spirit. 
 
 All evolution was subsumed by him under 
 an adequate philosophy. Behind and through 
 the process he saw the Idea, which so 
 many men of science in this time have not 
 seen, and, not seeing, have wrought their 
 mischief. Already as a boy, in one of his 
 college essays,* he wrote what might well 
 
 * His Bowdoin essay on " The Present State of Ethical Philoso 
 phy," in i8ai, for which he received a second prize. He received 
 the first Bowdoin prize the previous year for an essay on "The Char- 
 aracter of Socrates " ; but this essay is inferior to the other. The two 
 have been published together with an introduction by Rev. Edward 
 Everett Hale. 
 
The Philosophy of Emerson 87 
 
 have served Kropotkin as a motto for the 
 title-page of his " Mutual Aid as a Factor in 
 Evolution " : " The opinion that nature tends 
 to savageness is not true." The impulses to 
 social intercourse he saw were aboriginal ; 
 and more selective and determining than 
 fierceness was parental affection, dictating ac 
 tions of "wise and profound calculation." 
 The word of his youth was the word of his 
 age. The law after which the Universe was 
 made he pronounced to be that which the 
 moral sentiment speaks to every man ; and 
 it was with the assertion of " parity, identity 
 of design, through Nature," that he declared 
 that we find " benefit to be the uniform aim : 
 that there is a force always at work to make 
 the best better and the worst good." This 
 is Emerson s rationale of the dynamics and 
 the teleology of evolution ; and there is no 
 other satisfying or sane philosophy. 
 
 Amidst many rash and mischievous " phi 
 losophies of evolution," it is wholesome to 
 recur to these first principles, profitable 
 and very necessary to consider seriously what 
 is first and what circumferential second. No 
 man in this time has approached the prob- 
 
88 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 lem of the world and the soul with mind so 
 capacious and so veracious as our own great 
 thinker; none has spoken a word so pro 
 portionate, so rational, and so commanding. 
 The American, at least, has not excuse who, 
 possessed of Emerson s inspired and sacred 
 page, permits his insight to truckle to tra 
 dition, hangs up his logic on psychology, 
 and chokes intellect and freedom in mechan 
 ism, lawlessness, and fate. 
 
II 
 
 Emerson and Theodore Parker 
 
EMERSON AND THEODORE 
 PARKER 
 
 IN 1838 the daguerreotype was invented. 
 I wish that the first sensitive plate, perfected 
 and tenacious, could have been uncovered, 
 not in Westminster Abbey, where on a 
 midsummer day in that year 1838 Victoria 
 was crowned queen, the gewgaws conse 
 crated by traditions of the Conqueror and 
 Richard Lionheart and Harry Tudor and 
 the real kings brushed up once more by the 
 rather ghostly bishops who wore the robes 
 of Stephen Langton and Joseph Butler, and 
 a galvanized crown blessed once more by a 
 galvanized Church, not there, but in the 
 little chapel of the Divinity School of Har 
 vard University, where on another mid 
 summer day of that same year a little crowd 
 of men and women was gathered, and an 
 earnest man was speaking simply some 
 simple, earnest words. We should all like 
 a picture of that scene, I think; for this man 
 
92 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 was the real king, and this scene was more 
 impressive than the other to him who sees 
 f deep. Ideas alone have royalty and divine 
 right in this noon-time of the world ; and 
 so we count this little gathering at Harvard 
 the most important thing of that year 1838. 
 
 The speaker was Ralph Waldo Emerson. 
 The name did not mean much on the morn 
 ing of that day. The small world to which 
 it was known at all knew it as the name of 
 a young man who had left the pulpit of the 
 Unitarian Church half a dozen years before, 
 because he could not conscientiously join in 
 the sacrament of the Lord s Supper; who 
 had been to Europe since and hunted up 
 Thomas Carlyle in the solitude of Craigen- 
 puttock, and had just now published in 
 Boston Carlyle s "Sartor Resartus." He 
 had written a little book of his own, too, 
 " Nature," and had given lectures in Boston 
 and the towns about, which had drawn to 
 him the attention of the thoughtful people. 
 He had given an oration at Harvard the 
 year before the Divinity School Address, on 
 " The American Scholar," which had so 
 shocked the scholars who heard and read it 
 
Emerson and Theodore Parker 93 
 
 into reality and consciousness of their own 
 souls that Dr. Holmes pronounced it " our 
 intellectual Declaration of Independence." 
 He had retired now from the rush and roar 
 of Boston to the quiet of a Concord farm 
 house to spend his life. 
 
 " Good-bye, proud world ! I m going home," 
 
 he had said again to the fawning flattery and 
 upstart wealth of the town and the insinceri 
 ties and old clothes of the Church. 
 
 " When I am stretched beneath the pines, 
 Where the evening star so holy shines, 
 I laugh at the lore and the pride of man, 
 At the sophist schools and the learned clan ; 
 For what are they all, in their high conceit, 
 When man in the bush with God may meet ? " 
 
 He had been meeting with God in the 
 bush, standing on the holy ground with the 
 shoes off his feet; and he was come now 
 to tell the college and the Church what the 
 voice had said. 
 
 He spoke of the beauty of nature. He 
 spoke of spiritual laws, of which all nature 
 that we see is but the clothing and the 
 
94 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 symbol. He spoke of the more overpower 
 ing beauty of the sentiment of virtue, which 
 teaches us that we are "born to the per 
 fect." " The laws of the soul execute them 
 selves," he said. " He who does a good 
 deed is instantly ennobled ; he who does a 
 mean deed is by the action itself contracted. 
 If a man is at heart just, then in so far 
 is he God. If a man deceive, he deceives 
 himself. Thus is man made the Provi 
 dence to himself, dispensing good to his 
 goodness and evil to his sin." This senti 
 ment, he said, lies at the foundation of 
 society. Its absence is the presence of 
 degradation. Let this primary faith depart, 
 and the very words it spake become false 
 and hurtful. The doctrine of inspiration 
 lost or the oracle made second-hand, and 
 the church falls, and the state, art, letters, 
 and life. 
 
 Such a time, said this new prophet, had 
 come in the history of the American 
 Church. Its prayers and dogmas were 
 grown as fabulous as Dante s Inferno, 
 wholly insulated from anything in the life 
 and business of the people. Tradition, said 
 
Emerson and Theodore Parker 95 
 
 he, characterizes the preaching of this 
 country : it comes out of the memory, and 
 not out of the soul. It is assumed that the 
 age of inspiration is past, and that the Bible 
 is closed. But it is the office of a true 
 teacher to show us that God is, not was ; 
 that he speaketh, not spake. The true 
 Christianity, a faith like Christ s in the infini 
 tude of man, was lost. Jesus Christ, said 
 Emerson, was true to what is in you and 
 me. He saw that God incarnates himself 
 in man, and evermore goes forth anew to 
 take possession of his world. He said : 
 " I am divine. Through me, God acts ; 
 through me, speaks. Would you see God, 
 see me ; or, see thee, when thou also thinkest 
 as I now think." But the understanding 
 caught this high chant from the poet s lips, 
 and said in the next age, " This was 
 Jehovah come down out of heaven." The 
 idioms of his language usurped the place 
 of his truth ; and churches are built, not 
 on his principles, but on his tropes. The 
 preachers do not see that they make 
 Christ s gospel not glad, and degrade his 
 life and dialogues by insulation and pecu- 
 
96 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 liarity. Let them lie, as they befell, alive 
 and warm and part of human life. To aim 
 to convert a man by miracles is a profa 
 nation of the soul. That which shows God 
 in me is what fortifies me. Dare to go 
 alone. Dare to love God without mediator 
 or veil. Thank God for all good men, 
 but say, " I also am a man." Yourself a 
 new-born bard of the Holy Ghost, cast 
 conformity behind you, and acquaint men 
 at first hand with God. 
 
 This Harvard address of Emerson s 
 marked an epoch. It was the first clear, 
 complete, and uncompromising utterance of 
 rational religion in America. It showed all 
 men at once what the new faith was, and 
 what it meant to do. It fell into the camp 
 of the stiff and proper Unitarianism of Bos 
 ton and Cambridge like a thunderbolt. It 
 was a touchstone. It compelled every man 
 to define himself and speak out somehow or 
 other ; and it divided the Church. " There 
 are now two parties among the Unitarians," 
 wrote Parker. " One is for progress ; the 
 other says, c Our strength is to stand still/ 
 Dr. Channing is the real head of the first 
 
Emerson and Theodore Parker 97 
 
 party ; the other has no head." Charming, 
 who was less than almost anything else in 
 the world a cc Channing Unitarian," stood 
 by Emerson, said, indeed, that he could 
 discover no essential difference between 
 Emerson s address and the sermon he him 
 self had preached at the dedication of the 
 school. He found that he himself " could 
 not draw a long breath in Boston." Soon 
 after, indeed, he died. Had he lived ten 
 years longer, with his great prestige and 
 power and his ever steady movement for 
 ward, he would have saved the Unitarian 
 Church in America half a century. 
 
 But in the general Unitarian camp, " one 
 shouted," said Parker, " The Philistines be 
 upon us ! another, f We are all dead men ! 
 while the majority called out, < Atheism ! " 
 The dean of the Divinity School said, 
 "That part of it which was not folly was 
 downright atheism." Mr. Norton, the 
 high priest of the Church in those days, 
 opened his mouth and preached upon " The 
 Latest Form of Infidelity." No miracles, 
 he said, no religion : the miracles of Jesus 
 are the only evidence of the truth of Chris- 
 
98 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 tianity. Henry Ware told the young men 
 that, if there appeared to them any contra 
 diction between the reason of man and the 
 letter of the Bible, they "must follow the 
 written word." " Reason," said another, 
 "must be put down, or she will soon ask 
 terrible questions." Harvard College, in 
 the person of one who taught a " sound " 
 philosophy there, had already pronounced 
 Emerson s thoughts " fantastic and unreal " ; 
 and Professor Felton soon found that they 
 were " full of extravagance and overween 
 ing self-confidence, ancient errors disguised 
 in misty rhetoric, and theories which would 
 overturn society and resolve the world into 
 chaos." Such being the voice of Harvard 
 College and of the Unitarian Church, we 
 can picture for ourselves the reception ac 
 corded the new prophet in other religious 
 circles and by the world at large. 
 
 But amid all this uproar there was one 
 young man, not thirty years old yet, who 
 had sat quietly through the address in the 
 Harvard Chapel and, going home, had 
 written : " It was the most inspiring strain 
 I ever listened to, so beautiful, so just, 
 
Emerson and Theodore Parker 99 
 
 so true, and terribly sublime ! My soul is 
 roused, and this week I shall write the long- 
 meditated sermons on the state of the 
 Church and the duties of these times/ 
 This young man had graduated at the 
 Divinity School two years before, studying 
 under Ware and Norton there, and was now 
 settled over a little parish in West Roxbury. 
 He was born in Lexington. His grand 
 father was the captain of the minute-men 
 who gathered on Lexington Green on that 
 morning of the iQth of April, 1775, an< ^ l d 
 in the first battle with British tyranny in 
 the Revolution. The young man s name 
 was Theodore Parker. 
 
 Theodore Parker was already a suspected 
 man, known among his fellows as a man of 
 ideas ; and during the next three years he 
 did much thinking. In May, 1841, at an 
 ordination in South Boston, he sounded his 
 full keynote, in a sermon on "The Tran 
 sient and Permanent in Christianity." He 
 showed the evils of an appeal to any ex 
 ternal, prescriptive authority in matters of 
 religion. He showed that there is no reason 
 why moral and religious truths should rest 
 
ioo The Influence of Emerson 
 
 for their support on the personal authority 
 of their revealer any more than the truths 
 of science on the authority of him who 
 makes them known first or most clearly. 
 " If it could be proved," he said, "that the 
 Gospels were a fabrication and that Jesus of 
 Nazareth never lived, Christianity would 
 still stand firm and fear no evil. In an age 
 of corruption, Jesus stood and looked up to 
 God. There was nothing between him and 
 the Father of all. And we never are Chris 
 tians as he was the Christ until we worship 
 as Jesus did, with no mediator, with nothing 
 between us and the Father of all." 
 
 You remember the result of this. It 
 seems almost incredible to-day, when Chan- 
 ning s Baltimore sermon of 1819, Emerson s 
 Harvard address of 1838, and this very 
 sermon of Parker s in 1841 are the three 
 utterances popularly classed in the Unita 
 rian circle as the conspicuous landmarks 
 of Unitarian thought and progress. The 
 Church dropped him. " So far as the min 
 isters are concerned," he was compelled to 
 say, " I am alone." But the blood of his 
 Lexington grandfather was in him, and he 
 
Emerson and Theodore Parker 
 
 said : " I will go about and preach and lecture 
 in the city and glen, by the roadside and 
 fieldside, and wherever men and women 
 may be found. I will go eastward and west 
 ward and northward and southward, and 
 make the land ring ; and if this New 
 England theology, that cramps the intellect 
 and palsies the soul of us, does not come to 
 the ground, then it shall be because it has 
 more truth in it than I have ever found. 
 What I have seen to be false I will proclaim 
 a lie on the house-top ; and, fast as God re 
 veals truth, I will declare his word." And 
 then, while almost every pulpit and every 
 newspaper in Boston was vilifying him, 
 while some of his clerical friends would not 
 speak to him in the street and refused to 
 take him by the hand, let us never forget 
 the noble exceptions, let us remember Free 
 man Clarke and Bartol and Robbins and the 
 rest, in their public meetings left the sofas 
 or benches where he sat down, and withdrew 
 from him, we read, as Jews from contact 
 with a leper, then a little company of gen 
 tlemen met together, passed one resolution, 
 and went home. " Resolved, That Theodore 
 
102 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 Parker shall have a hearing in Boston." To 
 my mind, that was one of the most remark 
 able church councils ever held. The Coun 
 cil of Trent did not accomplish so much as 
 that in its whole six years. 
 
 I speak to you of Emerson and Parker 
 to-day, while the flowers laid on the grave 
 of Emerson are still fragrant, because I 
 would invoke the influence of this eloquent 
 and solemn hour to impress more deeply 
 upon every soul of us the duties of openness 
 to new ideas, of scorn of compromise, and 
 of self-reliance.* I wish that in this hour 
 we may bethink ourselves more gratefully 
 what the darkness was into which these great 
 souls let in the light by which we walk ; and 
 I wish that, turning from our secularities 
 and societies and strifes, we may, amid these 
 sacramental memories, more seriously fix our 
 minds upon the infinite God, the immortal 
 life, and the eternal right, in the conscious 
 ness of which they reposed and made true 
 religion to consist, and to consist alone. 
 
 * This address was first given soon after the death of Emerson, 
 and this original occasional character, manifest in much of it, I have 
 not sought to change, although certain references in the paper as now 
 printed are of later date. 
 
Emerson and Theodore Parker 103 
 
 Were this a biographical study, much 
 should be said of the personal and literary 
 relations of the two great thinkers ; but at 
 these we may here give but the merest glance. 
 Parker had met Emerson almost two years 
 before the Harvard address, perhaps even 
 before that. While yet hardly out of the 
 Divinity School, he had lectured in Concord, 
 and had passed part of the evening with 
 Emerson, going home to record his admira 
 tion in his journal. In the autumn of 1837 
 he is in the Connecticut Valley, delighting 
 in " Nature," which had appeared only the 
 year before, and resenting Professor Bowen s 
 attack upon it. Taking the little West Rox- 
 bury parish, we find him quoting Emerson 
 in his pulpit. As we find " Darwinism " in 
 Emerson before Darwin, so we find it in 
 Parker. Sixteen years before " The Origin 
 of Species " we find him saying in a sermon : 
 " In the visible world there is a law of con 
 tinuity. All is done gradually, nothing by 
 leaps. Invisibly the vegetable and animal 
 world approach and intermingle. In animals 
 lower down you see hints that a man is yet 
 to be." He contributed articles to the Dial, 
 
104 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 which Emerson and Margaret Fuller edited. 
 Writing of the Dial long afterwards, Emer 
 son said, " It had some numbers highly 
 important, because they contained papers by 
 Theodore Parker, which," he adds in 
 tribute to Parker s popular qualities, a sold 
 the numbers." The Dial lived four years, 
 dying in 1844. Three years later Parker 
 joined himself with Emerson and J. Eliot 
 Cabot to edit the Massachusetts Quarterly 
 Review, which was also loved by the gods and 
 died young, younger even than the Dial; 
 but it was made memorable by the Editor s 
 Address, written by Emerson, and by Parker s 
 papers upon Channing and upon Emerson 
 himself. No so important general review 
 of Emerson s writings had before appeared. 
 It may fitly be compared in its office with 
 Sterling s early review of Carlyle. Its ap 
 preciation of Emerson s intimacy with nature, 
 and his strong use of the common things of 
 our plain New England life, is clear and 
 beautiful, and not less striking its recogni 
 tion of the catholicity, sanity, and humor 
 with which Emerson makes philosophy and 
 poetry out of struggling thinkers of every 
 
Emerson and Theodore Parker 105 
 
 stripe, " the conservative who thinks the 
 nation is lost if his ticket chance to miscarry, 
 the bigot worshipping the knot-hole through 
 which a dusty beam of light has looked in 
 upon his darkness, the radical who declares 
 that nothing is good if established, and the 
 patent reformer who screams in your ears 
 that he can finish the world with a single 
 touch." Comparing Emerson with our 
 other American writers, Parker declared that 
 his fame and influence would outlast them 
 all. Emerson s editorial address had been 
 full of the spirit which he himself so justly 
 ascribes to Parker. There is the Parker 
 spirit in his word upon the religious problem 
 and condition of the time ; the spirit in his 
 word upon the political character of the time 
 which later inspired alike Parker s words and 
 his own upon both Daniel Webster and John 
 Brown ; the Parker discontent with mere 
 bigness in America unmatched by moral 
 greatness. Only our geography and material 
 activities were colossal : no commensurate 
 genius was yet reported, " no speech heard 
 but that of the auctioneers, newsboys, and the 
 caucus." " Where/ he exclaimed, " is the 
 
io6 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 great breath of the New World, the voice of 
 aboriginal nations opening new eras with 
 hymns of lofty cheer?" That breath was 
 already finding utterance in his question and 
 demand, in the words which he was speak 
 ing month by month to young men in college 
 halls and to the American people from plat 
 forms east and west, in country and in 
 town ; it was finding utterance in the sermons 
 and lectures of Parker ; it had found utter 
 ance in the things of religion, for a genera 
 tion, in the words and life of Channing, who 
 had died five years before, and who was in so 
 true and large a sense the spiritual father of 
 both Emerson and Parker. 
 
 This peculiar obligation to Channing of 
 both Emerson and Parker must not be 
 passed unrecognized, even in the briefest 
 survey of their religious work and influence. 
 The three names must be grouped together. 
 They make our great triumvirate in the 
 realm of religious progress and reform. 
 They had the same high idealistic philoso 
 phy ; they stood for the same rational 
 method ; and they had alike that reverence 
 for the soul and that lofty social ideal which 
 
Emerson and Theodore Parker 107 
 
 made them as earnest and constant workers 
 in the field of politics and whatever con 
 cerned man s freedom and growth as in the 
 field of religion. Emerson was born in the 
 very year, 1803, that Channing was ordained 
 and installed as minister of the Federal 
 Street Church ; and he grew up in a commu 
 nity, and especially in a family circle, per 
 vaded by Channing s influence. In 1821, 
 while he was a student at Harvard College, 
 he heard Channing deliver the Dudleian 
 Lecture there, and expressed his admiration 
 of it as the fruit of cc moral imagination " and 
 " the highest species of reasoning upon di 
 vine subjects." He began his studies for 
 the ministry under Channing s direction ; 
 and soon after the completion of his studies 
 we find him preaching in Channing s pulpit. 
 He pays tribute to Channing s genius and 
 influence as among the more immediate early 
 causes of the Transcendental movement. 
 The American Unitarian Association, of 
 which Channing was chosen president, was 
 formed, by auspicious coincidence, on Em 
 erson s birthday, May 25, 1825 ; and Emer 
 son was one of its first missionary preachers. 
 
io8 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 Of Channing s address on " Spiritual Free 
 dom," given soon after the formation of 
 the Association, Mr. Chadwick justly says, 
 " We do not wonder at Emerson s delight 
 in Channing when we read this superb an 
 ticipation of his own c Self-reliance. Mr. 
 Chadwick marshals various passages of the 
 kind that "made Emerson bless Channing 
 as one of those who had said his good things 
 before him." Channing was almost as im 
 patient as Emerson himself with the growth 
 of what he called a " Unitarian orthodoxy." 
 His deafness kept him from Emerson s early 
 Boston lectures ; but his daughter heard 
 them with joy, and borrowed the manu 
 scripts to read to her father, in whom they 
 also found hearty response. When others 
 condemned Emerson for his Harvard ad 
 dress, Channing defended him ; and he grew 
 steadily younger, more hospitable, and more 
 prophetic, as he grew older. "In our wan 
 tonness," said Emerson, " we often flout 
 Dr. Channing, and say he is getting old. 
 But as soon as he is ill, we remember he is 
 our bishop, and that we have not done with 
 him yet " ; and on the centennial of Chan- 
 
Emerson and Theodore Parker 109 
 
 ning s birth, April 7, 1880, two years before 
 his own death, he went from Concord to 
 Newport, to be present at the laying of the 
 corner-stone of the new Channing Memorial 
 Church. 
 
 Parker was no sooner settled in his West 
 Roxbury parish than we find him going to 
 Channing often for help in solving his press 
 ing religious problems. He borrows books 
 of him, and discusses with him Strauss s 
 Life of Jesus. Channing was now some 
 times preaching sermons which Dr. Gannett 
 thought " suited to do more harm than 
 good " ; and Parker writes, " If Dr. Chan 
 ning were a young man of five-and-twenty, 
 all unknown to fame, holding the same re 
 ligious, philosophical, political, and social 
 opinions as now, and preaching on them as 
 he does, he could not find a place for the 
 sole of his foot in Boston, though half a 
 dozen pulpits were vacant." Years before 
 the controversy over Emerson s Harvard 
 address and Parker s sermon, Channing said : 
 " The truth is, and it ought not to be dis 
 guised, that our ultimate reliance is and must 
 be upon reason. If a professed revelation 
 
no The Influence of Emerson 
 
 seems to us plainly to disagree with itself or 
 clash with great principles which we cannot 
 question, we ought not to hesitate in with 
 holding from it our belief. I am surer that 
 my rational nature is from God than that any 
 book is the expression of his will." Parker 
 went often to a little club to which Channing 
 went, at the home of his friend and parish 
 ioner, Jonathan Phillips ; and writing of 
 one of these " Socratic meetings/ where 
 Channing was the Socrates, and the theme 
 was Progress, Parker says, " Had the con 
 versation been written out by Plato, it would 
 equal any of his beautiful Dialogues." A 
 week later the subject for the club s discus 
 sion was a recent lecture of Emerson s. 
 Channing was no more troubled by Parker s 
 South Boston sermon than by Emerson s 
 Harvard address ; and when, the next year, 
 Channing died, Parker wrote to a friend : 
 " No man in America has done so much to 
 promote truth, virtue, and religion as he. I 
 feel that I have lost one of the most valu 
 able friends I ever had. His mind was wide, 
 and his heart was wider yet." In his jour 
 nal he wrote, " No man since Washington 
 
Emerson and Theodore Parker in 
 
 has done so much to elevate his country. " 
 Parker s memorial sermon at the time, and 
 his more exhaustive paper in the Massachu 
 setts Review a few years later, are among 
 the noblest tributes ever paid to Channing s 
 character and work. 
 
 I link the names of Emerson and Parker 
 here, because in the things of religion they 
 cannot be separated.* They stand for the 
 same thing. Emerson was Parker writing 
 books. Parker was Emerson s truth in the 
 pulpit. " What Emerson uttered witho ut 
 plot or plan," William Gannett says well, 
 " Theodore Parker elaborated to a system. 
 Parker was the Paul of Transcendentalism." 
 When there was almost no warm hand for 
 
 * James Freeman Clarke, reviewing Parker s "Discourse of 
 Matters Pertaining to Religion," which he called " the new gospel of 
 shallow naturalism," spoke of Parker as ** the expounder of Negative 
 Transcendentalism, as Mr. R. W. Emerson is the expounder of Positive 
 Transcendentalism." Forty years later Mr. Clarke edited an edition 
 of Parker s sermons for the Unitarian Association. The Unitarians 
 were holding their annual festival on the evening of the day in May, 
 1 8 60, when the news of Parker s death reached Boston ; and then and 
 there, from the depths of his heart, Mr. Clarke, who twenty -two years 
 later was to conduct Emerson s funeral at Concord, paid a noble tribute 
 to his friend. In his tribute to Emerson prepared for the Massachu 
 setts Historical Society he drew a parallelism between Emerson and 
 Parker, which it is interesting to compare with his early word. 
 
ii2 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 Parker in Boston, it was his wont to visit 
 Emerson often at Concord ; and he always 
 returned to his work quickened and inspired. 
 At one of Emerson s lectures in Boston, 
 when the storm against Parker was fiercest, 
 a lecture at which a score of the religious 
 and literary leaders of the city were present, 
 Emerson, as he laid his manuscript upon the 
 desk and looked over the audience after his 
 wont, observed Parker ; and immediatly he 
 stepped from the platform to the seat near 
 the front where Parker sat, grasping his 
 hand and standing for a moment s conversa 
 tion with him. It was not ostentation, and 
 it was not patronage : it was admiring friend 
 ship, and that fortification and stimulus 
 Parker in those times never failed to feel. 
 It was Emerson who fed his lamp, he 
 said ; and Emerson said that, be the lamp fed 
 as it might, it was Parker whom the time 
 to come would have to thank for finding the 
 lamp burning. Their differences in temper 
 ament and method were obvious enough. 
 Parker wielded the mallet of Thor. Emer 
 son, as Dr. Holmes so finely said, was " an 
 iconoclast without a hammer, who took 
 
Emerson and Theodore Parker 113 
 
 down our idols from their pedestals so ten 
 derly that it seemed like an act of worship." 
 Father Taylor would not have been so 
 sure of Parker s easy pathway into heaven 
 as he was sure of Emerson s. But their 
 aim was the same. c< Parker," said Emer 
 son, "is the soldier whom God gave 
 strength and will to fight for him the 
 battle of the day." " Emerson," said Parker, 
 "has a more glorious history than any 
 American of this generation. He has touched 
 the deepest strings on the human harp, and, 
 ten centuries after he is immortal, will wake 
 music which he first waked." He dedicated 
 to Emerson his " Ten Sermons of Religion " ; 
 and when, at last, all broken in the fight, he 
 sailed away in search of the health which he 
 should never find, his greatest comfort was 
 in saying, as he sat on the deck on Sunday 
 morning, " Emerson is preaching at Music 
 Hall to-day." When he died there at 
 Florence, no churchman s voice was heard at 
 the funeral in Music Hall, but the words of 
 Emerson and Phillips. 
 
 " He has gone down in early glory to his 
 grave," said Emerson, " to be a living and 
 
ii4 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 enlarging power wherever learning, wit, 
 honest valor, and independence are hon 
 ored." " The vice charged against Amer 
 ica/ he continued, "is the want of sincerity 
 in leading men. It does not lie at Parker s 
 door. He never kept back the truth for 
 fear to make an enemy. It was his merit, 
 like Luther, Knox, Latimer, and John 
 Baptist, to speak tart truth when that was 
 peremptory and when there were few to say 
 it. As a reformer, he insisted beyond all 
 men in pulpits that the essence of Christian 
 ity is its practical morals : it is there for use, 
 or it is nothing ; and if you combine it with 
 sharp trading or private intemperance or 
 successful fraud or immoral politics or un 
 just wars or the cheating of Indians, it is an 
 hypocrisy and the truth is not in you, . . . 
 and no love of religious music or praise of 
 John Wesley or of Jeremy Taylor can save 
 you from the Satan which you are. Ah, 
 my brave brother ! " cried Emerson in clos 
 ing, " it seems as if, in a frivolous age, our 
 loss were immense, and your place cannot 
 be supplied. But you will already be con 
 soled in the transfer of your genius, know- 
 
Emerson and Theodore Parker 115 
 
 ing well that the nature of the world will 
 affirm to all men, in all times, that which for 
 twenty-five years you valiantly spoke ; that 
 the winds of Italy murmur the same truth 
 over your grave, the winds of America over 
 these bereaved streets ; that the sea which 
 bore your mourners home affirms it, the 
 stars in their courses, and the inspirations of 
 youth ; whilst the polished and pleasant 
 traitors to human rights, with perverted 
 learning and disgraced graces, rot and are 
 forgotten with their double tongue." 
 
 Years afterwards, as Emerson wrote his 
 historic notes of New England life and 
 thought in the time of the Transcendental 
 movement, published after his death, he 
 paid this further tribute, not a few phrases 
 of which almost parallel the lines in Lowell s 
 famous portrait : " Theodore Parker was 
 our Savonarola, an excellent scholar, in frank 
 and affectionate communication with the 
 best minds of his day, yet the tribune of the 
 people, and the stout Reformer to urge and 
 defend every cause of humanity with and for 
 the humblest of mankind. He was no 
 artist. Highly refined persons might easily 
 
n6 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 miss in him the element of beauty. What 
 he said was mere fact, almost offended you, 
 so bald and detached ; little cared he. He 
 stood altogether for practical truth ; and so 
 to the last. He used every day and hour 
 of his short life, and his character appeared 
 in the last moments with the same firm con 
 trol as in the mid-day of strength. I habit 
 ually apply to him the words of a French 
 philosopher who speaks of c the man of 
 Nature who abominates the steam-engine 
 and the factory. His vast lungs breathe 
 independence with the air of the mountains 
 and the woods/ 
 
 After Parker s death his society desired 
 Emerson, the next autumn, to give the 
 first sermon for them in Music Hall. The 
 treatment Parker had received had alienated 
 Emerson more than ever from the Unita 
 rians, and he had long before abandoned 
 all thought of ever preaching again. But 
 he said that he could stand where Parker 
 had stood ; and he not only preached on 
 that first Sunday, but spoke in Parker s pulpit 
 many times for several years. He was the 
 only man large enough for that place, the 
 
Emerson and Theodore Parker 117 
 
 one man who stood roundly for the truth 
 which Parker preached. These two Ameri 
 cans seem to me the two greatest religious 
 teachers and reformers of our century, in 
 comparably beyond Dollinger and Hyacinthe 
 and that class of reformers, whose work 
 was really all done three hundred years ago ; 
 wiser far than Beecher and Bushnell and 
 Maurice and Stanley and the sundry sorts 
 of Broad Churchmen, whose new wine al 
 ready spills from the old bottles which it 
 was foolish to use ; greater than Carlyle, by 
 so much as their faith in essential humanity 
 was greater than his. The test of leader 
 ship and influence is the degree to which 
 the thinker seizes and embodies that which 
 is to determine and abide. Here is our New 
 Puritanism. The Erasmusisms of our time, 
 amiable and emancipated, have not the Puri 
 tan credentials. Emerson and Parker, 
 these are they in whom John Calvin and 
 John Milton, George Fox and William 
 Penn would in the nineteenth century 
 have found true and real kinship. 
 
 The first service which I wish this subject 
 might perform for us is to impress anew the 
 
n8 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 duty of openness to new ideas. Feeble, 
 indeed, here are any words of mine beside 
 the emphasis of history itself and new 
 events. I have thought that it must be im 
 possible for any man who has lived in these 
 last years and learned two of their great 
 lessons ever again to be a bigot. A much 
 briefer time than even my own life covers 
 has seen the outcome of the careers of Will 
 iam Lloyd Garrison and Charles Darwin. 
 I can remember a time when Garrison s life 
 was hardly yet safe on Boston Common. 
 Some here, not old men yet, can remember 
 when great rewards were offered for his 
 arrest, when he lay in jail in Baltimore, 
 when he was dragged by a rope, half-naked, 
 through the streets of Boston. We can 
 remember, too, how, just as John Brown s 
 musketry was rattling at Harper s Ferry, a 
 book was laid on the library table, called 
 " The Origin of Species " ; and we can re 
 member the noise that followed, much louder 
 than John Brown s musketry, for almost 
 twenty years. " Darwinism " was the butt 
 of every Punch s jokes, the target of all satire, 
 the object of the venom and vituperation of 
 
Emerson and Theodore Parker 119 
 
 the pulpit and the religious newspaper. I 
 suppose that half the sermons that many of 
 us have heard in all our sermon-hearing 
 Sundays have been on " Christianity and 
 Darwinism," or some variation of the theme ; 
 and in most mouths the phrase long meant 
 about the same as God and the devil. If 
 a preacher confessed Darwinism, he was a 
 doomed man. If a professor confessed Dar 
 winism, his theological-school days, some 
 times his college days, were done. If the 
 divinity student were caught hospitably 
 housing " The Origin of Species," it were 
 better for him, so far as pulpit aspirations 
 went, that he had never been born. 
 
 Well, we saw Garrison borne to the tomb 
 amidst the reverence and tears of a nation 
 which, if it should build a monument to 
 morrow to commemorate its new life and 
 salvation, would place his figure at the front, 
 as the central bearer of the redemptive idea. 
 And just as New England was bearing Em 
 erson to his grave, Old England, while the 
 bells tolled and the white-robed boys sang 
 anthems, laid Darwin to rest in Westminster 
 Abbey, beside Newton and Johnson and 
 
120 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 Chatham and Chaucer and those whom she 
 delighteth to honor. The mockers and 
 satirists of a few years ago are the elegists 
 and eulogists of to-day. There are few men 
 of science who have not now placed Darwin s 
 truth alongside the fundamental theories of 
 Newton and Copernicus ; and no pulpit has 
 yet been heard from which, if not manly 
 enough to join in the panegyric, has been 
 base enough to echo its old follies or is not 
 busy in the work of reconstruction and new 
 accommodation. I cannot think that these 
 two lessons will easily be forgotten by this 
 generation. I cannot think that those of us 
 who study politics and science, or venture to 
 speak of them at all, will ever, after witness 
 ing this abuse and then this apotheosis of 
 Garrison and Darwin, be hurried to condemn 
 any thoughtful and earnest man unheard ; 
 and I think that the Church will be cautions 
 before it again compromises itself with se 
 rious men, swells the bad reputation of caring 
 more for its creeds than for the truth, and 
 damages the cause of religion itself, as it has 
 done in the Darwin controversy. 
 
 As the crown of thorns and then the 
 
Emerson and Theodore Parker 121 
 
 laurel wreath to Garrison and Darwin in the 
 realms of politics and science, so in the realm 
 of morals and religion the rejection of Em 
 erson and Parker forty years ago and the 
 glory which is theirs to-day. I suppose 
 there has been no so conspicuous case of 
 persecution in the American religious world 
 in the century as that of Theodore Parker, 
 and no man ever who was the object of bit 
 terer malice, misrepresentation, and execra 
 tion in his lifetime than he. He was a man 
 who had no delight in controversy. He 
 was not by choice or first nature a fighter, 
 though certainly a better fighter never lived. 
 He was a scholar, with all the scholar s love 
 of quiet and retirement and the library. 
 He was a man whose whole warm, affection 
 ate nature craved love and sympathy and the 
 good opinion of his fellows. Yet he was 
 forced, by the rank abuses of the times and 
 by the infidelities of men, into lifelong con 
 flict ; though in that conflict he never once 
 shot back a poisoned arrow, seldom opened 
 a personal controversy, but fought and con 
 quered simply by preaching straight on, re 
 gardless of criticism or abuse on the right 
 
122 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 hand or the left, the great positive prin 
 ciples of an irresistible gospel. 
 
 The treatment which Parker received 
 from those who advertised themselves as 
 "liberal" and from those who did not was 
 much the same. The Unitarians of fifty 
 years ago, as Parker s biographer has said, 
 were " about as complacent a set of Chris 
 tians as ever took ship for the kingdom." 
 It was not the heroic age of Unitarianism. 
 Aside from Dr. Channing and a dozen 
 others who might be named, the clergy seem 
 to have been, if their sayings and doings in 
 the Emerson and Parker controversies give 
 their measure, a petrified and asphyxiated 
 set of men, as destitute of red blood as 
 the pre-Raphaelite saints. If they had any 
 positive maxim, it was, to use a phrase of 
 Emerson s elsewhere applied, " By taste 
 are ye saved," by propriety ; but for the 
 most part, as Emerson himself put it, their 
 creed was only a " pale negation." Their 
 conspicuous theological occupation was to 
 deny the divinity of Christ, a melancholy 
 business ; and they had not yet learned 
 that Christ was human. Parker s persua- 
 
Emerson and Theodore Parker 123 
 
 sion was that no body of men was ever more 
 completely sold to the sense of expediency. 
 They were, indeed, " the advance guard of 
 the Church militant in America." They 
 had been " the movement party in the 
 ology," and had done a praiseworthy work. 
 They had repudiated creed subscription, 
 and declared the right of each man to in 
 vestigate for himself in matters of religion. 
 But a reaction was now springing up. A 
 Unitarian orthodoxy had been tacitly agreed 
 upon, and the main endeavor of the elders 
 seemed to be to prevent any sort of com 
 motion and to keep things decent and in 
 order. 
 
 When a man like Theodore Parker came 
 into such a circle as that, an honest man and 
 a rugged, a man who could not compromise, 
 but who must and would speak out the 
 truth that was in him, a man whose every 
 word was " fierily furnaced in the blast 
 of a life that had struggled in earnest," 
 when such a man, I say, came into such a 
 circle, there could be but one result. The 
 controlling men of the denomination said, 
 This young man must be silenced ! They 
 
124 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 closed their pulpits and their periodicals to 
 him, they tried to alienate his little congre 
 gation, they wrote abusive letters, they 
 refused to occupy the same platform, to 
 trade at the same shop, to remain in the 
 same room with him. They excommuni 
 cated him, put him out of the Church. 
 Many of the brethren had said to him 
 before : " You are right, you say the truth ; 
 but it won t do. Don t preach it. He that 
 spits in the wind spits in his own face. You 
 will ruin yourself, and do nobody any 
 good ! " And, when the trial came, man 
 after man on whom Parker had reckoned 
 for countenance fell back upon the old 
 guard and was silent. " Alas," he wrote, 
 " for that man who consents to think one 
 thing in his closet and preach another in 
 his pulpit ! God shall judge him in his 
 mercy. But over his study and over his 
 pulpit must be written, Emptiness; on his 
 forehead and right hand, Deceit, deceit I " 
 
 If these things were done in the green 
 tree, what was to be expected in the dry ? 
 Parker was the special object of the prayers 
 and maledictions of the American churches 
 
Emerson and Theodore Parker 125 
 
 for twenty years. Priestly malice, as Phillips 
 said, scanned every inch of his garment ; but 
 " it was seamless, it could find no stain." 
 He saw men stare at him in the street, and 
 point and say, " That is Theodore Parker ! " 
 and look at him as if he were a murderer. 
 Prayer-meetings were held on his particular 
 account. During the great revival of 1858 
 it was recommended that men and women, 
 wherever they might be, in the shop or on 
 the street, should pray for Parker daily 
 when the clock struck one. " We know 
 that we cannot argue him down," they said ; 
 " but, O Lord, put a hook in his jaws, so 
 that he may not be able to speak ! If he 
 will still persist in speaking, induce the 
 people to leave him, and come up and fill 
 this house instead of that ! " " Hell never 
 vomited forth a more wicked and blasphe 
 mous monster than Theodore Parker," said 
 one of the noted evangelists, "and it is only 
 the mercies of Jesus Christ which have kept 
 him from eternal damnation already " ; and 
 then he prayed : " If this man is a subject 
 of grace, O Lord, convert him and bring 
 him into the kingdom of thy Son ; but, if 
 
126 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 he is beyond the reach of the saving influ 
 ence of the gospel, remove him out of the 
 way, and let his influence die with him ! " 
 
 And Parker himself through all this ? It 
 did not surprise him, for he knew human 
 nature. He knew that in no country and 
 in no age would he have encountered so 
 little persecution as he did encounter. He 
 knew that this bitterness and falsehood were 
 but the natural fruits of the hard and dark 
 theology against which he rose to do battle. 
 " I knew all this would come," he said. 
 "It has come from my religion; and I 
 would not forego that religion for all this 
 world can give. I have borne sorrows that 
 bow men together till they can in no wise 
 lift up themselves. But my comfort has 
 been the joy of religion, my delight is the 
 infinite God ; and that has sustained me." 
 " If I fall and die," he said, as he sailed away, 
 "let mine enemies rejoice as much as they 
 will at the thought that there is one feeble 
 voice the less rebuking the vice of the Press, 
 the State, the Market, and the Church ; one 
 voice the less to speak a word for truth, 
 freedom, justice, and natural religion. Let 
 
Emerson and Theodore Parker 127 
 
 them triumph in this ; but let them expect 
 no greater result to follow from my death. 
 For to the success of the great truths I have 
 taught, it is now but of the smallest conse 
 quence whether I preach in Boston and the 
 lyceums of the North or my body crumbles 
 in some quiet, nameless grave. They are 
 not my truths. A great Truth of Humanity 
 once set a-going, it is in the charge of 
 humanity. Neither State nor Press nor 
 Market nor Church can ever put it down. 
 It will drown the water men pour on it, and 
 quench their hostile fire. Cannot the Bible 
 teach its worshippers that a grave is no dun 
 geon to shut up Truth in? It is one thing 
 to rejoice at the sickness and death of a 
 short-lived heretic ; but it is another and a 
 different to alter the constitution of the 
 universe and put down a fact of spon 
 taneous human consciousness, which also is 
 a Truth of God." 
 
 When he lay dying there in Florence, he 
 said earnestly, in one of the gleams of light 
 that came at intervals across the weakness : 
 " There are two Theodore Parkers now, 
 one is dying here in Italy, the other 1 have 
 
128 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 planted in America. He will live there, 
 and finish my work." And, as the sun 
 looked down upon the half-dozen mourners 
 and the friend who read the Beatitudes over 
 his grave on the banks of the Arno, the 
 same sun lighted up the arches of Music 
 Hall as his dearer friend, unconscious of 
 that scene in Italy, stepped into his own 
 desk, and opened one of his own sermons to 
 the text, " Have faith in God. * 
 
 It was a Sunday in May, 1860, the year 
 so heavy with forebodings of that final trag 
 ical struggle with slavery, so much more 
 desperate than the heroic struggle he had 
 himself kept up so long. On a midsummer 
 day of the next year, Mrs. Browning was 
 laid to rest near him ; and, in the autumn 
 afterward, Arthur Hugh Clough. Three 
 years more, and Landor was borne to the 
 same little Protestant graveyard in the 
 Florence where Emerson had sought him 
 out, on his first European journey, thirty 
 years before. In the five years the four 
 whose memories have made that peaceful 
 God s-acre forever sacred were there com 
 mitted to Italian earth together, among the 
 
Emerson and Theodore Parker 129 
 
 Italian cypresses, beneath the soft Italian 
 skies. How many Emerson memories con 
 centrate there ! Clough, still at Oxford, had 
 become one of Emerson s dearest friends 
 during his English days in 1 848 ; and when, 
 four years later, he came to spend a year in 
 our own Cambridge, it was at Emerson s 
 urging, and to find in Emerson the Amer 
 ican whom he most admired and loved. It 
 was in Emerson s society that Parker came 
 to know him ; and I think that no words 
 testify with exacter faithfulness the inflexible 
 faith of Parker through his long life-battle 
 than those lines of Clough : 
 
 " It fortifies my soul to know 
 That, though I perish, Truth is so : 
 That, howsoe er I stray and range, 
 Whate er I do, Thou dost not change. 
 I steadier step when I recall 
 That, if I slip, Thou dost not fall." 
 
 It is sacramental for the American to 
 stand alone by Parker s grave in the little 
 Florence graveyard, and send his thoughts 
 across the sea as Parker sent his thoughts in 
 that last earthly hour. If it be gray No- 
 
130 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 vember, with the cold Alps just left behind ; 
 if, freighted with some cumulation of dark 
 facts or sad misgivings, you be heavy- 
 hearted and of little faith ; if even Giotto s 
 tower and San Giovanni s gates have failed 
 in their power to charm, that stern gray 
 stone by the gray grave, if you let it speak 
 its faithful speech in the still hour, will 
 make the weak heart start again and tell 
 you strongly to have faith in God and in 
 God s triumph in his world ; and, as you 
 turn back into the city, the streets, before 
 perhaps so cold and unresponsive, shall be 
 all eloquent with history and beauty ; each 
 boy upon the sidewalk shall be a Dante or 
 Michel Angelo in making; and the dear 
 home country for which you kept such sad 
 vigil shall seem haloed by the sunset as a 
 sure potential republic of God, all populous 
 with Parkers and Emersons. 
 
 So it is sacramental at this hour, when we 
 have pictured the generation gone, with all 
 the bigotry and blindness and " propriety " 
 that make us sick, to pause and remember 
 that Emerson and Parker have become ac 
 credited saints in the calendar, the Harvard 
 
Emerson and Theodore Parker 131 
 
 address and the South Boston sermon Uni 
 tarian tracts ; to remember how upon the 
 table of every thoughtful minister of relig 
 ion in the land, be he called " liberal " or 
 "orthodox," the Prayers of Parker lie, to 
 stimulate and voice devotion ; and feel, 
 through door and window, the air pulsating 
 still with the universal benediction falling on 
 the grave of Emerson. And, remembering 
 and feeling this, let us say to ourselves per 
 suasively, when hearts seem cold and the 
 fight is long and the false seems strong and 
 the day is weary, Have faith in God and the 
 power of his might, and know, indeed, that 
 one with him is a majority. 
 
 " Oh, blest is he to whom is given 
 
 The instinct that can tell 
 That God is on the field, when he 
 Is most invisible. 
 
 u And blest is he who can divine 
 
 Where real right doth lie, 
 And dares to take the side that seems 
 Wrong to man s blindfold eye." 
 
 1 know of nothing that can impress more 
 deeply the duties of openness to new ideas, 
 
132 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 of scorn of compromise, and of self-reliance 
 than the story of these two lives. I know 
 of nothing grander than Parker s pulpit, as 
 it stood there for twenty years, amid the 
 shuffling and truckling of those times, thun 
 dering of righteousness and judgment to 
 come. I should like to have been of those 
 earnest thousands who, Sunday after Sunday, 
 went up to Music Hall to hear him preach. 
 No trumped-up, twenty-minute speeches 
 those, confectional and condimental, such as 
 some of our weak-backed congregations sit 
 through with difficulty even, but solid ser 
 mons of an hour, or two hours if need were, 
 that sent the people home with their ears 
 tingling for a week. No place that for a 
 lazy head. Men told him that he was 
 preaching over the heads of the people ; but 
 none ever had to tell him that he was doing 
 that much commoner thing, preaching under 
 their feet. Not a school for the exquisite 
 graces of etiquette : Parker was not a rival 
 of the dancing-master. Boston had exhibi 
 tions plenteous of suaviter in modo ; his 
 business was with for tit er in re. " You 
 never made me vour minister," he said, "to 
 
Emerson and Theodore Parker 133 
 
 flatter or to please, but to instruct and 
 serve." Those who wore soft raiment, in 
 those days, dwelt in kings houses ; he wore 
 camel s hair and a leathern girdle, and the 
 words fell from his lips sharp and rugged as 
 from the Baptist s, " Repent ! Wrath to 
 come ! " He preached against the errors of 
 the popular theology more than upon any 
 other form of wrong, for he felt that they 
 were most fatally mischievous of all. But, 
 like all those New England Transcendental- 
 ists, he had much to say upon all the burn 
 ing questions of social reform. The Church 
 was here in the world for nothing at all, if 
 not to hold up a higher standard of life and 
 create a better society. Intemperance, covet- 
 ousness, ignorance, the wrongs of woman, war, 
 political corruption, above all, slavery, like 
 grape-shot were the sermons rained upon 
 them all. As it was Garrison who fought 
 slavery with the newspaper, and Phillips on 
 the bema, and Whittier with the poem, and 
 Sumner in the Senate, and John Brown on 
 the scaffold, and Lincoln with the sword of 
 State, so it was Parker who fought it with 
 the gospel in the pulpit, while the church- 
 
134 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 men of good and regular standing, whose 
 heads had felt the bishop s fingers, shivered 
 before the bullying of the slaveholders, chat 
 tered about Onesimus, and whined, " Cursed 
 be Canaan ! " 
 
 But the most precious of the great preach 
 er s sermons were not those which attacked 
 society nor those which attacked the 
 Church, but those in which he lifted his 
 hearers up into the comfort of the mighty 
 faith and trust wherewith he himself was 
 comforted of God, and sent them forth to 
 the duties of life with the divine pledge of 
 victory and fruition. " The first time I 
 heard Theodore Parker preach," writes 
 Louisa Alcott, who has passed the torch 
 along in books so full of gospel to so many 
 " little women," and to men as well, " was 
 a memorable day to me, as such occasions 
 doubtless were to many others who came 
 to wonder, and remained to pray/ The 
 sermon was addressed to < laborious young 
 women/ and was full of paternal advice, en 
 couragement, and sympathy ; but the prayer 
 that followed went straight to the hearts of 
 those for whom he prayed, not only com- 
 
Emerson and Theodore Parker 135 
 
 forting by its tenderness and strengthening 
 by its brave and cheerful spirit, but showing 
 them where to go for greater help, and how 
 to ask it as simply and confidingly as he did. 
 It was a quiet talk with God, as if long in 
 tercourse and much love had made it natural 
 and easy for the son to seek the Father, 
 confessing faults, asking help, and submitting 
 all things to the All Wise and Tender as 
 freely as children bring their little sorrows, 
 hopes, and fears to their mother s knee. To 
 one laborious young woman, just setting 
 forth to seek her fortune, that Sunday was 
 the beginning of a new life, that sermon like 
 the scroll given to Christian, that prayer the 
 God-speed of one who was to her, as to so 
 many, a valiant Great-heart leading pilgrims 
 through Vanity Fair to the Celestial City." 
 
 It is this deep, positive religion in Emer 
 son and Parker, this great faith in God and 
 right and the soul, of which I would speak 
 with chief emphasis, rather than of any work 
 of theirs against old superstitions and in the 
 service of free thought. I think there are 
 not many present here who need more words 
 on old superstitions and free thought, save 
 
136 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 to brace them to the work of keeping the 
 light shining in the dark places. I suppose 
 that most of us are already " rationalized " 
 almost to death ; and the everlasting on 
 slaught on the creeds, necessary as it is no 
 doubt, is wearisome to some of us, like the 
 crackling of thorns under the pot. We have 
 quite as much light already as we can man 
 age well, and what we pray for now is more 
 sweetness and very much more disposition 
 to do something. Not that I would mini 
 mize the great offices of Emerson and Parker 
 in the work of theological enlightenment, 
 nor our own duties in the same direction. 
 How great those offices were is best attested 
 by the public sentiment which they created, 
 able to recognize and love the truth they 
 taught, and condemning, in every enlight 
 ened place, the treatment which the public 
 sentiment of the middle of the century in 
 dorsed. It is attested by the greater liber 
 ality in every church in the land that stands 
 on the line of railroad. It is attested by 
 the decay everywhere of the belief in the old 
 doctrines of infallible books, mechanical cre 
 ation, and eternal damnation. It is attested 
 
Emerson and Theodore Parker 137 
 
 by the inaugurals of theological professors, 
 declaring that miracle cannot longer be ap 
 pealed to as the test of truth, and by the 
 clear perception of every thoughtful student 
 in the schools that that is not the worthy 
 conception of God s universe which finds 
 best evidence of the divine in prophets rid 
 ing in chariots of fire or in great fishes, in 
 the stopping of the sun and moon to light 
 up slaughter, or in wonders wrought with 
 water and wine or loaves and fishes, but that 
 which knows that the highest freedom works 
 by perfect law, and sees " in the procession of 
 the stars, in every dewdrop and in every 
 flower, and most in every human soul, the 
 working of the present God." Our duties in 
 the matter appear wherever these old doc 
 trines still have power, and men still endeavor 
 to put covers on God s Bible, to limit God s 
 activity to certain sections of the map, and 
 to consign any soul of man to hopeless hell. 
 Wherever men are found engaged in the 
 bad business, however conscientious, of de 
 fending bad doctrines by the bad method of 
 appeal to external and prescriptive authority, 
 there we must still lift up the battle-flag of 
 
138 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 Emerson and Parker, and cry, Turn on the 
 lights ! 
 
 It is not so much from superstition and 
 overbelief, however, that the interests of re 
 ligion are endangered to-day as from under- 
 belief and a withering of spiritual life in the 
 atmosphere of a mechanical philosophy and 
 ethics. The death-blow has been given to 
 superstition. There are always men, of 
 course, who never know that the sun has 
 risen until it is noon ; and superstition will 
 yet stagger on for a miserable distance before 
 its final fall. But Lessing and Kant struck 
 its death-blows a hundred years ago ; it 
 is already ghastly from loss of blood ; and 
 there is no loveliness in it more, that men 
 should desire it. But in the breaking up of 
 the old religious sanctions and the extension 
 of the realm of law to regions where, before, 
 men saw nothing but arbitrariness and im 
 pulse, God has seemed to many to be pushed 
 so far away that he has been discounted al 
 together, and a mechanism running rapidly 
 to a dread fatalism has seemed to leave no 
 place for the idea of freedom and to grind 
 up the soul. I have paid tribute to Darwin 
 
Emerson and Theodore Parker 139 
 
 and his epoch-making service ; but we must 
 not blind ourselves to the fact that his sci 
 ence was caught up and fathered by a poor, 
 unspiritual philosophy, whose identification 
 with it in the minds of a million untrained 
 and uninformed religious men has abundantly 
 justified their jealousy and opposition. No 
 good science is so good as bad philosophy 
 is bad ; and it may seriously be questioned 
 whether the major influence of the doctrine 
 of evolution up to date upon religious life 
 and thought has not been prejudicial. It 
 will be a generation yet before it takes its 
 place in the world s mind where it took its 
 place in the mind of Emerson long before 
 Darwin wrote, and becomes blessing and in 
 spiration unalloyed. 
 
 Tired of the false, distorted Jesus-worship 
 of the churches, many manly men have 
 come to listen more gladly to the words of 
 almost any other of God s sons than to the 
 words of Jesus, and to be found with almost 
 any other name upon their lips rather than 
 his, lest the merest honor to the name 
 should confound them with the gross idol 
 atry. " Let me never hear that man s name 
 
14 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 again ! " said the weary old Voltaire to 
 the priests, when they talked to him of 
 Jesus after their manner; and no man of 
 rugged, stern sincerity but who, turning 
 from much of the mawkish language of the 
 prayer-meeting and the tract, at least can 
 understand the feeling of the old iconoclast. 
 So the loquacious and fulsome discipleship 
 of a thin unintelligence makes us tire some 
 days of the names of Bach and Wagner and 
 Turner and Browning, of Washington even, 
 of Carlyle and of Emerson himself. Tired 
 of the superstitions, too, which have centred 
 round the Bible, many have put their Bible 
 on the upper shelf and thought they got 
 more inspiration from Confucius and the 
 Brahmins, from the new poem or new 
 novel, or from the newspaper, than from the 
 psalms of David or Isaiah s proohecies, the 
 gospel of Christ, or the letters of Paul. 
 Tired of the sluggish, unproductive dream 
 ing of "a happy land far, far away," they 
 have said : Enough of this ! Here is work 
 to be done, here are wrongs to be righted, 
 here are men with no chance, here is the 
 devil s work done in God s name. Don t 
 
Emerson and Theodore Parker 141 
 
 sing to us of heaven : we have only time 
 and strength to work for a new earth. And 
 so the docrine of the soul has suffered ; and 
 to deny immortality is thought to be a 
 virtue, to some has seemed heroic. It is 
 more unselfish, they say, to work nobly, 
 knowing there is no hereafter to reward us 
 and that we shall not see the fruition. 
 
 Great is the nobleness in much of this, 
 in no wise to be confounded ever with the 
 shallow and ignoble irreligion whose symp 
 toms and whose speech are oft-times so simi 
 lar. Greatly nobler, said Parker, is " the 
 doubt of the man than the creed of the 
 fooL" Greatly nobler often the atheist s Law 
 than the churchman s God. Sublime witness 
 is the protest, too, to the fact that the soul 
 will not be chained. Men hate a dictum and 
 a must. Legislate that your people shall 
 admire the sunset, and the evening shall 
 find them flocking from the hilltops to the 
 gulches ; that all shall learn " The Pilgrim s 
 Progress " and find no fault in it, and next 
 year each literary circle shall be a " Hudi- 
 bras " society. We tire of the best, will not 
 be content with the best save with the better 
 
142 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 and the good, not on terms of insulation. 
 Only the All is sacred and infallible. We 
 leave the philosopher to-day for the plough 
 man ; and to-morrow our foeman shall be 
 more welcome than our friend. Dante and 
 Shakespeare have had times of going out of 
 fashion; and Beethoven and Michael An- 
 gelo are forgotten for Brahms and Botticelli 
 or the new Frenchman. Yet, all the while, 
 the sunset is beautiful, and Bunyan is bet 
 ter than Butler, and best is best. It were 
 better that we should read Shakespeare 
 always than that we should think Shelley 
 and Schiller just as good ; and the dilettanti 
 who live only to glorify the pre-Raphaelites 
 are not the men who do the most either for 
 art or manhood. They do, indeed, do 
 more for both than the devotees of a sen 
 timental Guido or a dainty Carlo Dolci, 
 just as the compilers of the " sacred anthol 
 ogies " stand for a sturdier religion than the 
 men who write the tracts. No men so full 
 of the " sympathy of religions " as Emerson 
 and Parker. Of Parker, Lowell said truly 
 enough, if not indeed quite so truly as 
 wittily, 
 
Emerson and Theodore Parker 143 
 
 " His hearers can t tell you on Sunday beforehand 
 If in that day s discourse you ll be Bibled or 
 Koraned " ; 
 
 and what other American brought true 
 spiritual apprehension to the truth of India 
 and Persia so early as Emerson ? But all 
 this Orientalism and comparative theology, 
 which is the fashion now, invaluable and 
 imperative as its office is and warmly as we 
 welcome it to its right place, does us poor 
 service, I think they would say, if it makes 
 us fancy the Koran and the Vedas as great 
 as the Bible, or Confucius and Zoroaster as 
 great as Christ. 
 
 The transcendent merit of Emerson and 
 Parker as religious teachers is that they 
 never opposed halfness by halfness, and were 
 never hurried by impatience of superstition 
 to irreverence toward the object of the 
 superstition. Jesus Christ, the Bible, 
 more than any others have Emerson and 
 Parker helped us to see their transcendent 
 pre-eminence among books and men, be 
 cause recognizing this pre-eminence on 
 the ground of freedom and pure reason. 
 " People imagine," said Emerson, " that the 
 
144 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 x- * 
 
 place which the Bible holds in the world 
 it owes to miracle. It owes it simply to 
 the fact that it came out of a profounder 
 depth of thought than any other book." 
 "Jesus Christ," he said again, "alone in 
 all history estimated the greatness of man : 
 this one man was true to what is in you and 
 me." And Parker sang : 
 
 " Thy truth is still the light 
 Which guides the nations groping on their way, 
 
 Stumbling and falling in disastrous night, 
 Yet hoping ever for the perfect day. 
 
 Yes, thou art still the life 5 thou art the way 
 The holiest know." 
 
 This clear and cultured maintenance at 
 the centre for it is a question of culture, 
 of real and round education of what is 
 true and best comes into the flimsy anti- 
 Christianism of a cheap free-thinking like 
 the healthy restoration of Shakespeare after 
 the things that satisfied the shallow taste of 
 Queen Anne s London. The temple which 
 we build of the prophets and apostles who 
 through past ages have mediated truth to 
 men will lack beauty, proportion, and solid- 
 
Emerson and Theodore Parker 145 
 
 ity unless Jesus Christ be the chief corner 
 stone. And there was never a time when 
 it was so important to say this strongly, 
 despite the " Christo-centric " folk who 
 mechanize and, by magnifying it into un- 
 naturalness and dogma, degrade the truth, 
 as the present time, when the supersti 
 tions which have made a rational grasp 
 of Christ s idea so difficult are fading ; 
 when society seems ripe for a more prac 
 tical appropriation of the principles which 
 it has never yet applied or tried of 
 neighborhood, equality and brotherhood, 
 and the unit value of the soul, which he 
 instinctively divined ; and when a people 
 parched and paralyzed by mechanism, util 
 ity, and fate thirsteth for freedom and the 
 living God. What our society needs to-day 
 is a baptism of the Holy Ghost. " I see in 
 the young men of this age," said Emerson, 
 "character, but scepticism." "They have 
 insight and truthfulness, they will not mask 
 their convictions, they hate cant ; but more 
 than this I do not readily find. The 
 gracious motions of the soul piety, adora 
 tion I do not find. Scorn of hypocrisy, 
 
146 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 elegance, boundless ambition of the intellect, 
 willingness to make sacrifices for integrity 
 of character, but not that religious submis 
 sion and abandonment which give man a 
 new element and being, and make him 
 sublime." 
 
 This is what we want. The other, with 
 out this, is not enough. Goodness itself, 
 without this, lacks its final grace and beauty. 
 The soul, without this, is in the end dis 
 torted, maimed, and dumb. u Unlovely," said 
 Emerson, in his last public religious utterance, 
 speaking, as in 1838, to the Harvard stu 
 dents of religion, "unlovely, nay, frightful, 
 is the solitude of the soul which is without 
 God in the world." It is so. The man 
 who has looked into the pit and how 
 many such there have been, doughs, Hallams, 
 Sterlings, Robertsons, of every degree, in 
 the sad period now passing, I believe, into a 
 period more positive and glad ! knows that 
 it is so. The man who has seen the sun 
 shine without power to cheer, and who has 
 learned to look into the starry heavens with 
 irreverent incuriousness, who hears no music 
 in the rolling sea, and sees no vision where 
 
Emerson and Theodore Parker 147 
 
 it fades into the sky, to whom the brook in 
 the forest sings not, and who finds naught 
 but flint and granite in the everlasting hills, 
 to whom summer is only a waiting for winter, 
 the earth a graveyard, men and their cities 
 spectral, and his friend and the love that 
 loves him incredible and unauthentic like him 
 self, he knows that it is frightful to know 
 no Being behind the seeming, no living Will 
 that shall endure, no Soul of beauty, no 
 everlasting answering Thought, frightful 
 to be without God in the world. If my 
 word come to any single soul who, like Paul 
 with beasts, has fought with death, and to 
 whose innermost experience it speaks, I say 
 to you that, were there indeed no Soul in 
 nature and no hereafter, nobility and good 
 ness would still be good and noble. It would 
 be better to love than to hate, to help than 
 to sleep, to be brave and true than to be false 
 and cowards. The man who tells you that, if 
 this life be all, it matters not what you do, 
 preaches swine s gospel and the devil s ; he 
 smells of brimstone and is libertine at heart. 
 When the virtue of eternity is in a man, the 
 fact of our eternity is in no wise dependent on 
 
148 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 our speculation, he will live according to 
 the forms of eternity, though his prospect 
 be but a day. If this life be all, then make 
 it count; and a seventy years* lease of this 
 universe, with all its opportunities and joys 
 and disciplines, is much. Life may still be 
 great and noble, I say ; and, whatever our 
 philosophy, we are bound, in reverence of 
 the inward mystery and the horizon s sup 
 plication, to make it so. If the proclama 
 tion of a godless universe and the soul s 
 death be a glad new evangel that shall bring 
 new liberty and power, as Emerson s and 
 Parker s gospel brought liberty and power 
 in ridding us of other chains, then indeed let 
 us give heed, lest haply we be found fight 
 ing against godlessness ! If this gospel 
 speaks to you most persuasively in the hour 
 of your highest aspiration and most self- 
 sacrificing endeavor, listen to it. Whenever 
 it comes preached by the thinker and the 
 lover, listen to it. 
 
 " But if, when faith has fallen asleep, 
 You hear a voice, l Believe no more, 
 And hear an ever-breaking shore 
 That tumbles in a godless deep," 
 
Emerson and Theodore Parker 149 
 
 and the sound is not music to you, but 
 a dread sound, yet if, in your continuous 
 round of business and society and cellular 
 thinking, you have dulled yourself into com 
 placent listening, stop, and ask yourself what 
 your life means and whither it is tending. 
 
 Say to the man who tells you that faith in 
 God is a hindrance to earth s regeneration 
 and to devotion to mankind that, when the 
 atheistic teacher comes who shall prompt 
 to nobler endeavor than Emerson and Parker, 
 the atheistic martyr who shall suffer for the 
 suffering more gladly than John Brown, 
 the atheistic pioneer of civilization more 
 dauntless than the Puritans of Plymouth, 
 the atheistic apostle of any truth more zeal 
 ous and more bold than Paul, the atheistic 
 Christ who shall inspire self-sacrifice more 
 heroic and discipleship nobler and purer 
 than Jesus, then, but also not till then, 
 will you believe that faith in God is false 
 hood to humanity. Believe me, such poor 
 notion, though it may pass to-day, cannot 
 stand the test of life to-morrow and to-mor 
 row and to-morrow. And when it is said 
 that the doctrine of the soul s immortality 
 
150 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 is selfish and harmful to humanity, and that 
 a new earth can be built only on the ruins 
 of the faith in the hereafter, say that when 
 you find yourself tempted to baseness and 
 idleness to-day by the thought that the sun 
 will rise to-morrow, when you find honor to 
 your father and your mother a stumbling- 
 stone to care for your children, find your 
 soul so shrunken that you can be faithful to 
 a new friend only by casting off an old, find 
 yourself a better citizen through insularity 
 and protective laws, and find yourself in 
 spired to help the sufferer round the corner 
 more by slighting the men who send gospel 
 and schoolmaster to the night of Africa and 
 the isles of the sea, then say you will 
 believe it. When you find men agreeing 
 to call it selfish to enjoy the sunshine and 
 the breath of life, selfish to lift up the eyes 
 unto the hills and to stand by the shore 
 because the ocean is sublime and beautiful, 
 selfish to open Plato and Dante and to 
 thirst for knowledge, insight, growth and 
 power, for any noble capacity or any great 
 opportunity, then, I say, but also not till 
 then, concede the faith in the immortal 
 
Emerson and Theodore Parker 151 
 
 nature of you to be a blight upon you and 
 upon society and turn to the new evangel ; 
 and until then tell the preacher to go learn 
 clearer notions of self-sacrifice, and that he 
 is the selfish man indeed who, save by sober 
 est thought prolonged and resistless con 
 viction, by moral imperative and not the 
 indulgence of mental agility, impugns what 
 the history of the deepest thought and the 
 dearest hope and the constitution of the 
 soul itself avouch motives most pure and 
 potent to justice, heroism, nobility, and toil. 
 No, no, my friends, this God s universe 
 and the souls of us are not built upon any 
 such parsimonious plan as that. There is no 
 Wall Street in the soul ; no exchange, where 
 to barter hope for duty. Giving is getting 
 there ; and infinite responds to infinite, and 
 satisfies. Draw confidently on eternity for 
 all the godlike in you needs ; and it is the 
 spirit of God that declares the drafts will all 
 be honored. " What is excellent," says 
 Emerson, " as God lives, is permanent." 
 " When we pronounce the name of man, we 
 pronounce the belief of immortality. All 
 great men find eternity affirmed in the very 
 
The Influence of Emerson 
 
 promise of their faculties." It is so, be 
 lieve it ; and, as incurious about the hereafter 
 as about to-morrow, making your motto, if 
 you will, that strong Emersonian word of 
 Thoreau s, " One world at a time ! " live 
 your life faithfully and confidently, and do 
 this day s duty well. For this day, too, is 
 God s day ; and all eternity is one. 
 
 Our debt to Emerson and Parker, I say, 
 is greatest, not for their onslaughts on 
 debasing superstitions and their service to 
 free thought, but for a faith made perfect 
 in reason in the soul s freedom and great 
 affirmations, the eternal right, the immortal 
 life, and the infinite God. My brothers, 
 let not the torch shine dimmer for having 
 come to our hands in its progress ! Infinite 
 is the responsibility laid upon us. Our 
 prophets are falling in the high places. 
 These have been years of death. Upon 
 the heads of Whittier and Martineau and 
 Tennyson the hoar-frost already lay as 
 Emerson went. The tolling of the bells 
 of Concord spoke not only of the passing 
 of Emerson, but of the closing of an era, 
 and told us that we are left to ourselves 
 
Emerson and Theodore Parker 153 
 
 now. It is the signal for higher duties and 
 the call to nobler manhood. Thank God 
 for these good men and great, but say, as 
 they have taught us, I also am a man, and 
 vow to do your little task, if it be little, 
 even as they did their great ones, " in the 
 manner of a true man, not for a day, but 
 for eternity " ; to live as they counselled and 
 commanded, " not commodiously, in the re 
 putable, the plausible, the half, but reso 
 lutely, in the whole, the good, the true. 
 
Ill 
 
 Emerson and Carlyle 
 
EMERSON AND CARLYLE 
 
 IT has often happened that our writers of 
 history, in describing some striking and sig 
 nificant event, have expressed the wish that 
 some painter might be moved to reproduce 
 it graphically upon his canvas ; and not in 
 frequently they have furnished the painter 
 the fullest and most vivid details. I once 
 brought together a dozen such passages in 
 a magazine paper ; and bread cast upon the 
 waters seldom comes back in fewer days, 
 for the painter of one of the new historical 
 pictures in the Memorial Hall in our Mas 
 sachusetts State House, whom 1 met during 
 his work, drew a worn copy of the paper 
 from his pocket, and told me that he owed 
 to it the suggestion of his subject and his 
 prompting. I wish that I might likewise 
 prompt some painter to ponder upon the 
 impressive scene in the rooms of the Massa 
 chusetts Historical Society when Emerson, 
 on the day of Carlyle s burial, there read his 
 final tribute to his friend. I think that few 
 
158 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 scenes in our literary history have been more 
 impressive or significant than that. I wish 
 that picture might hang upon the walls of 
 the Society s new building, or that it might 
 dignify by and by the walls of the new home 
 of the Boston Athenaeum, the Athenaeum 
 which Emerson so dearly loved, and upon 
 which he pronounced his warm benediction. 
 Of this memorable scene it chances also that 
 the vivid details have been furnished the 
 painter by the historian, by Dr. Ellis, the 
 vice-president, afterwards the president, of 
 the Historical Society. 
 
 The reading of this tribute to Carlyle be 
 fore the Massachusetts Historical Society 
 was Emerson s last public act, save only one 
 lecture at Concord. It was a memorable 
 period to a relation as memorable as the 
 friendship of Goethe and Schiller in Ger 
 many. It is, indeed, a memorable thing that 
 these two men, greatest teachers of truth to 
 the England and America of their time, 
 should have found each other out so quickly, 
 been drawn together so unerringly, and stood 
 by each other, through all differences of con 
 ception, aim, and method, so faithfully. 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 159 
 
 Often as it has been recurred to in these 
 days, there is not danger that we shall think 
 too much about it. 
 
 Carlyle was an honorary member of the 
 Historical Society. Mr. Winthrop, the pres 
 ident, upon hearing of his death, wrote at 
 once to Mr. Emerson to insure his attend 
 ance at the commemorative hour which 
 had been appointed. It was felt that he was 
 the only man who, by the warmest relations 
 of personal friendship and the sympathies 
 of kindred genius, could fill the demands of 
 that occasion. The scene was a memorable 
 one, a scene, writes Dr. Ellis, " never to be 
 forgotten by those who felt what a privilege 
 they enjoyed in taking the full impression 
 of it, with all its vividness and suggestive- 
 ness, into heart and thought." It was on 
 the day, perhaps the very hour, when Car 
 lyle was being laid to rest in silence, by his 
 old friends and the neighbors of his youth, 
 in Ecclefechan churchyard. " A small table, 
 with two chairs for Mr. Emerson and his 
 daughter, was brought into the Dowse libra- 
 rary-room, where the meeting was held. The 
 manuscript, long since written, but never 
 
160 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 put in print, was a loose one, and only parts 
 of it were to be read by Mr. Emerson. Of 
 the incommunicable features of the scene, 
 very touching to its witnesses was his gentle 
 reference and compliance as he looked to his 
 daughter for direction as to the passages to 
 be read, and to the connection of them. 
 Some slight labial impediments caused an 
 occasional halting in the delivery of elon 
 gated words, never favorites with Mr. Emer 
 son. These served, in part, for those delays 
 on words which are so familiar to his hearers 
 as marking his pauses and emphasis. For 
 the rest, he was helped in the initiative 
 utterances of them by the silent lips of his 
 daughter. The apt and racy significance of 
 the most pointed passages came forth in full 
 force and with the old incisiveness and 
 humor. So hushed was the silence, and so 
 intent was the listening, that those who were 
 quick of hearing lost nothing of word or in 
 tonation. But even these, the more removed 
 in their seats, one by one drew nearer in a 
 closing circle around the reader. Their faces 
 and inward workings of thought showed the 
 profoundness of their interest, as they waited 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 161 
 
 for the interpretation of the great philoso 
 pher of England by the greatest philosopher 
 of America."* 
 
 What Emerson read had been written 
 thirty years and more before, written while 
 he was staying with Carlyle during his 
 London lecturing, in 1848. The thirty 
 years with all that they had brought had 
 made him wish to alter no word that he 
 had ever written of Carlyle. Carlyle had 
 lamented and cursed in plenty meantime, 
 he had gone up the scale and down it, and 
 had left almost nothing free from his knout 
 and besom. The dapper men who write 
 the tales and the women with " three yearn 
 ings and a hope " made up their minds 
 about him ; the stewards of the etiquettes 
 and the amiabilities and the craftsmen in 
 the literary dainties voted that there was 
 no good in him, and that the clown in him 
 was devil ; and the men of the silver 
 
 *Dr. Ellis s account was published in Scribner s Magazine, May, 
 1881, along with Emerson s paper. The latter was also printed in the 
 Proceedings of the Historical Society, and is included in Vol. X. of 
 Emerson s Works. It was with a reference to this tribute of Emerson 
 to Carlyle that Dr. Ellis introduced his own tribute to Emerson before 
 the Historical Society the next year. 
 
1 62 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 spoons, the "gig-men," who never waited 
 in Chesterfield s lobby, never knew what 
 heartache was or headache or anarchy at 
 the pit of the stomach, and never ran the 
 risk of discomfiture because never prompted 
 to fly their kites high, these in the days 
 after " Reminiscences " fed on the cartoons 
 and the caricatures of him, and, like the 
 Gaza mob in Dagon s house, laughed 
 at his cries, over their reduced claret and 
 " Leisure Hour Series," and had a notion 
 that his cries were the summing-up of him. 
 How petty and pitiful they all are, seen 
 from that little upper room above the old 
 Puritan graveyard ! and how inconsiderable 
 quite their dainty and proper criticisms 
 beside this life-long, stanch, and changeless 
 friendship of him who truly, as Carlyle 
 himself well said, " had not his equal on 
 earth for perception," who knew Carlyle 
 better than he knew himself, and knew 
 him, with all his biliousness and limitations, 
 for the giant figure of severe sincerity, in 
 flexible righteousness, and lofty purpose, 
 which all the world comes to know him 
 for, as his story is all told, as it has gradually 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 163 
 
 been told, nothing extenuated and naught 
 set down in malice ! 
 
 Much has been written upon the remark 
 able personal relations of Carlyle and Em 
 erson, and upon the affinities and striking 
 contrasts of their genius. Again and again, 
 now that the two lives are rounded, our 
 thoughts turn irresistibly to the old theme. 
 
 The last time that Emerson left Concord 
 it was to attend the funeral of Longfellow at 
 Cambridge, just a month before his own 
 death. Fifty years before, almost, in 1835, 
 Longfellow, just called to Harvard, went to 
 Europe, with a letter of introduction from 
 Emerson to Carlyle. Carlyle had just come 
 up to London and settled in Cheyne Row. 
 It was two years after Emerson had first 
 met him among the dreary Craigenputtock 
 moors. His coming to Craigenputtock, 
 said Carlyle to Longfellow then, was " like 
 the visit of an angel." From that time till 
 the end of life the friendship formed so 
 highly was highly maintained, and to high 
 issues. To no other living writer was 
 Emerson drawn so closely as to Carlyle ; 
 and Carlyle, among the " narrow built, 
 
164 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 considerably perverted men " of London, 
 wrote, " I hear but one voice, and that 
 comes from Concord." "Words cannot 
 tell," he said, " how I prize the old friend 
 ship formed there on Craigenputtock Hill, 
 or how deeply I have felt in all that 
 Emerson has written the same aspiring in 
 telligence which shone about us when he 
 came as a young man, and left with us a 
 memory always cherished." 
 
 It was in 1833 that Emerson s first visit 
 to Carlyle occurred, the year after his 
 withdrawal from the ministry. But he had 
 been reading Carlyle already for five years. 
 Carlyle s essays were speaking to many 
 youthful minds in New England, as Emer 
 son himself said, " with an emphasis that 
 hindered them from sleep." It was in 1828 
 that Emerson began to read Carlyle s 
 articles in the English and Scotch reviews, 
 long before he found out that the writer was 
 " a Thomas Carlyle." It was just then that 
 he wrote the poem, 
 
 " Good-bye, proud world ! I m going home," 
 that first clear utterance of his high ideals 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 165 
 
 and his scorn of sham and show. It was 
 natural that at such a time his heart should 
 beat in quick response to the sincere and 
 ringing words of the author of the Life 
 of Schiller and the articles on " German 
 Literature " and " Richter." He writes of 
 this author, still unknown, in his journal 
 in 1832: "I am cheered and instructed 
 by this paper on c Corn Law Rhymes/ in 
 the Edinburgh, by my Germanic new-light 
 writer, whoever he may be. He gives us 
 confidence in our principles. He assures 
 the truth-lover everywhere of sympathy. 
 Blessed art that makes books, and so joins 
 me to that stranger by this perfect rail 
 road ! " 
 
 Emerson read "Wilhelm Meister" in 
 Carlyle s translation ; and he read the 
 "Burns" and " Novalis " and " Voltaire" 
 and "Johnson" and "Signs of the Times." 
 u Characteristics " appeared just as Emerson 
 was breaking his Unitarian fetters. Carlyle, 
 too, now writes in his journal, " Have long 
 known the Unitarians intus et in cute y and 
 never got any good of them y or any ill." A 
 wish to see Carlyle had been a factor in de- 
 
1 66 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 termining Emerson s voyage to Europe just 
 after his farewell to his church in 1832. 
 He is looking forward to this in Florence, 
 where, after meeting Lander, he wrote : " It is 
 a mean thing that literary men, philosophers, 
 cannot work themselves clear of this ambi 
 tion to appear men of the world, as if every 
 dandy did not understand his business better 
 than they. I hope better things of Carlyle, 
 who has lashed the same folly." In Rome 
 he met a friend of Carlyle, M. Gustave 
 d Eichthal, who gave him a letter of introduc 
 tion to Carlyle. John Stuart Mill, whom 
 he met in London, also gave him an intro 
 duction. In Italy his greatest want is that 
 he " never meets with men that are great or 
 interesting " ; and in Paris he writes in his 
 journal : " A man who was no courtier, but 
 loved men, went to Rome, and there lived 
 with boys. He came to France, and in 
 Paris lives alone, and in Paris seldom 
 speaks. If he do not see Carlyle in Edin 
 burgh, he may go back to America without 
 saying anything in earnest, except to Cranch 
 and Landor." At Edinburgh, where he 
 preached at the Unitarian chapel and where 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 167 
 
 he first met Alexander Ireland, he found 
 difficulty in discovering Carlyle s wherea 
 bouts, but finally learned from the secretary 
 of the university that he was at Craigenput 
 tock, where he had been living for the last 
 five years ; and to Craigenputtock Emerson 
 drove across the country from Dumfries. 
 
 In August, 1833, Carlyle was more than 
 usually despondent among his pigs and pots 
 at Craigenputtock ; and the usual despond 
 ency was bad enough. On the 24th of 
 August we find him writing in his journal : 
 " So now all this racketing and riding has 
 ended, and I am left here the solitariest 
 stranded, most helpless creature that I have 
 been for many years. Months of suffering 
 and painful indolence I see before me ; for 
 in much I am wrong, and till it is righted, 
 or on the way to being so, I cannot help 
 myself. . . . The idea of the universe 
 struggles dark and painful in me, which 
 I must deliver out of me or be wretched." 
 
 "The next entry in the Journal," says 
 Mr. Froude, "is in another handwriting. 
 It is merely a name Ralph Waldo Emer 
 son. The Carlyles were sitting alone at din- 
 
1 68 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 ner on a Sunday afternoon at the end of 
 August, when a Dumfries carriage drove to 
 the door, and there stepped out of it a young 
 American, then unknown to fame, but whose 
 influence in his own country equals that of 
 Carlyle in ours, and whose name stands con 
 nected with his wherever the English lan 
 guage is spoken. He had read Carlyle s 
 articles and had discerned with the instinct 
 of genius that here was a voice speaking real 
 and fiery convictions, and no longer echoes 
 and conventionalisms. He had come to 
 Europe to study its social and spiritual 
 phenomena ; and to the young Emerson, as 
 to the old Goethe, the most important of 
 them appeared to be Carlyle." 
 
 Of this famous first visit of Emerson to 
 Carlyle we have accounts from both parties ; 
 and Emerson s account is doubly valuable, 
 since it is the only sketch we have of Carlyle s 
 life at Craigenputtock as it was seen by others. 
 We have indeed two accounts of the visit 
 from Emerson, besides the well-known 
 passage in " English Traits/ the interesting 
 letter to Mr. Ireland. The passage in " Eng 
 lish Traits," with its pictures of Carlyle s tall, 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 169 
 
 gaunt form and cliff-like brow, his northern 
 accent and anecdote and humor, the loveli 
 ness of Craigenputtock, the talk of pigs and 
 pauperism, the satirical views of literature, is 
 too familiar to need much quoting again. 
 " We went out to walk over long hills, and 
 looked at Criffel, then without his cap, and 
 down into Wordsworth s country. There 
 we sat down and talked of the immortality 
 of the soul. It was not Carlyle s fault that 
 we talked on that topic, for he has the nat 
 ural disinclination of every nimble spirit to 
 bruise itself against walls, and did not like to 
 place himself where no step can be taken. 
 But he was honest and true, and cognizant 
 of the subtle links that bind ages together, 
 and saw how every event affects all the future. 
 c Christ died on the tree : that built Dunscore 
 kirk yonder; that brought you and me 
 together. " 
 
 " I spent near twenty-four hours with 
 him," Emerson writes to Mr. Ireland. 
 "He lives with his wife, a most agreeable 
 and accomplished woman, in perfect solitude. 
 There is not a person to speak to within 
 seven miles. He is the most simple, frank, 
 
1 7 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 amiable person. I became acquainted with 
 him at once ; we walked over several miles 
 of hills and talked upon all the great ques 
 tions which interest us most. The comfort 
 of meeting a man of genius is that he speaks 
 sincerely, that he feels himself to be so rich 
 that he is above the meanness of pretending 
 to knowledge which he has not; and Car- 
 lyle does not pretend to have solved the 
 great problems, but rather to be an observer 
 of their solution as it goes forward in the 
 world. I asked him at what religious de 
 velopment the concluding passage in his 
 piece in the Edinburgh Review upon German 
 literature, and some passages in the piece 
 called Characteristics/ pointed. He re 
 plied that he was not competent to state it 
 even to himself; he wanted rather to see. 
 My own feeling was that I had met with 
 men of far less power who had yet greater 
 insight into religious truth. He is, as you 
 might guess from his papers, the most catho 
 lic of philosophers ; he forgives and loves 
 everybody, and wishes each to struggle on 
 in his own place and arrive at his own ends. 
 But his respect for eminent men, or rather 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 171 
 
 his scale of eminence, is rather the reverse 
 of the popular scale. Scott, Mackintosh, 
 Jeffrey, Gibbon even Bacon are no 
 heroes of his. Stranger yet, he hardly ad 
 mires Socrates, the glory of the Greek 
 world ; but Burns and Samuel Johnson. 
 Mirabeau, he said, interested him ; and I 
 suppose whoever else has given himself 
 with all his heart to a leading instinct, and 
 has not calculated too much. . . . He talks 
 finely, seems to love the broad Scotch, and 
 I loved him very much at once. I am afraid 
 he finds his entire solitude tedious ; but I 
 could not help congratulating him upon 
 his treasure in his wife, and I hope they 
 will not leave the moors, tis so much better 
 for a man of letters to nurse himself in se 
 clusion than to be filed down to the com 
 mon level by the compliances and imitations 
 of city society." 
 
 Still another word of Emerson s we get 
 concerning Carlyle at this time, a word in 
 his journal a day or two after the visit : " I 
 never saw more amiableness than is in his 
 countenance. T. C. has made up his mind 
 to pay his taxes to William and Adelaide 
 
172 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 Guelf, with great cheerfulness, as long as 
 William is able to compel the payment, 
 and shall cease to do so the moment he 
 ceases to compel them. T. C. prefers Lon 
 don to any other place to live in. John S. 
 Mill the best mind he knows : more purity, 
 more force ; has worked himself clear from 
 Benthamism. His only companion to speak 
 to was the minister of Dunscore kirk. 
 And he used to go sometimes to the kirk, 
 and envy the poor parishioners their good 
 faith. But he seldom went, and the min 
 ister had grown suspicious of them and did 
 not come to see them. 1 Waiting through 
 tedious, stormy days at Liverpool for his 
 ship to sail, he sighed for Carlyle : " Ah me, 
 Mr. Thomas Carlyle, I would give a gold 
 pound for your wise company this gloomy 
 evening/ He writes about Carlyle during 
 the voyage, in that wonderful confession of 
 his own religious thought and feeling. 
 Soon after his arrival home he wrote to 
 James Freeman Clarke, then in Louisville, 
 who in a note had asked him concerning 
 Carlyle : " My recollections of him are most 
 pleasant, and I feel great confidence in his 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 173 
 
 character. He understands and recognizes 
 his mission. He is perfectly simple and 
 affectionate in his manner, and frank, as he 
 can well afford to be, in his communications. 
 He expressed some impatience of his total 
 solitude, and talked of Paris as a residence. 
 I told him I hoped not; for I should al 
 ways remember him with respect, meditating 
 in the mountains of Nithsdale. He was 
 cheered, as he ought to be, by learning 
 that his papers were read with interest by 
 young men unknown to him in this conti 
 nent ; and when I specified a piece which 
 had attracted warm commendation from the 
 New Jerusalem people here, his wife said 
 that is always the way ; whatever he has 
 writ that he thinks has fallen dead, he hears 
 of two or three years afterward. He has 
 many, many tokens of Goethe s regard, 
 miniatures, medals, and many letters. . . . 
 He told me he had a book which he 
 thought to publish, but was in the pur 
 pose of dividing into a series of articles 
 for c Eraser s Magazine/ I therefore sub 
 scribed for that book, which he calls the 
 Mud Magazine. " 
 
174 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 Emerson stayed over night, and went 
 to Dumfries in the morning. Two days 
 later Carlyle writes an account of the visit 
 to his mother. "Our third happiness," 
 he says, telling of three happinesses that 
 had befallen them at Craigenputtock, "was 
 the arrival of a certain young unknown 
 friend, named Emerson, from Boston, in 
 the United States, who turned aside so far 
 from his British, French and Italian travels 
 to see me here ! He had an introduction 
 from Mill and a Frenchman (Baron d Eich- 
 thal s nephew) whom John knew at Rome. 
 Of course we could do no other than wel 
 come him, the rather as he seemed to be 
 one of the most lovable creatures in him 
 self we had ever looked on. He stayed till 
 next day with us, and talked and heard talk 
 to his heart s content ; and left us all really 
 sad to part with him. Jane says it is the first 
 journey since Noah s Deluge undertaken to 
 Craigenputtock for such a purpose." 
 
 Carlyle recurs to this visit again and again. 
 It had been to him a red-letter day. He 
 speaks of it to the Americans who come to 
 Cheyne Row, as the time "when that super- 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 175 
 
 nal vision, Waldo Emerson, dawned on 
 me." "Of you," wrote Margaret Fuller to 
 Emerson, in 1846, telling of her visit to 
 Carlyle, " he spoke with hearty kindness ; 
 and he told, with beautiful feeling, a story 
 of some poor farmer, or artisan, in the coun 
 try, who on Sunday lays aside the cark and 
 care of that dirty English world and sits 
 reading the Essays and looking upon the 
 sea." To Lord Houghton he said : " That 
 man came to see me, I don t know what 
 brought him, and we kept him one night, 
 and then he left us. I saw him go up the 
 hill ; I didn t go with him to see him de 
 scend. I preferred to watch him mount and 
 vanish like an angel." In the same spirit 
 Mrs. Carlyle writes to Emerson : " Friend, 
 who years ago, in the Desert, descended on 
 us, out of the clouds as it were, and made 
 one day there look like enchantment for us, 
 and left me weeping that it was only one 
 day." Carlyle dwells fondly upon it the 
 evening after his address as Lord Rector of 
 Edinburgh, when his heart was mellowed 
 and he lived his life over ; and it finds a 
 place also in his " Reminiscences " : " The 
 
ij6 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 visit of Emerson from Concord, and our 
 quiet night of clear fine talk, was also very 
 pretty to both of us." 
 
 Emerson, rejoicing in his own escape from 
 the " weary crowd " and cc learned clan " of 
 Boston to the quiet fields and lanes of Con 
 cord, where man could meet with God in 
 the bush, hoped that Carlyle would not 
 leave the moors. But already, as Emerson 
 himself noted, Carlyle s eyes were turning 
 toward London. cc Sartor Resartus " was 
 already written and lying in Eraser s drawer ; 
 and when Longfellow, two years later, went 
 to England, carrying Emerson s letter, Car 
 lyle had been living in London a year, and 
 " Sartor " had all been given piecemeal to the 
 world. Not to a very large world. When 
 it began to appear, no Englishman could tell 
 what to make of it. The writer was consid 
 ered a maniac, and the unlucky editor began 
 to dread the ruin of his magazine. " c Teu- 
 felsdrockh beyond measure unpopular ; an 
 oldest subscriber came in to him and said, 
 c If there is any more of that d d stuff I 
 will, etc., etc. ; on the other hand, an order 
 from America to send a copy of the magazine 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 177 
 
 so long as there was anything of Carlyle s 
 in it." The almost utter lack of apprecia 
 tion in London soon flung Carlyle back into 
 a despondency greater, if possible, than any 
 ever revealed by the journal at Craigenput- 
 tock. " My state has been one of those it 
 was almost frightful to speak of," is the first 
 entry in his journal at Cheyne Row, scarcely 
 a month after the settlement there. " Mood 
 tragical, gloomy, as of one forsaken, who had 
 nothing left him but to get through his task 
 and die. Despicablest fears of coming to 
 absolute beggary, etc/ " In the midst of 
 innumerable discouragements," he adds, " let 
 me mention two small circumstances that are 
 comfortable. The first is a letter from 
 some nameless Irishman in Cork (Fraser 
 read it to me) actually containing a true 
 and one of the friendliest possible recogni 
 tions. . . . The second is a letter I got 
 to-day from Emerson, of Boston in America ; 
 sincere, not baseless, of most exaggerated 
 estimation. Precious is man to man." 
 
 The correspondence between Carlyle and 
 Emerson, which fills so important a place in 
 the lives of the two men, was now well 
 

 178 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 begun. The first letter in this famous 
 correspondence was written by Emerson, 
 May 14, 1834; the last by Carlyle, April 
 2, 1872. Of this correspondence Whipple 
 justly says: "In richness and fulness of 
 matter, there is nothing superior, nothing, 
 one is prompted to say, equal to it in 
 literary annals." Nowhere else are the 
 deep sympathies and sharp differences of the 
 writers so strikingly revealed. Dr. Holmes 
 estimates it well : " The hatred of unreality 
 was uppermost with Carlyle ; the love of 
 what is real and genuine with Emerson. 
 Those old moralists, the weeping and the 
 laughing philosophers, find their counter 
 parts in every thinking community. Car 
 lyle did not weep, but he scolded ; Emerson 
 did not laugh, but in his gravest moments 
 there was a smile waiting for the cloud to 
 pass from his forehead. The Duet they 
 chanted was a Miserere with a Te Deum for 
 its Antiphon ; a De Profundis answered by a 
 Sursum Corda. The ground of my ex 
 istence is black as death/ says Carlyle. 
 c Come and live with me a year/ says 
 Emerson, c and if you do not like New 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 179 
 
 England well enough to stay, one of these 
 years (when the "History " has passed its 
 ten editions, and been translated into as many 
 languages) I will come and dwell with you/ 
 The criticisms of each other s style are most 
 frank. In his first letter, Emerson remon 
 strates with Carlyle upon his "defying dic 
 tion " ; and he writes in his diary, " O, 
 Carlyle ! the merit of glass is not to be 
 seen, but to be seen through." Carlyle 
 finds that Emerson s sentences do not 
 "cohere," do not "rightly stick to their 
 foregoers and their followers ; the para 
 graphs not as a beaten ingot, but as a 
 beautiful bag of duck shot held together by 
 canvas." In his diary Emerson writes: 
 " My affection for that man really incapa 
 citates me from reading his book. The 
 pages which to others look so rich and 
 alluring to me have a frigid and marrowless 
 air for the warm hand and heart I have an 
 estate in, and the living eye of which I can 
 almost discern across the sea some sparkles." 
 In 1836 Emerson edited "Sartor Re- 
 sartus," from the pages of Fraser, and had 
 it published in Boston, himself writing a 
 
180 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 preface for the book. He had lent the 
 numbers of Fraser to Miss Jackson at 
 Plymouth, and we have accounts of the 
 excitement which they caused in her circle 
 and in others. " The foreign dress and 
 aspect of the work," Emerson said in his 
 preface, "are quite superficial, and cover a 
 genuine Saxon heart. We believe no book 
 has been published for many years written 
 in a more sincere style of idiomatic English, 
 or which discovers an equal mastery over all 
 the riches of language. The author makes 
 ample amends for the occasional eccentricity 
 of his genius, not only by frequent bursts 
 of pure splendor, but by the wit and sense 
 which never fail him." He has " an insight 
 into the manifold wants and tendencies of 
 human nature, which is very rare among our 
 popular authors. The philosophy and the 
 purity of moral sentiment which inspire the 
 work will find their way to the heart of 
 every lover of virtue." 
 
 Emerson received ^150 from the sale 
 of this American edition of " Sartor Re- 
 sartus," a sum which must have been wel 
 come enough in Cheyne Row, considering 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 181 
 
 the rather low ebb of the housekeeping 
 there at the time. This was before " Sartor " 
 had been published at all in book form in 
 England, and while there were probably not 
 a dozen persons between Whitechapel and 
 Chelsea who thought it anything else than a 
 mass of extravagances and absurdities. Car 
 lyle, having occasion at this time to make 
 an extract from " Sartor," said parentheti 
 cally, " I quote from a New England book." 
 The interest in Carlyle was for long much 
 greater in America than in England ; and 
 not a few of Emerson s letters enclose drafts 
 for copyright. "The French Revolution" 
 found its adequate recognition in Boston 
 long before it found it in London. 
 
 In 1838 Emerson collected Carlyle s 
 essays and miscellaneous writings, from the 
 pages of the English reviews, and published 
 them in three volumes, with an introduc 
 tion ; and this was done also before the 
 essays were put into a book in England. 
 All of the zealous New England Tran- 
 scendentalists in that time were close readers 
 of Carlyle ; many of them owed to him 
 their principal knowledge of German liter- 
 
1 82 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 ature; most of them were profoundly af 
 fected by him. Carlyle loved the Dial 
 " yet with a kind of shudder." Years be 
 fore the Dial was started, there had been 
 talk of another journal, with Carlyle as its 
 editor. Emerson especially wished that he 
 might come to New England. " Shall we 
 not bid him come/ he writes to James 
 Freeman Clarke in 1834, "and be Poet and 
 Teacher to a most scattered flock wanting a 
 shepherd ? " 
 
 " Past and Present " was published during 
 the brief existence of the Dial. Emerson 
 edited it for America, and wrote about it in 
 the Dial, pronouncing it a political tract 
 with which we have nothing to compare 
 since Milton and Burke. " It is such an 
 appeal to the conscience and honor of Eng 
 land as cannot be forgotten. . . . When the 
 political aspects are so calamitous that the 
 sympathies of the man overpower the habits 
 of the poet, a higher than literary inspiration 
 may succor him. It is a costly proof of 
 character, that the most renowned scholar of 
 England should take his reputation in his 
 hand and should descend into the ring ; and 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 183 
 
 he has added to his love whatever honor his 
 opinions may forfeit. To atone for this 
 departure from the vows of the scholar and 
 his eternal duties, to this secular charity, we 
 have at least this gain, that here is a message 
 which those to whom it was addressed can 
 not choose but hear." Emerson declares 
 Carlyle to be " the first domestication of the 
 modern system with its infinity of details 
 into style," all the vast and multifarious 
 movements of our present civilization best 
 represented in him. For " London and 
 Europe tunnelled, graded, corn-lawed, with 
 trade-nobility, and East and West Indies for 
 dependencies, and America with the Rocky 
 Hills in the horizon, have never before been 
 conquered in literature." Of the faults of 
 the book Emerson says: "It appears to us 
 as a certain disproportion in the picture, 
 caused by the obtrusion of the whims of the 
 painter. In this work, as in his former 
 labors, Mr. Carlyle reminds us of a sick 
 giant. His humors are expressed with so 
 much force of constitution that his fancies 
 are more attractive and more credible than 
 the sanity of duller men. But the habitual 
 
184 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 exaggeration of the tone wearies while it 
 stimulates. It is felt to be so much deduc 
 tion from the universality of the picture. 
 It is not serene sunshine, but everything 
 is seen in lurid storm-lights. Every object 
 attitudinizes to the very mountains, and stars 
 almost, under the refractions of this wonder 
 ful humorist; and, instead of the common 
 earth and sky, we have a Martin s Creation 
 or Judgment Day." 
 
 The editing of " Sartor Resartus " and 
 Carlyle s Essays may be regarded as the 
 beginning of Emerson s own literary career. 
 He doubtless looked upon the introduction 
 of Carlyle to America as the best thing that 
 a literary man could do at that time. " If 
 the good Heaven have any word to impart 
 to this unworthy generation," he wrote, 
 " here is one scribe qualified and clothed for 
 its occasion." Emerson published nothing 
 himself during his days in the ministry, and 
 seems to have written nothing on literary 
 themes. "Nature" did not appear till 
 1836 ; and it was not until after the publica 
 tion of u Sartor " that the oration on the 
 " American Scholar " came and the epoch- 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 185 
 
 making address to the Harvard Divinity 
 School, the first clear revelations to Bos 
 ton and Cambridge of the nature of the 
 new light which was rising. The Harvard 
 address was written at the very time that he 
 was editing Carlyle s Essays, and we may 
 imagine that he refreshed himself in the 
 writing by spells of recourse to <c Signs of 
 the Times " and cc Characteristics." 
 
 Emerson s oration on the "American 
 Scholar" filled Carlyle with delight, as he 
 had already been delighted with " Nature," 
 which he had lent about to all his acquaint 
 ance that " had a sense for such things." 
 He justly anticipated the verdict of the years 
 when he wrote to Emerson, " I call it The 
 Foundation and Ground-plan on which you 
 may build whatsoever of great and true has 
 been given you to build." 
 
 We now find Carlyle, on his side, intro 
 ducing Emerson to England. Emerson s 
 first little volume of Essays was published 
 in 1841 ; and the same year Carlyle had 
 it reprinted in England, with a preface by 
 himself, a preface so memorable, so char 
 acteristic of Carlyle, so justly appreciative 
 
1 86 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 of Emerson and so unfamiliar, it is to be 
 feared, to most American readers to-day, 
 that a few passages from it may profitably 
 be cited here : * 
 
 "The name of Ralph Waldo Emerson 
 is not entirely new to England ; distin 
 guished travellers bring us tidings of such a 
 man ; fractions of his writings have found 
 their way into the hands of the curious here ; 
 fitful hints that there is in New England 
 some spiritual notability called Emerson 
 glide through reviews and magazines. . . . 
 Emerson s writings and speakings amount 
 to something ; and yet hitherto, as it seems 
 to me, this Emerson is far less notable for 
 what he has spoken or done than for the 
 many things he has not spoken and has for 
 borne to do. With uncommon interest I 
 have learned that this, and in such a never- 
 resting, locomotive country too, is one of 
 those rare men who have withal the invalu 
 able talent of sitting still. That an educated 
 man of good gifts and opportunities, after 
 looking at the public arena and even trying 
 
 * The whole is given in Mr. George Willis Cooke s volume on 
 Emerson, that invaluable repository of so much about Emerson not 
 otherwise easily accessible. 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 187 
 
 not with ill success what its tasks and 
 its prizes might amount to, should retire for 
 long years into rustic obscurity and, amid 
 the all-pervading jingle of dollars and loud 
 chaffering of ambitions and promotions, 
 should quietly, with cheerful deliberateness, 
 sit down to spend his life, not in Mammon- 
 worship or the hunt for reputation, influ 
 ence, place or any outward advantage what 
 soever ; this, when we get note of it, is a 
 thing really worth noting. For myself, I 
 have looked over with no common feeling 
 to this brave Emerson, seated by his rustic 
 hearth on the other side of the ocean (yet 
 not altogether parted from me either), silently 
 communing with his own soul and with the 
 God s World it finds itself alive in yonder. 
 Pleasures of Virtue, Progress of the Species, 
 Black Emancipation, New Tariff, Eclecti 
 cism, Locofocoism, Ghost of Improved 
 Socinianism, these, with many other ghosts 
 and substances, are squeaking, jabbering, 
 according to their capabilities, round this 
 man. To one man among the sixteen 
 millions their jabber is all unmusical. The 
 silent voices of the stars above and of the 
 
1 88 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 green earth beneath are profitable to him, 
 tell him gradually that these others are but 
 ghosts, which will shortly have to vanish ; 
 that the Life-Fountain these proceed out 
 of does not vanish. The words of such 
 a man what words he finds good to speak 
 are worth attending to/* 
 
 This from Carlyle, who at the same time 
 was writing to Sterling, " Emerson seems 
 to me like a kind of New Era," while most 
 proper New England people looked upon 
 Emerson as little less beside himself than 
 the Londoners had thought the author of 
 " Sartor Resartus," * and while the greater 
 part of the five hundred copies of" Nature," 
 which were all that the bookseller ventured 
 to print, still lay on the bookseller s shelves, 
 destined to be well represented there for ten 
 years to come. The critics found the " Es 
 says " more devoid of real meaning than 
 anything which often came into their hands. 
 One, of Princeton, thought that such essays 
 
 * " The majority of the sensible, practical community regarded 
 him as mystical, as crazy or affected, as an imitator of Carlyle, as racked 
 and revolutionary, as a fool, as one who did not himself know what he 
 meant." Jamts Freeman Clarke, Lecture on the Religious Philosophy 
 of Emerson. 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 189 
 
 could be produced during a lifetime, as rap 
 idly as a human pen could be made to move. 
 Harvard College, at the hands of one pro 
 fessor, found the Essays full of cc extrava 
 gance, overweening self-confidence, ancient 
 errors, and misty rhetoric," and at the hands 
 of another found his " professed poetry " the 
 " most prosaic and unintelligible stuff." 
 Sound Unitarianism hastened to repudiate 
 the address before the Divinity School as 
 the " lucubrations of an individual who had 
 no connection with the school whatever," 
 and notions "utterly distasteful to Unitarian 
 ministers generally, by whom they were 
 esteemed neither good divinity nor good 
 sense." Only Dr. Channing told Mr. Ware 
 and Mr. Norton that they were fighting 
 shadows, and that Emerson s God was 
 "alive and not dead" ; and Theodore 
 Parker, whose true life was now beginning, 
 said that it was Emerson who fed his lamp. 
 It was not Carlyle alone who measured the 
 new man aright, nor in Old England only 
 that the prophet was received. But, steadily 
 as Emerson s reputation grew at home, it 
 grew even more rapidly in England, just 
 
190 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 as the recognition of Carlyle was quicker 
 here than there. As to Carlyle s intellectual 
 influence upon Emerson himself, an English 
 critic has justly said, " It would be hard to 
 lay the finger on a passage in Emerson 
 which he could not conceivably have come 
 by if Carlyle had never lived." Yet another 
 English scholar has said equally justly, 
 " Carlyle s frank recognition of him as a 
 spiritual and intellectual equal must have 
 had a most stimulating effect on him." 
 It was very largely owing to Carlyle s intro 
 duction and hearty indorsement that Emer 
 son s Essays were at once so widely read 
 in England and that his fame as a lecturer 
 became so great as to lead to the invitation 
 from the Mechanics Institutes for the 
 courses of lectures in England. He went 
 to England in October, 1847, simply writ 
 ing to Carlyle that he intended to sail 
 "about the first of October." "Contrive 
 in some sure way," wrote Carlyle to Mr. 
 Ireland in Manchester, " that Emerson may 
 get hold of my note the instant he lands in 
 England. I shall be permanently grieved 
 otherwise. And, on the whole, if you can, 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 191 
 
 get him put safe into the express train, and 
 shot up hither, as the first road he goes. * 
 This invitation, Emerson wrote his wife, 
 " I could no more resist than I could gravi 
 tation"; and he hastened to London. "At 
 ten at night the door was opened to me by 
 Jane Carlyle, and the man himself was 
 behind her with a lamp in the entry. They 
 were very little changed from their old 
 selves of fourteen years ago, when I left 
 them at Craigenputtock. f Well/ said Car 
 lyle, c here we are, shovelled together again/ 
 The floodgates of his talk are quickly 
 opened, and the river is a great and constant 
 stream. We had large communication that 
 night until nearly one o clock, and at break 
 fast next morning it began again." Then 
 came many great walks about London, 
 " Carlyle melting all Westminster and Lon 
 don down with his talk and laughter as 
 he walked ; " and, mixed with the many 
 lectures and the much society, happy 
 evenings and mornings by the fireside. 
 " Carlyle and his wife live on beautiful terms. 
 Nothing can be more engaging than their 
 ways, and in her bookcase all his books are 
 
192 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 inscribed to her, as they come, from year to 
 year, each with some significant lines." 
 
 Yet, as the weeks of Emerson s English 
 lecturing went on, it is clear that the sharp 
 differences in temperament and in opinion 
 between the two men made themselves 
 seriously felt. Carlyle writes to a friend 
 early in Emerson s visit : " We had immense 
 talking with him here, but found he did not 
 give us much to chew the cud upon, found, 
 in fact, that he came with the rake rather 
 than the shovel. He is a pure, high-minded 
 man ; but I think his talent is not quite 
 so high as I had anticipated." He found 
 Emerson s doctrines " too airy and thin." 
 A little later he writes in his diary concern 
 ing Emerson: "Very exotic differed much 
 from me, as a gymnosophist sitting idle on 
 a flowery bank may do from a wearied 
 worker and wrestler passing that way with 
 many of his bones broken." When finally 
 Emerson returned home, Carlyle, recording 
 the fact that he " parted with him in peace," 
 and paying another tender tribute to him for 
 his great friendliness to himself, comments : 
 " A spiritual son of mine ? Yes, in a good 
 
I .inn ,<m and Carlylc i ( ) ,\ 
 
 ecree, >u( j one i n( o pianl ropy ;iiui ol her 
 moonshine." "Carlylc, a I (Ins lime, as 
 Cahof say;, ct was in a mood in winch I .mei 
 son s o|)( inii ,11) was api locall loifh showers 
 ol vitriol upon all mm and llnnj s. I hey 
 did not mccl often nor wilh nni< h pleasure 
 on cilhersidc; Imf their rei/ard and alleedon 
 lor cadi oilier were unahalcd." I .arher in 
 his biography ol I .inerson, speaking |-i)f-r 
 ally ol the fwo men s charaelei islies, in Ins 
 aceounl ol the hrj inmn^ ol their Inend 
 ship, ( ahol says, not with enlne fiulh, hut 
 cmphasi/ing the point which now alleeled 
 them: u Neil hei c at rd nun h for I he ol hrr s 
 ideas; lo each, indeed, (he leading idea ol 
 the oilier, fhe message he wishc-d lo hear lo 
 Ins j cnri at ion, was a delusion. Mad they 
 hcen recjuired respectively lo define l>y a 
 sinide frail the farlhesl reach ol lolly in 
 a theory ol conduct, ( arlyle would have 
 selected the- notion thai mankind need only 
 lo l>c sel Irce and led lo thuds, and act 
 for themselves, and I .merson the doc irme 
 that they need only lo he well governed." 
 These dillerc-Mces were accentuated to llie 
 
 highest degree at the time of Emerton f 
 
194 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 visit to London in 1847. Carlyle was sur 
 charged with Cromwell ; Emerson was hos 
 pitably entertaining the doctrine of non- 
 resistance in its extremest form, and even 
 venturing opinions which, fathered to-day 
 by Kropotkin and his friends, would be 
 called rank anarchy. Espinasse, summing 
 up the talk at Carlyle s, declares that " Em 
 erson s theory was that the wise man should 
 have such perfect confidence in the on-goings 
 of the universe, the development of the 
 human race included, as to refrain from 
 fighting with pen or tongue, not less than 
 with sword, for the good and against the 
 bad, and should regard even the best gov 
 ernment and legislation as superfluous inter 
 ferences with the ordained economy of 
 things." It was of this visit to England, 
 it will be remembered, that " English Traits " 
 was born. The chapter on Stonehenge is 
 an account of Emerson s visit to the fa 
 mous ruin in company with Carlyle, and con 
 tains the record of significant conversation ; 
 but, although Emerson tells us here that he 
 " opened the dogma of no-government and 
 non-resistance " and said sweeping things 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 195 
 
 about " the bankruptcy of the vulgar mus 
 ket-worship," it is clear that the record is 
 incomplete. Espinasse tells us that after 
 this trip to Stonehenge Carlyle was full 
 of indignant protest at Emerson s limitless 
 laissez-faire-) which, he said, would prevent 
 a man from " rooting out a thistle." Caro 
 line Fox says that Carlyle tried to shake 
 Emerson s optimism by taking him the 
 round of the horrors and abominations of 
 London, asking after each exhibition, cc Do 
 you believe in the devil now ? " When 
 Emerson at the Cheyne Row fireside em 
 phasized his belief that man everywhere, in 
 whatever sin or degradation, was always 
 tending upwards, Mrs. Carlyle s indignation, 
 Espinasse tells us, <c knew no bounds, and 
 for some time she could scarcely speak of 
 Emerson with patience." Espinasse would 
 make us believe that the friction with Mrs. 
 Carlyle was rather serious, saying, cc Emer 
 son s admiration for her abated visibly, till 
 at last he was heard to say that the society 
 of c the lady was worth cultivating mainly 
 because she was the person who could tell 
 you most about the husband." All these 
 
196 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 things are to be taken for what they are 
 worth ; and they are not worth very much. 
 They witness to the great personal and 
 philosophical differences between Emerson 
 and Carlyle ; but their mutual admiration 
 and affection went on after the conversa 
 tions just the same as before them. In 
 the Stonehenge chapter itself, Emerson 
 pays special tribute to Carlyle s genius, pen 
 etration, and severe theory of duty ; and 
 Carlyle writes to Emerson soon after his 
 return to America, " Though I see well 
 enough what a great deep cleft divides us, 
 in our ways of practically looking at the 
 world, I see also (as probably you do your 
 self) where are the rock-strata, miles deep, 
 united again, and the two poor souls are 
 at one." 
 
 The Life of Cromwell had been pub 
 lished shortly before this time of Emerson s 
 lecturing in England, and Carlyle was now 
 beginning his preparations for the intermin 
 able " Frederick." Now and then, as this 
 work went on, a letter came from Emerson ; 
 " and, amid all the smoke and mist of this 
 world," said Carlyle, " it is always as a 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 197 
 
 window flung open to the azure. During 
 all this last weary work of mine, his 
 words have been nearly the only ones 
 about the thing done to which I have in 
 wardly responded." It was a weary work 
 indeed for Carlyle ; and, when at last it was 
 completed, he wrote to Emerson to express 
 the sorrowful conviction that the years spent 
 on it had been wasted, as the more he had 
 to do with Frederick the less heroic he 
 found him. This may have been extrava 
 gant, it was the expression of an exhausted 
 and despondent time ; but certain it is that 
 the effect of his long years upon the " Fred 
 erick " was not wholesome for Carlyle ; and 
 perhaps it was this absorption in Prussian 
 absolutism as much as anything else which 
 betrayed him into the positions which he 
 took at the beginning of our Civil War, and 
 which he defended with a coarseness so 
 brutal, for it must be said, which Amer 
 icans found it so hard to forgive. The 
 bitter feelings against him which came to 
 his ears from America were very painful to 
 Carlyle. " They think," he cried sharply 
 to an American friend, " some of you think, 
 
198 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 I am no friend to America. But I love 
 America, the true America, the country of 
 Emerson and Emerson s friends, the country 
 of honest toilers and brave thinkers. " It 
 was Emerson who dealt the final, stagger 
 ing blow which awakened Carlyle from his 
 false dream of the conditions of society in 
 the Southern States ; for, though he awak 
 ened slowly, he did awake at last. "It was 
 early in October, 1864," says Mr. Conway, 
 " that I found him reading and rereading a 
 letter from Emerson." The " voice from 
 Concord " had come to him now freighted 
 with tenderness indeed, but also with terrible 
 truth. The letter spoke of old friendship, 
 mentioned pleasantly a friend whom Carlyle 
 had introduced, and spoke of the satisfaction 
 with which he had read the fourth volume 
 of the " Frederick," especially the evidence 
 it gave that many years had not yet broken 
 any fibre of Carlyle s force, " a pure joy to 
 me, who abhor the inroads which time makes 
 in me and my friends. To live too long 
 is the capital misfortune." Then, says Mr. 
 Conway, Emerson s sentences turned to 
 fire, fire in which love was quick as enthu- 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 199 
 
 siasm was burning. He said he had lately 
 lamented that Carlyle had not visited 
 America. It would have made it impossible 
 that his name should ever be cited against 
 the side of humanity, and would have shown 
 him the necessities and aspirations struggling 
 up in the free states, though but unsteadily 
 articulated there. " The battle of humanity 
 is at this hour in America." He longed to 
 enlist him with his thunderbolt on the right 
 side. Could not the thoughtful minds of 
 England see the finger-pointings of the gods 
 which, above the understanding, feed the 
 hopes and guide the wills of men ? As for 
 Carlyle himself, there must be some mistake. 
 Perhaps he was experimenting on idlers. 
 But he could not be disguised from those 
 eyes that saw deep. They knew him better 
 than he knew himself, perhaps, certainly 
 better than others knew him. And so 
 Carlyle felt when he read in this letter, at 
 the close, " Keep the old kindness, which I 
 prize above words." 
 
 " No danger but that will be kept," said 
 Carlyle. " For the rest, this letter, the first 
 I have received from Emerson this long 
 
200 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 time, fills me with astonishment. That the 
 clearest mind now living for I don t 
 know Emerson s equal on earth for percep 
 tion should write so is quasi-miraculous. 
 I have tried to look into the middle of 
 things in America, and I have seen a people 
 cutting throats indefinitely to put the negro 
 into a position for which all experience 
 shows him unfit." 
 
 Emerson s letter now came as the voice 
 of Carlyle s good angel. " Never again," 
 says Mr. Conway, " did I hear Carlyle 
 speak as before concerning the issue in 
 America." His esteem for America and 
 Americans steadily grew, and his eyes 
 seemed again turning with hope to the 
 West. 
 
 In the Concord household the affection 
 for Carlyle and the pre-eminent interest in 
 him had never wavered. We get many 
 glimpses of them. One interesting glimpse 
 is that, in one of the years soon after 
 Emerson s London lecturing, which John 
 Albee gives us. The talk had turned to 
 Carlyle, and Emerson produced Carlyle s 
 photograph, with the heavy lower jaw and 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 201 
 
 lip, " between which as between millstones," 
 he said with loving admiration, " every 
 humbug was sure to be pulverized." " And 
 then," says Albee, " he good-naturedly imi 
 tated Carlyle for me ; he was an excellent 
 mimic." Soon after the war Carlyle con 
 ceived the thought of presenting to New 
 England the books which he had collected 
 and used in the preparation of his " Crom 
 well " and "Frederick the Great," "of 
 testifying," he wrote, " my gratitude to New 
 England New England acting mainly 
 through one of her sons called Waldo 
 Emerson." There was correspondence be 
 tween the two, the relative claims of the 
 Boston Public Library and the Harvard 
 Library were considered, and finally it was 
 settled by Emerson s judgment that all 
 should go together to Harvard, where to-day 
 they constitute one of the university s sa 
 cred treasures. Emerson wrote that he 
 should add the copy of Wood s " Athenae 
 Oxonienses," given him by Carlyle in 1848, 
 "in which every pen and pencil mark of 
 yours is notable," as may also be said con 
 cerning the Cromwell books. 
 
2O2 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 Niagara had been safely shot by us, 
 "nigger question" and all, the prodigal 
 Southern States had been taken home 
 again, and the Geneva tribunal had duly 
 assessed John Bull for his bad manners, 
 when Emerson, in October, 1872, set out 
 for his last visit to Europe. In London he 
 found new delight in his friendship for 
 Carlyle. " I found my way to Chelsea," he 
 writes his wife, " and spent two or three 
 hours with Carlyle in his study. He 
 opened his arms and embraced me, after 
 seriously gazing for a time : c I am glad to 
 see you once more in the flesh/ and we sat 
 down and had a steady outpouring for two 
 hours and more." Carlyle wrote concern 
 ing it, cc It s a very striking and curious 
 spectacle to behold a man in these days 
 so confidently cheerful as Emerson." Mrs. 
 Carlyle was now dead, and Carlyle had en 
 tered into the evening twilight, " so aged- 
 looking," Emerson found ; but Emerson s 
 visit was made a festival by his old English 
 friends. " There is no other American," 
 wrote one, "who has in England a company 
 of such friends as those who gather about 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 203 
 
 Mr. Emerson ; no one for whom so many 
 rare men and women have a reverence so 
 affectionate ; no one who holds to the best 
 section of English students and of her most 
 religious and cultivated minds a relation 
 so delightful to both." This interest was 
 shown in the organization in England, in 
 1869, of an association, which Emerson 
 found in full life on this last visit, devoted 
 to the publication and diffusion of the works 
 of Carlyle and Emerson, its kindred ob 
 jects, the diffusion of education, the ele 
 vation of woman, international peace, the 
 broadening of religion, and the general 
 diffusion of art and culture. 
 
 Emerson returned to America in 1873. 
 It was just forty years from the time when, 
 a young man of thirty, he had first found 
 Carlyle on the Craigenputtock moors. Mill, 
 who had introduced him to Carlyle, died in 
 the same month (May, 1873) tnat Emerson 
 now left Carlyle for the last time. Cole 
 ridge, Wordsworth, Landor, Clough, Leigh 
 Hunt, Dickens, Faraday, Thackeray, Ma- 
 caulay, Arnold, Mrs. Somerville, and others, 
 whom he had met during his previous visits 
 
204 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 to England, were dead. Channing and 
 Parker, Margaret Fuller and Francis, among 
 the old Transcendentalists and reformers, 
 were dead. Sumner and Garrison, Ripley 
 and Brownson, Dwight and Cranch, Cabot, 
 W. H. Channing, Hedge, Bartol, Clarke, 
 Furness, and Miss Peabody still lived, al 
 though so many of them were destined to 
 precede Emerson to the undiscovered coun 
 try. Hawthorne and Thoreau were dead. 
 Alcott alone remained his neighbor, out of 
 the once bright Concord constellation. Car- 
 lyle was now almost eighty, and his working 
 life was done. Emerson s work too was al 
 most over. In 1874 he was put in nomina- 
 nation by the independent party among the 
 students of Glasgow University for the office 
 of Lord Rector, and received five hundred 
 votes against seven hundred for Disraeli, who 
 was elected. " I count that vote," Emerson 
 wrote to Dr. Hutchison Stirling, " as quite 
 the fairest laurel that has ever fallen on 
 me;" as Carlyle counted his own election 
 by the students of Edinburgh the highest 
 honor ever paid himself. 
 
 In 1874 Emerson published " Parnas- 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 205 
 
 sus"; in 1875 ne spoke at the centennial 
 of the Concord fight, upon the very spot 
 where the militia 
 
 " Fired the shot heard round the world " ; 
 
 in 1875 also he published " Letters and 
 Social Aims"; in 1879 he read a paper be 
 fore the Harvard Divinity School on "The 
 Preacher/ the last expression of his relig 
 ious views, and fit complement to the fa 
 mous address of forty years before. In this 
 year, and again in 1880, he read papers be 
 fore the Concord School of Philosophy, in 
 which, as the offspring of the old Transcen 
 dentalism, he was so deeply interested ; and 
 in 1880 he gave his hundredth lecture be 
 fore the Concord Lyceum, on " New Eng 
 land Life and Letters." His last public 
 acts were the reading of his tribute to Car 
 lyle, before the Massachusetts Historical 
 Society, Feb. 10, 1881, and his lecture on 
 "Aristocracy," at the Concord School of 
 Philosophy, in July of the same year. The 
 last time he left his house was to hear an 
 essay by Dr. Harris of the Concord School, 
 and then his neighbor, on Carlyle s " Sartor 
 
206 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 Resartus." He died April 27, 1882. Of 
 his final illness, the days just before his 
 death, his son writes : " Though dulled to 
 other impressions, to one he was fresh as 
 long as he could understand anything, and, 
 while even the familiar objects of his study 
 began to look strange, he smiled and pointed 
 to Carlyle s head and said, c That is my 
 man, my good man ! I mention this be 
 cause it has been said that this friendship 
 cooled, and that my father had for long 
 years neglected to write to his early friend. 
 He was loyal while life lasted, but had been 
 unable to write a letter for years before he 
 died. Their friendship did not need let 
 ters." It is a noteworthy thing that in his 
 last letter to Carlyle, little divining that it 
 was the last, Emerson should have cast a 
 glance back over the long years of their 
 friendship and penned this general judg 
 ment : " I count it my eminent happiness 
 to have been so nearly your contemporary, 
 and your friend, permitted to detect by its 
 rare light the new star almost before the 
 Easterners had seen it, and to have found 
 no disappointment, but joyful confirmation 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 207 
 
 rather, in coming close to its orb." That 
 was Emerson s final verdict, and it will 
 stand. And Carlyle a little later wrote of 
 " the silent but sacred covenant that exists 
 between us two to the end." 
 
 Much as there was in common in the 
 aims and character and doctrine of Carlyle 
 and Emerson, there was something, too, in 
 common in the externalities of their lives, 
 and much in the courses of their culture. 
 Carlyle was almost a decade the older, born 
 in the year of the " whiff of grape-shot," 
 and just as "Wilhelm Meister" had been 
 given to the world ; while Emerson s birth 
 was just before the death of Kant and the 
 crowning of Napoleon as emperor. Carlyle 
 came of the old Covenanting stock ; Emerson 
 was preceded by eight generations of Puritan 
 ministers. Both were sent to the university, 
 both destined, like Lessing, Kant, and 
 Fichte, and so many of the great Germans 
 whom they loved, for the ministry. Carlyle 
 preached at least one sermon, " a weak, 
 flowery, sentimental piece," he calls it, on 
 the text, " Before I was afflicted, I went 
 astray " ; but he did not enter the ministry, 
 
208 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 for the same reason that Emerson so soon 
 abandoned it, because he " found he did 
 not believe the doctrines of his father s 
 kirk." Emerson, the son of the minister of 
 the First Church of Boston, became himself 
 the minister of the Second Church ; but the 
 ministry was for three or four years only, 
 ending with his differences with his congre 
 gation about the Lord s Supper, although 
 he preached occasionally afterwards for sev 
 eral years. The strongest praise I have 
 ever read of Carlyle as a possible preacher 
 was that he might have become a second 
 Chalmers. Alexander Ireland, who heard 
 Emerson in the Unitarian chapel in Edin 
 burgh in 1833, says, "Not long before this 
 I had listened to a wonderful sermon by Dr. 
 Chalmers ; . . . but I must confess that the 
 pregnant thoughts and serene self-possession 
 of the young Boston minister had a greater 
 charm for me than all the rhetorical splendors 
 of Chalmers." 
 
 Both men, on leaving college, played the 
 schoolmaster for a time ; and both, when 
 their pedagogical and theological chapters 
 were ended, embarked alike upon the in- 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 209 
 
 dependent literary career, and never assumed 
 any official or professional position. Carlyle 
 passed nearly all his working life in his li 
 brary. Emerson transferred his ministry 
 from the church to the platform, and re 
 mained a public man. It was his choice ; it 
 was his joy. He craved public influence and 
 relationship to men. Of a certain promising 
 young literary man he said, " I doubted his 
 genius when I saw that he did not seek a hear 
 ing." It was on the lecture platform, above 
 all other places, that Emerson was at home. 
 " My pulpit is the lyceum platform," he said. 
 He was par excellence Emerson the Lecturer : 
 he may almost be said to have founded the 
 Lyceum in this country ; and, as has been 
 remarked by another, he certainly gave it its 
 form and character and made it the effi 
 cient instrument of instruction and reform 
 which it was for the third of a century and 
 more during which he occupied the platform. 
 He was during this time, as Mr. Lowell has 
 said, the most steadily attractive lecturer in 
 America, always drawing, the charm of his 
 voice, his manner, and his matter continually 
 winning new multitudes, while never losing 
 
2io The Influence of Emerson 
 
 its power over his earlier hearers. " The 
 announcement that such a pleasure as a new 
 course of lectures by him is coming," wrote 
 Mr. Lowell, " to people as old as I am, is 
 something like those forebodings of spring 
 that prepare us every year for a familiar 
 novelty, none the less novel, when it arrives, 
 because it is familiar." Almost everything 
 that Emerson wrote after the essay on "Nat 
 ure " was written originally for the platform. 
 " Representative Men," " English Traits," 
 " The Conduct of Life," " Letters and Social 
 Aims," " Society and Solitude," nearly 
 everything that goes to make up these books 
 had served first and many times as lectures. 
 The impression which Emerson made upon 
 the platform was captivating and command 
 ing. His voice and manner alike exercised 
 a unique charm. " I have heard some great 
 speakers and some accomplished orators," 
 said Lowell, " but never any that so moved 
 and persuaded men as he." " His voice 
 and manner," writes Andrew D. White, re 
 ferring to the first time he heard Emerson 
 lecture, " seemed to me the best I had ever 
 known." " Emerson s voice," said Whipple, 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 211 
 
 " had a strange power which affected me 
 more than any other voice I ever heard on 
 the stage or on the platform." Such trib 
 utes might be multiplied indefinitely, alike 
 from those who heard him in America and 
 in England. In many places in England 
 Emerson gave the lectures on " Represen 
 tative Men," which treat several of the same 
 subjects, Shakespeare, Napoleon and, I 
 was about to say, Goethe, but I remember 
 that Carlyle purposely omitted Goethe from 
 his course, complimentarily telling his hearers 
 that they were not up to it, which Carlyle 
 had treated in his course on " Heroes and 
 Hero-worship " delivered during his brief 
 experience as a lecturer in London, ten 
 years before. In London Emerson de 
 livered a special course on the " Mind and 
 Manners of the Nineteenth Century," Car 
 lyle being among his hearers. These lect 
 ures were delivered in the same place, evi 
 dently, Portman Square, where Carlyle s 
 own lectures were given. "Edward Street, 
 Portman Square, the only free room there 
 was," he says in " Reminiscences." Emer 
 son also gave certain lectures in Exeter 
 
212 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 Hall, at one of which Carlyle was present. 
 " He was seated by the joyful committee," 
 Emerson writes his wife, " directly behind 
 me as I spoke a thing odious to me." 
 Froude tells us that the first time he ever saw 
 Carlyle was at Emerson s last London lect 
 ure, where he was pointed out to him by 
 Clough ; and he says, " I heard his loud, 
 kindly, contemptuous laugh when the lect 
 urer ended." Carlyle s highest praise of the 
 first lectures, to Emerson himself, had been 
 that they were " Emersonian " : to others he 
 called them " Moonshine." But he spoke 
 of some of the later lectures as " intellectual 
 sonatas " ; and Emerson himself was " the 
 seraphic man." 
 
 Carlyle abominated lecturing. " Detest 
 able mixture of prophecy and play-actor- 
 ism," is the way he describes his work as a 
 lecturer, in "Reminiscences" "vilest welter 
 of odious confusions, horrors and repug 
 nancies." "Nothing could well be hate- 
 fuller to me ; but I was obliged. . . . How we 
 drove together, we poor two, to our place of 
 execution, she with a little drop of brandy 
 to give me at the very last ! " Yet Harriet 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 213 
 
 Martineau, who was present at many of the 
 lectures, assures us that the merits of his dis 
 courses were so great that he might probably 
 have gone on year after year with improving 
 success and perhaps ease ; but the struggle 
 with nervous excitement and ill-health was 
 too severe. Carlyle delivered three or four 
 courses of these lectures in London. <c Our 
 main revenue three or four years now was 
 lectures." The last of these courses was 
 that on tc Heroes and Hero-worship/ the 
 concluding words of which will be remem 
 bered. 
 
 The second course was on the " History 
 of Literature, or the Successive Periods of 
 European Culture from Homer to Goethe." 
 A careful abstract of these lectures, by Pro 
 fessor Edward Dowden, from what was evi 
 dently a very full manuscript report, has 
 been published. The history of culture is 
 viewed, in these lectures, as a succession of 
 faiths, interrupted by periods of scepticism. 
 The faith of Greece and Rome is succeeded 
 by the Christian faith, with an interval of 
 pagan scepticism. The Christian faith, after 
 the interval of Christian scepticism repre- 
 
214 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 sented by Voltaire and culminating in the 
 French Revolution, is transforming itself 
 into a new thing not yet capable of defini 
 tion, of which Goethe in " Wilhelm Meister " 
 and the " Westostlicher Divan " is a herald. 
 Many passages in these lectures, on Dante, 
 Shakespeare, Luther and the Reformation, 
 the French Revolution, and German Litera 
 ture, are much the same as we find in others 
 of Carlyle s writings, but put in a way 
 often fresh and always forcible. 
 
 Carlyle s first lecture in London was on 
 May i, 1837. Dr. Chalmers was also lect 
 uring in London at the time ; and those in 
 terested in coincidences may like to know 
 that on the evening of that day Browning s 
 " StrafTord " was produced for the first time 
 by Macready at Co vent Garden Theatre. 
 The Times gave a very friendly notice of 
 this first lecture by Carlyle, observing that 
 " the lecturer, who seems new to the mere 
 technicalities of public speaking, exhibited 
 proofs, before he had done, of many of its 
 higher and nobler attributes, gathering self- 
 possession as he proceeded." It was agoniz 
 ing business for Carlyle ; but Mrs. Carlyle 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 215 
 
 " had a steady hope " in him. The impres 
 sion which he made as a lecturer was really 
 much better than he would lead us to sup 
 pose. A writer in the Examiner, perhaps 
 Leigh Hunt, in noticing the first two lect 
 ures on the " History of Literature/ said : 
 "He again extemporizes, he does not read. 
 We doubted, on hearing the Monday s lect 
 ure, whether he would ever attain in this way 
 to the fluency as well as depth for which he 
 ranks among celebrated talkers in private ; 
 but Friday s discourse relieved us. He 
 strode away like Ulysses himself, and had 
 only to regret, in common with his audience, 
 the limits to which the one hour confined 
 him." George Ticknor was present at the 
 ninth lecture of this course, and he noted in 
 his diary (June i, 1838): "He is a rather 
 small, spare, ugly Scotchman, with a strong 
 accent, which I should think he takes no 
 pains to mitigate. To-day he spoke, as I 
 think he commonly does, without notes, and 
 therefore as nearly extempore as a man can 
 who prepares himself carefully, as was plain 
 he had done. He was impressive, I think, 
 though such lecturing could not well be very 
 
216 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 popular ; and in some parts, if he were not 
 poetical, he was picturesque." Ticknor es 
 timates the audience at about one hundred. 
 We read that Emerson had a thousand 
 hearers at his lecture on Montaigne, in Lon 
 don, and that he was greeted with loud 
 applause. Perhaps this contrast in point of 
 platform popularity was one thing that made 
 Mrs. Carlyle, as Espinasse fancied, view 
 Emerson with " a certain wife-like jealousy, 
 as a sort of rival of her husband," although 
 the latter s platform days had long been 
 over. We have pleasant glimpses of Emer 
 son s London lectures from Henry Crabbe 
 Robinson and Harriet Martineau. After 
 the first London lecture the following ac 
 count appeared in Jerrold s Newspaper, and 
 it is interesting as preserving the impression 
 which Emerson made as a lecturer upon 
 an English audience in which Carlyle sat : 
 " Precisely at four o clock the lecturer glided 
 in, and suddenly appeared at the reading- 
 desk. Tall, thin, his features aquiline, his 
 eye piercing and fixed, the effect, as he 
 stood quietly before his audience, was at 
 first somewhat startling, and then nobly im- 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 217 
 
 pressive. Having placed his manuscript on 
 the desk with nervous rapidity, and paused, 
 the lecturer then quickly and, as it were, 
 with a flash of action, turned over the first 
 leaf, whispering at the same time, c Gentle 
 men and ladies. The initial sentences were 
 pronounced in a low tone, a few words at 
 a time, hesitatingly, as if then extemporane 
 ously meditated and not, as they really were, 
 premeditated and forewritten. Time was 
 thus given for the audience to meditate 
 them, too. Meanwhile, the meaning, as it 
 were, was dragged from under the veil and 
 covering of the expression, and ever and 
 anon a particular phrase was so emphatically 
 italicized as to command attention. There 
 was, however, nothing like acquired elocu 
 tion, no regular intonation, in fact, none of 
 the usual oratorical artifices, but for the most 
 part a shapeless delivery (only varied by cer 
 tain nervous twitches and angular movements 
 of the hands and arms curious to see and 
 even to smile at), and calling for much co 
 operation on the part of the auditor to help 
 out its shortcomings. Along with all this, 
 there was an eminent bonhomie, earnestness 
 
218 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 and sincerity, which bespoke sympathy and 
 respect nay, more, secured veneration." 
 
 Carlyle s love of lecturing evidently did 
 not increase with his experience of it ; and 
 from the time of " Heroes and Hero-wor 
 ship " to the address as Lord Rector of 
 Edinburgh I do not think he ever spoke in 
 public. The only passage which I recall in 
 his writings in which he speaks with some 
 real enthusiasm about lecturing or preaching 
 is in a letter to Emerson at the time of his 
 lectures on " Heroes and Hero-worship " 
 and when Emerson was trying to induce him 
 to come to America. He wrote after one of 
 these lectures, along with sundry critical ob 
 servations upon his lecturing, that he had 
 been " gratified nevertheless to see how the 
 rudest speech of a man s heart goes into men s 
 hearts, and is the welcomest thing there. 
 Withal I regretted that I had not six months 
 of preaching, whereby to learn to preach 
 and explain things fully ! In the fire of the 
 moment I had all but decided on setting out 
 for America this autumn, and preaching far 
 and wide like a very lion there. Quit your 
 paper formulas, my brethren, equivalent to 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 219 
 
 old wooden idols, undiv me as they ; in the 
 name of God understand that you are alive 
 and that God is alive ! Did the Upholsterer 
 make this Universe ? Were you created by 
 the Tailor ? I tell you, and conjure you to 
 believe me literally, No, a thousand times, 
 No ! Thus did I mean to preach, on 
 Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic/ in 
 America too." 
 
 For many years at this period of his life 
 Carlyle s thoughts turned much towards 
 America. The important chapter in the 
 history of English Puritanism which the 
 founding of New England constituted 
 deeply affected him. The " Mayflower," to 
 him, bore a richer freight than the cc Argo," 
 and the thought of her desperately breasting 
 the seas stirred his eloquence. But it was 
 not simply the historical that moved him. 
 As late as 1 849 he writes to Emerson of the 
 Western frontiersman and the America wait 
 ing for its poet, and waiting to be born, in 
 a buoyant and prophetic strain, such as 
 might find place in the page of Whitman or 
 of Emerson himself: " How beautiful to 
 think of lean, tough Yankee settlers, tough 
 
The Influence of Emerson 
 
 as gutta-percha, with most occult unsubdu- 
 able fire in their belly, steering over the 
 Western Mountains to annihilate the jungle, 
 and bring bacon and corn out of it for the 
 Posterity of Adam ! The Pigs in about a 
 year eat up all the rattlesnakes for miles 
 round : a most judicious function on the 
 part of the Pigs. Behind the Pigs comes 
 Jonathan with his all-conquering plough 
 share, glory to him too ! Oh, if we were 
 not a set of Cant-ridden blockheads, there is 
 no Myth of Athene or Herakles equal to 
 this fact ; which I suppose w/7/find its real 
 * Poets some day or other ; when once 
 the Greek, Semitic and multifarious other 
 Cobwebs are swept away a little ! " The 
 thought of Carlyle as a possible pioneer 
 beside the Missouri or the Platte is even 
 more stirring than the thought of him as the 
 shepherd of a Transcendental flock beside 
 the Concord and the Charles. It was his 
 " odd dream " that he " might end in the 
 western woods." 
 
 Both Carlyle and Emerson got their new 
 birth from Germany, Carlyle immediately, 
 from Schelling, Richter, Schiller, and Goethe ; 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 221 
 
 Emerson mediately, from Coleridge and 
 Carlyle himself. Of the early group of 
 New England Transcendentalists Emerson 
 tells us that " perhaps they only agreed in 
 having fallen upon Coleridge and Words 
 worth and Goethe, then on Carlyle, with 
 pleasure and sympathy." " He is almost 
 more at home in our literature than our 
 selves," Goethe said of Carlyle. It was the 
 Germanism of Carlyle and his close relations 
 with Goethe which especially drew Emerson 
 to him at the first. He had already found 
 in Coleridge and Wordsworth a higher form 
 of thought than Andrews Norton had to 
 teach ; he had gone from one Boston church 
 to another on Sunday mornings to hear 
 Everett, fresh from his German studies; 
 and his brother William had been to Ger 
 many to study theology, and had even gone 
 to Goethe himself, to get his help about his 
 doubts and duties. The indebtedness of 
 both Carlyle and Emerson to German litera 
 ture and thought was long greater than to al 
 most all other sources. They were both, it 
 is right to say, an integral part of the great 
 German movement in thought, originating 
 
222 The Influence of Emerson . 
 
 in Lessing, Herder, Kant, and Goethe. Yet 
 Emerson never had a " new birth," either 
 through German influence or any other, 
 in the way in which Carlyle had. His in 
 tellectual life was not a struggle, with its 
 crises, but a steady and serene unfolding 
 and enrichment ; and it may fairly be ques 
 tioned, as the English critic questions 
 whether he would not have been essentially 
 the same if he had never met Carlyle, 
 whether he would not also have been the 
 same had he never read Goethe, to whom, 
 nevertheless, his obligations were so distinct 
 and great. 
 
 It was the example of Schiller which en 
 couraged Carlyle to venture on the literary 
 life. " The biographies of English men of 
 letters," he says somewhere, " are the wretch- 
 edest chapters in our history, except the 
 Newgate Calendar." But Germany fur 
 nished brighter examples ; and the situation 
 of Schiller especially, a youth of poverty, 
 obstructions of all sorts, bad health, and the 
 despondent tendency, was like his own, 
 while Schiller s unswerving fidelity, his firm 
 moral convictions, enduring through the 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 223 
 
 breaking up of creeds, and his final triumph 
 gave confidence and inspiration. 
 
 From Schiller and like Schiller, Carlyle 
 turned to Goethe, and found in him full 
 satisfaction to the end. " Goethe especially 
 was my evangelist/ he said. If anybody s 
 disciple, Carlyle was Goethe s disciple. 
 "Emerson," Mr. Sanborn says rightly, 
 "resembled Goethe more than Carlyle re 
 sembled Schiller " ; although Grimm rightly 
 notes, in comparing Emerson with Goethe 
 and Schiller, that he was like Schiller in 
 coming to the front in public emergencies, 
 sharing the deep feelings of his time and 
 people, to which Goethe was so often in 
 different, turning seldom to anything save 
 what was congenial. It must be remem 
 bered here that Carlyle, in his essay on 
 Goethe, repeats with sympathy the declara 
 tion of Schiller, that the poet is a citizen not 
 only of his country, but of his time ; what 
 ever occupies and interests men in general 
 will interest him still more. Emerson called 
 no man master and had far less of the element 
 of discipleship in him than Carlyle ; but he 
 pronounced Goethe the leading mind of the 
 
224 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 century, and Grimm, in writing of Goethe, 
 acknowledges his debt to Emerson for the 
 point of view from whence correctly to judge 
 him. " Since Shakespeare there has been 
 no mind of equal compass to Goethe s. 
 There is the wise man. He has the largest 
 range of thought, the most catholic mind ; 
 a person who has spoken in every science, 
 and has added to the scientific lore of other 
 students, and who represents better than 
 any other individual the progressive mind 
 of the present age." Place beside this the 
 judgment of Carlyle : " In Goethe we dis 
 cover by far the most striking instance, in 
 our time, of a writer who is, in strict speech, 
 what Philosophy can call a Man. He is 
 neither noble nor plebeian, neither liberal nor 
 servile, nor infidel nor devotee, but the 
 best excellence of all these, joined in pure 
 union, c a clear and universal Man. Emer 
 son was an untiring reader of Goethe, urged 
 to it by Carlyle, read every one of the 
 fifty-five volumes of his works, including 
 "The Theory of Color," in the original, 
 read him more than any other of the Ger 
 mans, more probably than all of the rest 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 225 
 
 together ; and in the last letter which he 
 wrote to Herman Grimm (1871) he said, 
 " For Goethe I think I have an always 
 ascending regard." CfC Wilhelm Meister, " 
 he once said, " contains the analysis of life " ; 
 but "Faust" he "could not read nor en 
 dure," and he confessed late in life that he 
 was unfamiliar with the Second Part. Less 
 the disciple of Goethe than Carlyle, Emerson 
 is more like him, like him in his interest 
 in nature as well as in man, his confidential 
 love of nature, in his love of art, in the poet 
 in him, in the enjoyment of life, above all 
 in his calm repose. There was little of the 
 Olympian about Carlyle, little of the Goethe 
 temperament. He was more like Fichte 
 among the Germans. Without dyspepsia, 
 he would have been a Fichte ; with dyspep 
 sia, Fichte s "Addresses to the German 
 People " and " Characteristics of the Present 
 Age " would have been like " Past and 
 Present " and " Latter-day Pamphlets." 
 Goethe was less than Emerson in ethical and 
 religious stature. If to his other qualities 
 had been added the moral elevation of Kant, 
 he would have been the greater Emerson. 
 
226 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 The moral temptations, the self-compla 
 cency, and the lack of aspiration in Goethe, 
 which made Parker most mistakenly 
 rank his manhood and his influence alike 
 below Voltaire s, and made him " rather be 
 Blake sweeping Tromp out of the Channel 
 for the nation s sake," Emerson was deeply 
 conscious of. Goethe s thinking, though of 
 great altitude, he found a table-land, without 
 the cc great felicities and miracles of poetry." 
 " Of Shakespeare and the transcendent muse, 
 no syllable." Emerson was no believer in 
 culture for culture s sake ; and he cannot 
 forgive Goethe, being the great man that he 
 was, for not being a greater man, " a re 
 deemer of the human mind." He was " the 
 poet of the Actual, not of the Ideal ; the 
 poet of limitation, not of possibility ; of 
 this world, and not of religion and hope." 
 
 Men of striking originality both, most 
 quotable writers of the century, Carlyle and 
 Emerson have both been peculiarly quoters 
 and men of books, men who smack of the 
 library. The best thing that the university 
 does for a man, said Emerson in his better 
 way, is to place him in intelligent possession 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 227 
 
 of the keys of the library. Books are the 
 scholar s tools. Emerson s essay on " Books " 
 should be put into the hands of every young 
 man beginning life. "The colleges," he 
 said, " whilst they provide us with libraries, 
 furnish no professor of books ; and I think 
 no chair is so much wanted." Carlyle said 
 the same thing in almost the same words ; 
 and both would have rejoiced at the degree 
 to which many of our great modern libra 
 rians, in colleges and out of them, construe 
 it as one of their regular and main functions 
 to be professors of books. One would like 
 to write an essay upon Emerson in the Study, 
 dealing with the books which influenced 
 him and with his essays in criticism.* One 
 
 * Dr. Holmes gives an interesting table of the twenty-seven men 
 whom Emerson mentions twenty times or more, ranging from Shake 
 speare (112) to Chaucer, Coleridge, and Michael Angelo (20). See 
 Cabot, vol. i., 288 $ also the section in John Morley s essay on 
 Emerson which deals with Emerson s use of books and breadth of 
 literary reference. One of the most interesting chapters of that very 
 valuable little volume of "Talks with Emerson," by Mr. Charles J. 
 Woodbury, which was a distinct new contribution to our knowledge 
 of Emerson s thought, is that entitled " Criticism," reporting Emer 
 son s judgments upon many writers, some not elsewhere touched upon. 
 Gibbon, although a great example of diligence and truth, was "a 
 mind without a shrine." "Read Chaucer! " and he repeated with 
 out hesitation several verses from his "Good Counsel," saying, "I 
 
228 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 would like to do the same concerning Car- 
 lyle. So much can easily be said, that 
 where we have an essay by Carlyle on any 
 great writer, Goethe, Richter, Novalis, Vol 
 taire, Johnson, Scott, or Burns, there we 
 almost always have the best essay upon the 
 
 would copy it and have it always with me; it is a scripture." "I 
 have seen an expurgated edition of Chaucer," he added. "Shun it! 
 Shun expurgated editions of any one, even Aphra Bene or Francois 
 Villon. They will be expurgating the Bible and Shakespeare next." 
 " Don Quixote" and novels generally "made him yawn." "Why 
 read novels ? We meet stranger creatures than their heroes. What 
 writer of stories would not be derided if he gave us creatures as impos 
 sible as Nero or Alva or Joan of Arc ? " His depreciation of novels 
 here, however, must be offset by his warm word of appreciation and 
 prophecy of the novel s future, in his essay on "Books," and his 
 remarks in his letters to Grimm, that, when he read rarely a good novel, 
 he felt rebuked that he did not use "these delicious relations," and 
 that he thought the tale, as opposed to the drama, "the form that 
 is always in season." Of the American historians, Prescott was 
 "thorough," Motley "painstaking," and Bancroft "reads enor 
 mously," and "always understands his subject" j but neither of them 
 "lifts himself off his feet" ; they "have no lilt in them," "Do 
 not read by the bookful," he said. "Often a chapter is enough. 
 The glance reveals when the gaze obscures. Skip the paragraphs that 
 do not talk to you." " Avoid all secondhand, borrowing books : 
 * Collections of , Beauties of , etc. Do your own quarrying." 
 " Read those men who are not lazy, who put themselves into contact 
 with realities." "All criticism dealing with isolated points is super 
 ficial ; the prevailing thought and disposition are your main care." 
 "Stop reading if you find yourself becoming absorbed." "Shut the 
 book when your own thought comes." "Seek first spirit, and 
 second spirit, and third and evermore spirit." 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 229 
 
 subject which is to be found in the library. 
 Carlyle was probably the greatest reader of 
 books, as well as the greatest writer of them, 
 in the England of his time. Both men were 
 too great to entertain the upstart s fancy 
 that greatness and originality lie in inde 
 pendence and trust in one s own intuitions. 
 "The great man," said Emerson, "must 
 be a great reader, and possess great assimilat 
 ing power. He must depend upon others, 
 because intuition is not constant, while we 
 must try our own intuitions by those of 
 other minds." 
 
 No men of our time have written better 
 upon books and reading than Carlyle and 
 Emerson, few have passed better literary 
 judgments, none have kept company with 
 better books. Both were at home with the 
 Elizabethan and Puritan writers. One-third 
 of the selections in " Parnassus " are from 
 the seventeenth century. Both have written 
 in the same strain of Shakespeare ; but it is 
 clear that Emerson really lived closest to 
 him. " Shakespeare was a wonder," he said 
 to Mr. Woodbury : " he struck twelve every 
 time." " Perhaps the human mind," he said, 
 
230 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 would be a gainer if all the secondary 
 writers were lost say, in England, all but 
 Shakespeare, Milton, and Bacon." Carlyle 
 always spoke slightingly of Bacon. To Em 
 erson, Bacon s essays were " a little bible of 
 earthly wisdom." Bacon and Berkeley " have 
 been friends to me." 
 
 It is singular that Carlyle s references to 
 Milton are so brief, casual, and unimportant. 
 Above all men he loved the great Puri 
 tans. " I don t know, in any history of 
 Greece or Rome, where you will get so fine 
 a man as Oliver Cromwell." He loved 
 John Knox in highest measure and all 
 men of that class. His " Cromwell " is the 
 best contribution yet to the history of Puri 
 tanism, and that one of his historical books 
 which will longest endure. By interesting 
 coincidence, the only history which Emerson 
 ever wished that he might write was a 
 history of Calvinism with reference to its 
 influence on New England. We should 
 have expected a glowing panegyric of Mil 
 ton in the " Cromwell " ; but it is not there, 
 although we are sure that this is but an un 
 fortunate accident, and that Carlyle would 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 231 
 
 have written it heartily. Emerson declared 
 Milton to stand foremost of all men in 
 literary history, and so of all men, in the 
 power to inspire. There was no man in 
 history, literary or political, whom he 
 honored more or with whom he more natu 
 rally measured himself. Dr. Holmes dwells 
 on the parallelisms in their characters, their 
 writings, and their lives. Emerson thinks 
 of Milton on the ship which bears him back 
 to America from his first European visit] 
 " Milton did not love moral perfection more 
 than I." Milton was the subject of one of \ 
 his earliest lectures in Boston. In Milton 
 " the man was paramount to the poet " ; and 
 he remarks upon the reason, the force of 
 which he had felt in his own life, why, " the 
 most devout man in history, he frequented 
 no church." cc Better than any other he has 
 discharged the office of every great man, 
 namely, to raise the idea of Man in the minds \ 
 of his contemporaries and of posterity. . . . 
 Human nature in these ages is indebted to 
 him for its best portrait." " There is not 
 in literature," he said, <c a more noble out 
 line of a wise external education than that 
 
232 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 which Milton drew up, at the age of thirty- 
 six, in his letter to Samuel Hartlib " ; and 
 his own great address on Education, the 
 most pregnant and inspiring word on edu 
 cation yet spoken by an American, the 
 most memorable English word since Milton, 
 has the same dominant note which Milton 
 sounded, the note of nobleness. During 
 his last visit to London he went to Milton s 
 grave, and inquired, " Do many come here ? " 
 " Yes, sir, Americans." This picture of Em 
 erson by Milton s grave in the old Cripple- 
 gate church is also to be commended to the 
 painter. 
 
 Scott, of whom Carlyle wrote one of his 
 most interesting essays, seemed to Emerson 
 to inspire his readers more than any other 
 modern writer with affection to his own per 
 sonality, and in the strength and variety of his 
 characters to approach Shakespeare nearest. 
 " There are no books for boys," he said, 
 "like the poems of Sir Walter Scott. c Mar- 
 mion, the c Lay of the Last Minstrel, and 
 the c Lady of the Lake surpass everything 
 we have for boy-reading." Burns was as 
 dear to Emerson as to Carlyle himself. 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 233 
 
 " The Confession of Augsburg, the Declara 
 tion of Independence, the French Rights of 
 Man and the Marseillaise are not more 
 weighty documents in the history of free 
 dom than the songs of Burns. ... I find his 
 great, plain sense in close chain with the 
 greatest masters Rabelais, Shakespeare in 
 comedy, Cervantes, Butler and Burns. " 
 " My excited fancy," says Mr. Lowell, in 
 speaking of the enthusiasm of Emerson s 
 discourse on Burns, "set me under the 
 bema, listening to him who fulmined over 
 Greece." * 
 
 * It was this address on Burns which prompted Judge Hoar to the 
 most remarkable tribute ever paid to the eloquence of Emerson. This 
 was in his letter read at the meeting of the Massachusetts Historical 
 Society in May, 1882, immediately after Emerson s death. Two things 
 he wrote to emphasize. The first was Emerson s power as a historian, 
 of which he gave an impressive instance, and then added: "The sec 
 ond is his power at an orator , rare and peculiar, and in its way un 
 equalled among our contemporaries. Many of us can recall instances 
 of it, and there are several prominent in my recollection; but perhaps 
 the most striking was his address at the Burns centennial, in Boston, 
 on the 2,5th of January, 1859. The company that he addressed was 
 a queer mixture. First, there were the Burns club, grave, critical, 
 and long-headed Scotchmen, jealous of the fame of their countryman, 
 and doubtful of the capacity to appreciate him in men of other blood. 
 There were the scholars and poets of Boston and its neighborhood, 
 and professors and undergraduates from Harvard College. Then there 
 were state and city officials, aldermen and common councilmen, 
 
234 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 Coleridge was one of Emerson s masters ; 
 it was because Coleridge led him to the Ger 
 mans. The fame of Wordsworth he re 
 garded as a leading fact in modern literature. 
 Wordsworth was " the poet of England 
 the only one who comes up to high-water 
 mark." cc He has done more for the sanity 
 of this generation," he wrote in the Dial, 
 " than any other author " ; and in his own 
 Concord quiet he felt that a large part of 
 this sanity was in living in Westmoreland 
 
 brokers and bank directors, ministers and deacons, doctors, lawyers, 
 and carnal self-seekers of every grade. I have had the good fort 
 une to hear many of the chief orators of our time, among them 
 Henry Clay, John Quincy Adams, Ogden Hoffman, S. S. Prentiss, 
 William H. Seward, Charles Sumner, Wendell Phillips, George Will 
 iam Curtis, some of the great preachers, and Webster, Everett, 
 Choate, and Winthrop at their best. But I never witnessed such an 
 effect of speech upon men as Mr. Emerson apparently then attained. 
 It reached at once to his own definition of eloquence, a taking sov 
 ereign possession of the audience. He had uttered but a few sen 
 tences before he seemed to have welded together the whole mass of 
 discordant material and lifted them to the same height of sympathy and 
 passion. He excited them to smiles, to tears, to the wildest enthu 
 siasm. His tribute to Burns is beautiful to read, perhaps the best 
 which the occasion produced on either side of the ocean. But the 
 clear articulation, the ringing emphasis, the musical modulation of 
 tone and voice, the loftiness of bearing, and the radiance of his face, 
 all made a part of the consummate charm. When he closed, the 
 company could hardly tolerate any other speaker, though good ones 
 were to follow." 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 235 
 
 and out of London. " The Excursion was 
 nearer to nature than anything we had be 
 fore. ... It was the human soul in these last 
 ages striving for a publication of itself." He 
 could quote almost entirely the " Prelude " 
 and " Excursion " ; and he included more 
 selections from Wordsworth in his " Parnas 
 sus " than from any other save Shakespeare. 
 From Carlyle on Coleridge in the Life of 
 Sterling, and on Wordsworth in " Rem 
 iniscences " there is no need of quoting. 
 " A man of great and useless genius " he 
 calls Coleridge in one of his letters. Southey 
 Emerson and Carlyle rated alike. When 
 Landor praised Southey to Emerson, Emer 
 son was " pestered " by it, and exclaimed, 
 " But who is Southey ? " When Carlyle read 
 Southey s article on the Saint Simonians in 
 the Quarterly , he said, " My brother, I say 
 unto thee, thou art a poor creature." Lan 
 dor himself was one of the four eminent men 
 of letters Coleridge, Carlyle, and Words 
 worth the others whom Emerson sought 
 out in his first visit to Europe, in 1833, and 
 to whom he devoted the first chapter of his 
 " English Traits." Noting in this chapter 
 
236 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 that Landor is "strangely undervalued in 
 England, usually ignored, and sometimes 
 savagely attacked/ he records his own admi 
 ration of his energy and creative force, and 
 his judgment that "year after year the 
 scholar must still go back to Landor for a 
 multitude of elegant sentences for wisdom, 
 wit and indignation that are unforgetable." 
 He writes of Landor as of the others of the 
 four in the Dial: "We do not recollect 
 an example of more complete independence 
 in literary life;" " he is a man full of thoughts, 
 but not, like Coleridge, a man of ideas " ; * 
 and as late at least as 1865 ne was st ^ prais 
 ing Landor in yet higher terms. 
 
 * It was not until 1856, twenty-three years after the interview 
 with Landor in Florence, that " English Traits" was published ; and 
 it provoked an Open Letter from Landor to Emerson, published in 
 pamphlet form at Bath, which, now almost forgotten and unknown, 
 is one of the curiosities of literature. Mannerly and courteous through 
 out, it gives evidence that Landor had been much more " pestered " 
 by some things Emerson had said about himself than Emerson had 
 been by Landor s own enthusiasm about Sou they. For Sou they he 
 again takes up the cudgel, depreciating Carlyle and Wordsworth in 
 contrast. When he had once heard Wordsworth remark that he 
 "would not give five shillings for all of Southey s poetry," he had 
 told a friend that he " might safely make such investment of his 
 money and throw all his own poetry in." Southey, on the strength 
 of Lander s early poem, "Gebir,"had compared him with Goethe, 
 and given him the preference. He hastens to say that he doesn t con- 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 237 
 
 In Byron, Emerson sees a perverted will 
 and a wasted life, once speaks of his genius 
 as " unhallowed " ; yet to Mr. Thayer, on 
 the California trip in 1871, he spoke highly 
 of Byron as an efficient poet, observing 
 that " there is a sort of scenic and general 
 luck about him." Carlyle, whose first mes 
 sage to the world almost had been, " Shut 
 your Byron ; open your Goethe," after 
 wards, when he heard of Byron s death, 
 affected perhaps by Goethe s own great 
 admiration for Byron, felt that " the no 
 blest spirit in Europe " was gone. " If 
 
 sider this the greatest praise in the world 5 that, in his judgment, 
 "fifty pages of Shelley contain more true poetry than a hundred pages 
 of Goethe," that " Wilhelm Meister " is " trash," and that Goethe 
 couldn t have written in a lifetime any twenty of his own " Imaginary 
 Conversations." Gravitating to politics, he says, "Democracy, such 
 as yours in America, is my abhorrence "5 and he makes a vigorous 
 p ea for the lost art of assassination, counting the stigma placed upon 
 it by the moderns a proof of our lapse from classic virtue, and calling 
 especially for a revival of it with reference to the Austrian tyrant then 
 trampling upon Italy. It might be guessed that here, as Emerson 
 found touching other things in 1833, Landor " carries to its height 
 the love of freak which the English delight to indulge "5 but he is 
 entirely serious. As concerns Landor s depreciation of Goethe, one 
 remembers that Emerson had the same experience with Wordsworth. 
 "He proceeded to abuse Goethe s Wilhelm Meister heartily. It 
 was full of all manner of fornication. He had never gone farther 
 than the first part ; so disgusted was he that he threw the book across 
 the room." 
 
238 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 they had said the sun or moon was gone 
 out of the heavens," wrote Miss Welsh, 
 whom Carlyle only two years before had 
 taught to shun Byron, " it could not have 
 struck me with the idea of a more awful or 
 dreary blank in the creation than the words, 
 c Byron is dead " ; and Carlyle answered, 
 "The news of his death came upon my 
 heart like a mass of lead as if I had 
 lost a brother. Late so full of fire and 
 generous passion and proud purposes ; and 
 now forever dumb. Poor Byron ! and but 
 a young man, still struggling amidst the 
 perplexities and sorrows and aberrations 
 of a mind not arrived at maturity, or set 
 tled in its proper place in life. Had he 
 been spared to the age of three-score and 
 ten, what might he not have done, what 
 might he not have been ! " 
 
 Emerson cc never could endure Shelley," 
 Whipple tells us. " Shelley, though a poetic 
 mind, is never a poet," he says somewhere. 
 " I cannot read Shelley with comfort," he 
 said to Mr. Woodbury. " His visions 
 are not in accord with the facts ; they are 
 not accurate. He soars to sink." One 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 239 
 
 can imagine the suffering, however one 
 may differ from Emerson s judgment of 
 Shelley, and I find its severity hard to 
 understand, with which he would have 
 read Mr. Chapman s judgment, that in 
 " Nature " he showed himself " a sort of 
 Yankee Shelley " ! Swinburne and the 
 Englishmen of the fleshly ilk Emerson 
 could not abide. In William Morris s verse 
 he found much to admire, but he wished there 
 were less of it. Of Browning and Ruskin he 
 wrote no adequate or important word. As 
 early as the days of the Dial, he discerned 
 the genius of Tennyson. He "wants rude 
 truth, he is too fine " ; but it will be "long 
 before we have his superior" as a lyrist. 
 He met Tennyson in London in 1847, and 
 found him the "most satisfying" of the 
 English men of letters whom he had seen. 
 " I do not meet, in these late decades, such 
 company over a pipe," was Carlyle s appre 
 ciation of Tennyson. 
 
 There was almost none of his contem 
 poraries in literary London for whom 
 Carlyle had real admiration ; there were 
 few for whom he even expresses respect. 
 
240 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 " Among the scrambling miscellany of 
 notables that hovered about us, Leigh 
 Hunt was probably the best," Leigh 
 Hunt deeply impressed Emerson in Lon 
 don as a pure and beautiful spirit, 
 " Charles Lamb the worst." Campbell s 
 head was a " shop " and his heart " as dry 
 as a Greenock kipper "; Proctor was a good- 
 natured man, but " essentially a small " ; 
 De Quincey, " the dwarf opium - eater," 
 4C carries a laudanum bottle in his pocket 
 and the venom of a wasp in his heart"; 
 Hazlitt was writing his way through France 
 and Italy, "the ginshops and pawnbrokers 
 bewailing his absence." " Good heavens ! 
 I often inwardly exclaim, and is this the 
 literary world ? This rascal rout, this dirty 
 rabble, destitute not only of high feeling and 
 knowledge or intellect, but even of com 
 mon honesty ! . . . Not red-blooded men 
 at all ; only things for writing articles." 
 Yet we must remember that Emerson and 
 Goethe, whom Carlyle esteemed so highly, 
 were his contemporaries ; and we must not 
 forget his enthusiasm for Dickens, his love 
 for Mill, and the essay on the Corn Law 
 Rhymes. 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 241 
 
 Emerson s appreciation of his American 
 contemporaries was generous and enthusiastic. 
 Channing, who belonged more perhaps to 
 the preceding generation than his own, he 
 especially revered. He was "the star of 
 the American church/ <c one of those men 
 who vindicate the power of the American 
 race to produce greatness." Of his relation 
 to the group of Transcendentalists it is not 
 necessary to speak. He had great admira 
 tion for the verses of Helen Hunt; he re 
 garded Forceythe Willson as a poet of ex 
 traordinary promise ; he brought Ellery 
 Channing s "Wanderer" before the public; 
 and he greeted Walt Whitman "at the be 
 ginning of a great career." " It was one 
 part of Emerson s mission," says Sanborn, 
 " to appreciate the best of contemporary 
 authors before the great world did so. Lan- 
 dor, Carlyle, Charles Reade and Matthew 
 Arnold are cases in point, not to mention 
 Alcott, Thoreau and Ellery Channing, 
 William Allingham and David Wasson." 
 He devoted much time and pains to secur 
 ing the publication of Jones Very s essays 
 and poems. Quick in praise of new authors, 
 
242 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 he was plain in criticism. Whitman s 
 " Leaves of Grass " is " a singular blending 
 of the Bhagavat Ghita and the New York 
 Herald." 
 
 He discussed his American contemporaries 
 very freely with Mr. Woodbury, paying trib 
 ute to Dr. Holmes s acuteness, fine sensibil 
 ity, versatility, and catholicity of taste ; to 
 Lowell s geniality and wit, " it does one 
 good to read him " ; to Thoreau, of whom 
 he talked oftener and more tenderly than 
 any other, calling him " my Spartan- 
 Buddhist," " a man whose core and whose 
 breath was conscience " ; to Forceythe Will- 
 son, whose parting song " far surpasses Poe 
 in his most peculiar vein " ; and to Alcott, 
 whose life is " full of beatitudes." " Soc 
 rates thought Athens ought to support him ; 
 and Alcott thinks Boston commonwealth 
 ought to support him and it ought." 
 Louisa Alcott " is, and is to be, the poet of 
 children ; she knows their angels." Walt 
 Whitman, whose " Leaves of Grass " is 
 "wonderful," he contrasts with Poe and his 
 "happy jingle," almost the very phrase, 
 it will be remembered, which he used con- 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 243 
 
 cerning Poe in talking with Mr. Howells. 
 He would have read with curious surprise 
 the recent dictum of one of our leading liter 
 ary journals, that the three greatest Ameri 
 can men of letters are " Emerson, Haw 
 thorne, and Poe." He would have said that 
 a first qualification for a great man of letters 
 is to have something of import to say ; and 
 he would have named a dozen poems of 
 Lowell s to go no farther as beautiful 
 in word and form as anything of Poe s, 
 with the additional merit of import. The 
 real greatness of Hawthorne he failed to 
 appreciate. " No one ought to write as 
 Hawthorne has," he said ; and concern 
 ing " The Scarlet Letter " he exclaimed, 
 " Ghastly, ghastly ! " This was in accord 
 ance with a general principle of his. " I do 
 not read the sad in literature," he said. He 
 would not read " Les Miserables." " In all 
 good writings " he expected to find some 
 thing " hearty or happy." " Melancholy is 
 unendurable," he said; "grief is abnormal." 
 The extent to which Emerson pressed 
 this doctrine, wholesome and necessary as it 
 is in its right measure, surely marks one 
 
244 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 of his limitations ; and in the argument be 
 tween him and young Woodbury, which the 
 latter reports, the student has the stronger 
 case, showing what the deep and tragical 
 notes are which breathe through the Bible 
 from Genesis to Revelation, from the story 
 of Job to the story of Calvary ; what the 
 problems are with which Greek tragedy and 
 the Eastern scripture deal ; what it is that 
 Dante wrote into his poem and life wrote 
 into Dante s face ; what the myriad miseries 
 and sorrows are which Shakespeare was " too 
 faithful to humanity to conceal"; and what 
 the sights were which blind Milton saw, 
 what the imperatives to " Paradise Lost," 
 " Samson Agonistes," and " II Penseroso." 
 Perhaps the strongest pages in Mr. Morley s 
 essay are those in which he similarly points 
 out Emerson s failure to grapple as Milton 
 and Michael Angelo and Dante and 
 ^Eschylus and Isaiah grapple yes, and 
 Hawthorne and Hugo and Carlyle with 
 the world s dark tragedies of sin and suffer 
 ing, depravity and death.* 
 
 * To Michael Angelo he makes concessions. " I miss cheerful 
 ness," he says, writing of him to Herman Grimm. "He is tragic, 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 245 
 
 We are brought here so close to the point 
 which is most discussed by religious critics 
 in their essays upon Emerson, the point of 
 his Christianism in relation to his Hellenism, 
 that reference should be made to his own 
 clearest and strongest statement of his posi 
 tion. That, it seems to me, is his essay on 
 " The Tragic," which, first given as a lect 
 ure, then published in the Dial, stands now 
 as the last essay in the last volume of his 
 complete Works, with its last words these : 
 " The intellect in its purity and the moral 
 sense in its purity are not distinguished from 
 each other, and both ravish us into a region 
 whereinto these passionate clouds of sorrow 
 cannot rise." Emerson is not blind to the 
 world s sorrow. His first words are : " He 
 has seen but half the universe who never has 
 been shown the house of Pain." But he 
 holds that " all sorrow dwells in a low re 
 gion." The real tragic element, he insists, 
 is almost invariably Terror; and Terror is 
 born of ignorance of our own real nature and 
 
 like Dante." "But," he adds, "we must let him be as sad as he 
 pleases. He is one of the indispensable men on whose credit the race 
 goes." He pays tribute to him, also, as "a noble, suffering soul, 
 poor, that others may be rich." 
 
246 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 of the constitution of the universe. "All 
 melancholy, as all passion, belongs to the ex 
 terior life." But when a man is " grounded 
 in the divine life by his proper roots," that 
 is, when he sees the end from the beginning, 
 as God sees it, he can feel neither terror nor 
 sorrow ; and the task of the religious man, 
 the son of God, is to elevate life to tran 
 scendence of both. Sorrow and suffering, in 
 a word, are not attributes of the Infinite, but 
 of the finite and imperfect. The Divine is 
 joyful, because it always knows the function 
 of discipline and sees that the end is good ; 
 and we rise to this confidence and serenity 
 as we realize our own divinity. So far as 
 we are God, so far we do not sorrow. 
 There is no other word of Emerson so 
 Greek as this ; but here and not elsewhere 
 the discussion of his attitude toward suffer 
 ing and sin and sorrow must begin. 
 
 Emerson was greatly attracted by Mon 
 taigne. When a boy, he found a volume of 
 Montaigne s essays among his father s books. 
 After leaving college, it came again to his 
 notice, and he procured the remaining vol 
 umes. " I remember the delight and won- 
 

 Emerson and Carlyle 247 
 
 der," he says, " in which I lived with it. It 
 seemed to me as if I had myself written the 
 book in some former life, so sincerely it 
 spoke to my thought and experience." Yet 
 he once said to a young man, "You shall 
 not read Montaigne and be a poet/* although 
 at the same time he noted the fact that 
 Montaigne s Essays was the only book 
 known to have been owned by Shakespeare. 
 Of Plutarch, whom he loves, he says : " He 
 perpetually suggests Montaigne, who was 
 the best reader he has ever found, though 
 Montaigne excelled his master in the point 
 and surprise of his sentences. Plutarch had 
 a religion which Montaigne wanted, and 
 which defends him from wantonness." It 
 is noteworthy that among Carlyle s earliest 
 writings also was an article on Montaigne 
 one of the articles contributed to the Edin 
 burgh Encyclopaedia and that this notice 
 contains no word about Montaigne s re- 
 religious scepticism, but treats the character 
 purely from its human and literary sides. 
 " Montaigne s faithful delineation of human 
 feelings, in all their strength and weakness, 
 will serve as a mirror to every mind capable 
 of self-examination." 
 
248 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 It was through Montaigne that Emerson 
 and John Sterling were first drawn together. 
 Sterling wrote a loving criticism of Mon 
 taigne in the Westminster Review, with a 
 journal of his own pilgrimage to Montaigne s 
 estate and chateau, which attracted Emer 
 son s attention ; and soon after he records, 
 " Carlyle writes me word that this same lover 
 of Montaigne is a lover of me." Sterling 
 had taken " Nature " to his heart ; and Car 
 lyle writes of him to Emerson as one " whom 
 I love better than anybody I have met with 
 since a certain sky-messenger alighted to me 
 at Craigenputtock and vanished in the Blue 
 again." Emerson and Sterling at once en 
 tered into correspondence ; and this corre 
 spondence, extending almost to the day of 
 Sterling s death, and recently published with 
 a tender introduction by Emerson s son, 
 constitutes one of the most beautiful chapters 
 in the biographies of the two men, who 
 strangely never met. In one letter Sterling 
 writes to Emerson, " You are the only man 
 in the world with whom, though unseen, 
 I feel any sort of nearness," making us 
 think of the closeness with which that other 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 249 
 
 rare English spirit, whose spiritual struggles 
 were so like Sterling s, Arthur Hugh 
 Clough, was drawn to Emerson.* Emer 
 son felt that Sterling " had certain American 
 qualities in his genius." To Emerson 
 Sterling dedicated in the following lines 
 his tragedy of " Strafford," published the 
 year before his death : 
 
 " Teacher of starry wisdom, high, serene, 
 
 Receive the gift our common ground supplies ; 
 Red flowers, dark leaves, that ne er on earth had 
 
 been 
 Without the influence of sidereal skies." 
 
 Both Emerson and Carlyle read much 
 that was ephemeral and contemporaneous, 
 studied and wrote much upon the social 
 movements of their period, published much 
 in the magazines. Emerson was editor of 
 two reviews, and one of the group of writers 
 who started the Atlantic Monthly ; and he 
 knew the value of newspapers and their 
 danger to the scholar. " Newspapers have 
 done much to abbreviate expression, and 
 so to improve style. They are to occupy 
 
 * Herman Grimm, in 1867, wrote to Emerson in almost Sterling s 
 words, "I can mention no one whom I wish to know except yourself." 
 
25 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 during your generation," he said to the 
 Williams student, " a large share of atten 
 tion ; and the most studious and engaged 
 man can only neglect them at his cost. 
 But have little to do with them. Learn 
 how to get their best without their getting 
 yours. Do not read them when the mind 
 is creative ; and do not read them thor 
 oughly. Remember they are made for 
 everybody, and don t try to get what isn t 
 meant for you. There is a great secret in 
 knowing what to keep out of the mind as 
 well as what to put in. Give yourself only 
 so many minutes for the paper; then you 
 will learn to avoid the stuff put in for 
 people who have nothing to think." He 
 would give to Concord and Boston and 
 London what was their due ; but he would 
 not let the young schplar forget his citizen 
 ship in Rome and Athens and Palestine and 
 Persia. 
 
 Emerson greatly loved the Persian poets, 
 and he wrote a preface to an American edi 
 tion of Saadi s " Gulistan." He loved the 
 Vedas, put India into poems, and was really 
 the first to turn American hunger or curi- 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 251 
 
 osity toward the Orient. The time which 
 Emerson gave to Persian poetry Carlyle 
 gave to Norse mythology ; and perhaps he 
 found a greater affinity with his own char 
 acter in Odin and Thor than Emerson 
 found in Saadi and Hafiz. 
 
 Both men lived much in the classical 
 world, Emerson especially with Plato and Plu 
 tarch. The Meditations of Marcus Aure- 
 lius, with whom Arnold chose to rank him, 
 were especially dear to him in his youth. 
 Emerson s favorite study in school and 
 college days was Greek, and many of 
 his translations of both Greek and Latin 
 authors were remarkably good. In mathe 
 matics he could make no headway, whereas 
 Carlyle s mathematical ability was so great 
 as to have drawn the attention of Legendre. 
 He translated Legendre s Geometry, and he 
 was at one time a prominent candidate for 
 the professorship of astronomy in Edin 
 burgh University. cc Of the old Greek 
 books," said Emerson, "there are five 
 which we cannot spare : Homer, Herodotus, 
 ./Eschylus, Plato, and Plutarch " ; but really 
 only the last two seem to have been among 
 
252 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 his inseparable friends. There is no writer 
 of whom he speaks with more constant 
 fondness than Plutarch. No other Amer 
 ican has written of Plutarch so well. " I 
 must think we are more deeply indebted to 
 him than to all the ancient writers," he says. 
 " I do not know where to find a book, to 
 borrow a phrase of Ben Jonson s, f so 
 rammed with life. " I find him a better 
 teacher of rhetoric than any modern. His 
 superstitions are poetic, aspiring, affirmative. 
 A poet might rhyme all day with hints 
 drawn from Plutarch." " His faith in the 
 immortality of the soul is another measure 
 of his deep humanity. . . . He believes that 
 the doctrine of the Divine Providence and 
 that of the immortality of the soul rest on 
 one and the same basis," as did Emerson 
 himself. 
 
 Emerson early came to love Plato, and 
 after leaving college and all through his 
 life studied him closely. " Plato," says Dr. 
 Holmes, "comes nearest to being his idol, 
 Shakespeare next." "Out of Plato," he 
 said, " came all things that are still written 
 and debated among men of thought. The 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 253 
 
 work of Plato is that writing which, in the 
 history of civilization, is entitled to Omar s 
 account of the Koran, when he said, f Burn the 
 libraries ; for, if they contain anything good, 
 it is contained in this book/ " "Why," he 
 asks, "should not young men be educated 
 in this book [Plato] ? It would suffice for 
 the tuition of the race ! " " Read Plato s 
 ( Republic ! Read Plato s < Republic ! 
 Read Plato s c Republic ! " he repeated to 
 one young man. "He lifts man toward the 
 divine, and I like it when I hear that a man 
 reads Plato. I want to meet that man " ; 
 as he used similarly to say that he felt like 
 embracing men who loved Horace. But 
 " Plato," wrote Emerson of Carlyle at 
 Craigenputtock, " he does not read, and he 
 disparaged Socrates." Later, however, Car 
 lyle studied Plato, and his political views 
 were directly influenced by him. " I re 
 member when Emerson first came to see 
 me, that he had a great deal to say about 
 Plato that was very attractive, and I began 
 to look up Plato ; but amid the endless 
 dialectical hair-splitting was generally com 
 pelled to shut up the book and say, c How 
 
254 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 does all this concern me at all ? But later 
 on I have read Plato with much pleasure, 
 finding him an elevated soul, spreading a 
 pure atmosphere around one as he reads " ; 
 and then he proceeds to quote, with great 
 relish, Plato s beratings of Cleon, the shoe 
 maker, for meddling with politics, and the 
 rest of his scorn of the Athenian democracy. 
 The Neo-Platonists were always favorites 
 with Emerson, Plotinus and the rest ; and 
 he was a great reader of Swedenborg and 
 the mystics. He placed Swedenborg among 
 the five poets whom he recognized as defy 
 ing the powers of destruction, Homer, 
 Dante, Shakespeare, Swedenborg, and 
 Goethe. Of Dante s power to embody 
 his own life and time in highest poetry 
 Emerson wrote the most striking words 
 which have been written ; but his general 
 use of Dante is not important while 
 Carlyle spoke the first adequate word of 
 appreciation of Dante in modern England. 
 Emerson specially valued the bibles of the 
 race and such authors as Epictetus, Thomas 
 a Kempis, and Pascal. The highest class 
 of books, he said, are those which express 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 255 
 
 the moral element; the next, works of 
 the imagination ; and the next, works of 
 science. " There is a mental power and 
 creation," he says in one place, " more ex 
 cellent than anything which is commonly 
 called philosophy and literature." The 
 high poets, as Homer, Milton, and Shake 
 speare, "do not fully content us." They 
 " do not offer us heavenly bread " ; and the 
 true poetry is to be found in Zoroaster and 
 Plato, Saint John and Menu, " with their 
 moral burdens." Above all is the Bible, 
 most original and most profound. " People 
 imagine that the place which the Bible holds 
 in the world it owes to miracles. It owes 
 it simply to the fact that it came out of 
 a profounder depth of thought than any 
 other book, and the effect must be pre 
 cisely proportionate." " Gibbon fancied that 
 it was combinations of circumstances that 
 gave Christianity its place in history ; but 
 in nature it takes an ounce to balance an 
 ounce." " The most wonderful words I 
 ever heard of being uttered by man," said 
 Carlyle, " are those in the four Evangelists, 
 by Jesus of Nazareth. Their intellectual 
 
256 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 talent is hardly inferior to their moral." 
 "Our divinest symbol," he said, "is Jesus 
 of Nazareth and his life and what followed 
 therefrom ; higher has the human thought 
 not yet reached." Jesus, said Emerson, 
 " alone in all history estimated the greatness 
 of man." 
 
 Both men were lovers of history, rever- 
 encers, with all that was prophetic in them, 
 of the past and its great lessons. Carlyle 
 was the greatest historian in the England of 
 his time. He wrote wise essays upon " Biog 
 raphy," "History," and "History Again," 
 and devoted to history his last public 
 utterance. " History " is the subject of the 
 first essay in Emerson s first series of es 
 says ; and the first word sounds his key 
 note of interpretation. One of his earliest 
 and most important lecture courses was one 
 twelve lectures upon the "Philosophy 
 of History." He had the highest qualities 
 of the historian. Judge Hoar s tribute to 
 his historical address on Concord as " the 
 most complete and exquisite picture of the 
 origin, history, and peculiar characteristics 
 of a New England town that has ever been 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 257 
 
 produced " was a just tribute. There are 
 no lines which throw more illuminating light 
 than his upon e^ery period of our American 
 history, the Colonial period, the period of 
 the Revolution, and the period of the Anti- 
 slavery struggle and the Civil War. 
 
 Both men were students of the individual. 
 In reading history, Emerson said, the stu 
 dent is to "prefer the history of individ 
 uals." He gives lists of the autobiographies 
 and table-talks which he loves, the books 
 which bring the student close to the heart of 
 the great actors of a period. He prized the 
 works of Ben Jonson as " a sort of hoop " 
 to bind all the Elizabethan men together 
 and to England. Biography is the only 
 history, Carlyle said : history is chiefly the 
 record of what the great men in the world 
 have done. Emerson was not a hero-wor 
 shipper in the Carlylian sense. History 
 is all in me, he said, in every man. The 
 foundation idea of his interpretation of his 
 tory is that there is one mind common to 
 all individual men. Carlyle writes of Hero- 
 worship, Emerson of the Uses of Great 
 Men. The great man is the useful man, 
 
258 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 the greatest man the best servant. " Self- 
 trust," he said, " is the essence of heroism." 
 " That which takes my fancy most in the 
 heroic class," he says, "is the good humor 
 and hilarity they exhibit." This is true of 
 some of the heroic, but it is not true of 
 others. " Times of heroism," as he recog 
 nizes, "are generally times of terror"; and 
 the hero of the terror must be sad and 
 stern. " Emerson s ideal," says John Bur 
 roughs, " is always the scholar, the man of 
 books and ready wit ; Carlyle s hero is a 
 riding or striding ruler or a master worker 
 in some active field." Yet we criticise these 
 generalizations almost as fast as we make 
 them, and file the crowding exceptions. 
 We think of Carlyle s tribute to the literary 
 life as the most fortunate and influential 
 life, in his essay on Voltaire ; and Emerson 
 mentions Napoleon, generally in praise of 
 some energetic quality, oftener than he 
 mentions anybody else save Shakespeare, 
 oftener than Plato, Plutarch, or Goethe, who 
 stand next in order. It is illuminating to 
 compare Emerson s " Representative Men " 
 and the subjects of his early biographical 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 259 
 
 lectures, Michael Angelo, Milton, Luther, 
 George Fox, and Edmund Burke, with the 
 men whom Carlyle chooses to represent 
 his sundry heroisms. With the early bi 
 ographical course he gave an introductory 
 lecture on "The Tests of Great Men," 
 corresponding to the lecture on " The 
 Uses of Great Men," which introduced 
 the course on " Representative Men." The 
 two write often of the same men, Napo 
 leon, Goethe, Shakespeare, but differently. 
 Carlyle is always the advocate or prose 
 cutor ; Emerson is judicial, and we feel a 
 kind of finality in what he says. Napo 
 leon s case cannot be reopened. There is 
 in Emerson s page always a certain spirit of 
 superiority to the man he writes of; but we 
 find that this is born of his identification of 
 himself with humanity, his taking of his 
 reader into partnership, and the judgment 
 appears no more his than ours as we read. 
 To Carlyle common mankind is a mere 
 flock of sheep, and the main thing is to 
 find good "bell-wethers" for the "dull 
 host." To Emerson " all men are wise ; 
 the difference is in art." " The great are 
 
260 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 our better selves, ourselves with advan 
 tages," the men who are able to express 
 more clearly some idea which others also 
 accept, and the homage paid them is 
 " anything but humiliation ; it is men s ex 
 pression of their hope of what they shall 
 become when the obstructions of their mal 
 formation and mal-education shall be trained 
 away." 
 
 Right here is the ground of the main 
 differences between Carlyle and Emerson. 
 Here Carlyle goes to despotism, a despot 
 ism, albeit, based in a searching radicalism 
 and rooted in most human sympathies, a 
 despotism of brains, loving the people and 
 having no respect for the "dignities and a 
 that, * a despotism a thousand times more 
 democratic than all Whiggism, and Em 
 erson is the stanch republican. No one 
 could characterize Carlyle s politics better 
 than Emerson himself: "Young men, es 
 pecially those holding liberal opinions, press 
 to see him, but he treats them with con 
 tempt ; they profess freedom, and he stands 
 for slavery ; they praise republics, and he 
 likes the Russian czar ; they admire Cob- 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 261 
 
 den and free trade, and he is a protectionist 
 in political economy; they praise moral 
 suasion, he goes for murder, money, capital 
 punishment, and other pretty abominations 
 of English law ; they wish freedom of the 
 press, and he thinks the first thing he would 
 do, if he got into Parliament, would be to 
 turn out the reporters and stop all manner 
 of mischievous speaking to Buncombe and 
 wind-bags ; they go for free institutions, for 
 letting things alone, and only giving oppor 
 tunity and motive to every man, he for a 
 stringent government, that shows people 
 what they must do, and makes them do it." 
 Carlyle really never thought himself out 
 in politics. He railed, and that is easy, 
 and he had plenty to rail at: the faithful 
 and hopeful democrat is as conscious as he 
 of the defects of democracy. But he sug 
 gested no method by which his benevolent 
 despot could be made a despot in this mod 
 ern world, or kept benevolent, or secured a 
 benevolent successor; and he would have 
 railed at any method which any man had 
 ventured to suggest. Some glimmering of 
 a better way painfully evolving in humanity 
 
262 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 he curiously confesses to Emerson himself 
 in one of his last letters (1871): "In my 
 occasional explosions against Anarchy, and 
 my inextinguishable hatred of //, I privately 
 whisper to myself: Could any Friedrich 
 Wilhelm now, or Friedrich, or most per 
 fect Governor you could hope to realize, 
 guide forward what is America s essential 
 task at present faster or more completely 
 than Anarchic America is now doing ? 
 Such f Anarchy has a great deal to say for 
 itself." * 
 
 *" Emerson s high and transparent sanity, among other things, 
 kept him in line with the ruling tendencies of his age, and his teach 
 ing brings all the aid that abstract teaching can towards the solution 
 of the moral problems of modern societies. Carlyle chose to fling 
 himself headlong and blindfold athwart the great currents of things, 
 against all the forces and elements that are pushing modern societies 
 forward. Beginning in his earlier work with the same faith as Emer 
 son in leading instincts, he came to dream that the only leading in 
 stinct worth thinking about is that of self-will, mastery, force and 
 violent strength. Emerson was for basing the health of a modern 
 commonwealth on the only real strength, and the only kind of force 
 that can be relied upon, namely, the honest, manly, simple and 
 emancipated character of the citizen. This gives to his doctrine a 
 hold and a prize on the work of the day, and makes him our helper. 
 Carlyle s perverse reaction had wrecked and stranded him when the 
 world came to ask him for direction. In spite of his resplendent 
 genius, he had no direction to give, and was only able in vague and 
 turbid torrents of words to hide a shallow and obsolete lesson." 
 John Morley. 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 263 
 
 " Emerson told me once," says Edward 
 Everett Hale, " that when, in the winter of 
 1848, he left Liverpool for America, Arthur 
 Hugh Clough, the young poet, accompanied 
 him to the ship, and walked the deck with 
 him until she sailed. Clough was sad for 
 his departure. He said: c You leave all 
 of us young Englishmen without a leader. 
 Carlyle has led us into the desert, and he 
 has left us there/ Emerson said to him, 
 c That is what all young men in England 
 have said to me ; and he placed his hand 
 on dough s head, and said, c I ordain you 
 Bishop of all England, to go up and down 
 among all the young men, and lead them 
 into the promised land/ Alas ! " comments 
 Dr. Hale, " Clough was not one of the 
 leaders of men : rather a listener and a fol 
 lower. And the young men of England 
 and America were left to the greater lesson 
 of the Master of Life, that every life must 
 for itself drink from the infinite Fountain. 
 The days of chieftains, of proconsuls, of 
 dukes and barons are gone by ; the day of 
 the boss and the magician was over when 
 the Master of Life spoke the Word. The 
 
264 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 kingdom of heaven is open to each man 
 who will thunder at the door. The king 
 dom of heaven suffers violence ; and the 
 sturdy and persevering, and only they, are 
 those who take it by force." 
 
 Emerson believed in the people, in the 
 present and in progress. Carlyle painted 
 the tombs of the prophets, but too often 
 stoned the prophets sent to his generation. 
 He would very likely have been much pes 
 tered by Cromwell and his Puritans if he 
 had lived in London then ; and he might 
 have told Luther, if he had heard his ham 
 mer whacking on the door of Wittenberg 
 church, amidst the rabblement, that he had 
 better be attending to " the duty that lay 
 nearest him." He failed to see Mazzini s 
 vision, and to divine that he had the truest 
 political prophet of the age to his neighbor, 
 while walking in and out with him every 
 day. Emerson was the universal man, to 
 whom past and present, history and the 
 newspaper, were the same. " Tis wonder 
 ful," he writes in 1864, "what sublime les 
 sons I have once and again read on the bul 
 letin boards in the streets ! " His perception 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 265 
 
 of the good was immediate ; and he knew 
 John Brown for a hero while the musketry 
 was rattling at Harper s Ferry as truly as 
 the men of Concord Bridge whose shot had 
 been heard round the world and been ap 
 plauded all along the line. Emerson be 
 lieved in America and the republic, in its 
 opportunity and power ; and we go to him to 
 feed our patriotism. " To him more than 
 to all other causes together/ Lowell has 
 said, with great boldness, perhaps, and think 
 ing of the Harvard heroes, " did the young 
 martyrs of our civil war owe the sustaining 
 strength of thoughtful heroism that is so 
 touching in every record of their lives." 
 Yet we must remember that, if Carlyle s 
 pages are not calculated to stir the patriotism 
 of Englishmen, there was little that was 
 admirable in the social and political condi 
 tions of the England to which it was his 
 lot to address himself. We do not go to 
 Emerson s addresses on slavery to warm our 
 love of country ; and had Emerson been 
 born, like Carlyle, into the midst of the 
 Cl morgue of aristocracy," his speech there 
 would often have taken the form of a Lat 
 ter-day Pamphlet. 
 
266 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 Here, too, in this root view of human 
 nature, is the ground of such pessimism as 
 there is in Carlyle and of Emerson s com 
 plete optimism. There is none of Carlyle s 
 despair in Emerson. All evil is to him a 
 temporary lack of harmony ; and there is 
 always at work in the affairs of the world 
 a power which compels men to be just, so 
 that what is useful and right will last, and 
 what is bad and hurtful will sink. There 
 is a law always working to make the best 
 better and the worst good. Moral deformity 
 itself is good passion out of place. " Nature 
 is upheld by antagonism. Passions, resist 
 ance, danger, are educators. We acquire 
 the strength we have overcome." Law is 
 the highest method of freedom. No evil 
 ever escapes unpunished. Crime and pun 
 ishment grow out of one stem ; but all work 
 together for the universal good. This faith 
 in the universal good grew with Emerson as 
 he grew older ; and hence the ever-deepen 
 ing serenity and trust which made his last 
 days best. It was the faith in Providence. 
 " I have heard prayers," he asked his 
 readers in the cc Sovereignty of Ethics," his 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 267 
 
 last great religious utterance, whether they 
 had never had occasion to say this to them 
 selves, " I have prayed, even ; but I have 
 never until now dreamed that this undertak 
 ing the entire management of my own affairs 
 was not commendable. I have never seen, 
 until now, that it dwarfed me. I have not 
 discovered, until this blessed ray flashed just 
 now through my soul, that there dwelt any 
 power in nature that would relieve me of my 
 load. But now I see." It is in the persist 
 ent, consistent faith in the soul, in man, in 
 progress, and in the reliable omnipotence 
 of the good, that Emerson s superiority to 
 Carlyle consists. This is the faith that sus 
 tains and inspires, and this alone that can 
 do it constantly. 
 
 It is bad to be with Carlyle habitually. 
 It is bad not to have Emerson always on 
 the table. He is a civilizer. His reverence 
 for man as man begat the gentlest manners 
 and the most delicate deference to all. He 
 rebukes our rudeness, hurry, and self-asser 
 tion by the mere thought of him, while 
 Carlyle often feeds them. " He is a born 
 gentleman," said Frederika Bremer. He 
 
268 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 was the perfect gentleman for the same 
 reason that he was the perfect republican. 
 We should laugh at an essay from Carlyle 
 on Manners, kind as that great heart was 
 in its innermost, and fine his courtesy when 
 he bethought himself. He was boisterous, 
 obtrusive often and rude, breaking every 
 rule of etiquette, perhaps, every twenty- 
 four hours. He was forgetful of others, 
 careless too often, if comfortable himself, 
 whether others were comfortable or no, 
 careless how much he might disturb the 
 peace and happiness of others by the vain 
 and ineffectual ventilation of his own mis 
 eries. He was doubtless an uncomfortable 
 man to live with, much of the time ; and 
 the loneliness and hardships to which Mrs. 
 Carlyle was subjected during those long 
 years at Craigenputtock, with the pans and 
 kettles, and with no "immensities" or "eter 
 nities " of her own, to speak of, to cheer her 
 up, were certainly severe. Thoughtlessness ? 
 Yes ; but it was mournful thoughtlessness, 
 and perhaps the remorse of " Reminiscen 
 ces " was scarcely too severe an atonement 
 for this and some of the London matters, 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 269 
 
 although too much has been heard of all 
 this, and the gossip has done gross wrong to 
 Carlyle and to the truth. 
 
 Emerson was by far the rounder man, 
 more-sided. A many-sided man it is not 
 just to call Carlyle. Of prodigious knowl 
 edge, writing on many subjects, these are 
 chiefly in a few directions, circling round 
 and illustrating a few great ideas. Man, in 
 his history and destiny and literature, was 
 what exclusively held Carlyle s attention ; 
 and history and society he approached with 
 serious limitations. That quick and loving 
 interest in nature which breathes in all of 
 Emerson s pages, and of which his poetry 
 especially is so largely an expression, we look 
 for in vain in Carlyle. Nor was his interest 
 in Art greater. Such interest as appears is 
 the interest rather of the student of history, 
 who must take account of art as of politics 
 or of pauperism. " I was at the Museum 
 a week ago seeking pictures [for the French 
 Revolution] ; found none ; but got a sight of 
 Albert Diirer and (I find) some shadow of 
 his old teutschen, deep, still soul, which was 
 well worth the getting." It is an interest in 
 
270 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 the man, not the artist, as he was interested 
 in portraits of John Knox. He would 
 probably have been equally interested in one 
 of Holbein s Henries and in the Mona Lisa. 
 We should like to know what he was chiefly 
 thinking about as he wandered with Emer 
 son, on that Stonehenge day, through Wilton 
 Hall, among the pictures and the statues, 
 " to which Carlyle, catalogue in hand, did all 
 too much justice." He should have been 
 interested in art, if only to have written 
 adequately on the man, Michael Angelo. 
 There is nothing that he did not give us 
 which we should have liked so well, unless 
 it be the Life of Luther. In Emerson s 
 study there was only one large picture, a 
 copy of Michael Angelo s " Fates." We 
 should have looked for this with Carlyle, 
 perhaps, and here rather for the "Trans 
 figuration " or the Parthenon. But do not 
 we see on second thought that it was in its 
 proper home, and that its prominence was 
 proper ? " The moral sentiment in us is 
 inspiration ; out there in Nature we see its 
 fatal strength. . . . The dice are loaded ; the 
 globe is a battery, because every atom is a 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 271 
 
 magnet ; and the police and sincerity of the 
 universe are secured by God s delegating 
 his divinity to every particle ; there is no 
 room for hypocrisy, no margin for choice. 
 . . . The book of Nature is the book of 
 Fate. ... If we give it the high sense in 
 which the poets used it, even thought itself 
 is not above Fate ; that, too, must act ac 
 cording to eternal laws." Emerson would 
 have been most likely to have given us the 
 adequate essay on " the hand that rounded 
 Peter s dome," as that hand, writing upon 
 Fate, would have fixed its relation to free 
 dom just as Emerson fixed it. Indeed, 
 Emerson did lecture upon Michael Angelo, 
 it was, I think, the first biographical 
 lecture he ever gave. In inculcating self- 
 reliance, he appeals to Michael Angelo s 
 course, " to confide in one s self and be 
 something of worth and value " ; and both 
 in prose and verse he celebrates his divine 
 inspiration : " Michael Angelo is largely 
 filled with the Creator that made and makes 
 men." " Himself from God he could not 
 free." "It is almost a test by which the 
 finest people I have ever known might be 
 
272 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 selected," he writes to Herman Grimm, 
 " their interest in Michael Angelo and his 
 friends, Vittoria Colonna in chief." He 
 corresponds enthusiastically with Margaret 
 Fuller about Michael Angelo and Raphael. 
 The Boston Athenaeum "on whose sunny 
 roof and beautiful chambers," writes Emer 
 son, cc may the benediction of centuries of 
 students rest with mine " had then just 
 added to its library a small collection of 
 plaster casts, Michael Angelo s " Day " and 
 " Night " among them, and a good number 
 of engravings of the works of the French 
 and Italian masters. " Here was old Greece 
 and old Italy brought bodily to New Eng 
 land, and a verification given to all our 
 dreams and readings." But Emerson has 
 not written so wisely or with so much in 
 spiration on painting and sculpture as on 
 poetry : we could wish that, when embalm 
 ing Guercino in song, he had written another 
 name instead, and such like ; yet upon the 
 general principles of all true art what other 
 American has written essays comparable in 
 luminousness and stimulation with his ? 
 Carlyle doubted whether Art, in the old 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 273 
 
 Greek and Italian sense, were possible for 
 men in this era. " Were not perhaps the 
 founder of a religion our true Homer at 
 present ? " he asked. " The whole soul 
 must be illuminated, made harmonious/ 
 " I will try for Winckelmann," he said 
 again ; " but in my heterodox heart there 
 is yearly growing up the strangest, crabbed, 
 one-sided persuasion, that art is but a remi 
 niscence now : that for us in these days 
 prophecy (well understood), not poetry, is 
 the thing wanted. How can we sing and 
 paint when we do not yet believe and see ? " 
 There is deep truth here. Art in the an 
 tique sense has seemed almost impossible in 
 this age. There is little which the sculptors 
 or the painters have done in these days in 
 England or America which really expresses 
 the earnest or actual mind of the time, or 
 will ever be hunted up as evidence. Pictures 
 of buttercups and sunsets and the full moon 
 cannot do it, although the love of nature is 
 perennially welcome in painting, as in poetry ; 
 nor the yards of battles with which Berlin 
 hangs its walls, and with which records of 
 reaction, obscuration, and anachronism 
 
274 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 New York and London may hang theirs to 
 morrow ; nor portraits of the dangerous little 
 idle classes, manikins to carry silk and 
 velvet that will stand the microscope. The 
 art clubs have seemed fated to be dilettant, 
 seemed rather suffocating places, which 
 should be scented with jockey club and fur 
 nished carefully with chaste correctness, 
 though with stuffed chairs. Their air has 
 been as impossible for the people to breathe 
 as the air of a Fifth Avenue church ; and 
 the people have not breathed it, only the 
 indulged and fortunate have breathed it. 
 Our art has not been for the people : our 
 paintings have not been published, like our 
 books, but parlored, and so calculated for 
 the parlor. Not appealing and not able to 
 appeal to the people, it has not reflected the 
 people s life nor had roots in it. New Eng 
 land sent a roomful of pictures to represent 
 her at the World s Fair. They did not 
 represent her: no visitor could have told 
 whether they came from Boston or Brittany. 
 The student of New England by and by will 
 turn back to the stories of Mrs. Stowe and 
 Mrs. Cooke and Miss Wilkins and Miss 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 275 
 
 Jewett, to Sumner s orations and Parker s 
 sermons, to the " Biglow Papers " and 
 Whittier s ballads and Emerson, but not 
 to the painters ; for there is nothing indige 
 nous and authentic there, nothing reporting 
 life. Boston the Puritan capital, the 
 cradle of liberty, the freer of slaves, the 
 home of historians, the centre of our golden 
 age of poetry and letters rears her temple 
 of culture ; and no canvas or marble on the 
 walls to show that the foundations are not in 
 Birmingham or Bordeaux or Bologna. It 
 is not an answer to say that culture tran 
 scends patriotism and provincialism : a great 
 civic life is not a provincialism, and the 
 inspirations of the nation are a cardinal 
 factor in all vital education and public expe 
 rience. The answer is that art with us is 
 still exotic as likewise in Carlyle s Eng 
 land and Scotland. It was not so in Nu 
 remberg and Venice and Florence and 
 Athens. The painter and the sculptor told 
 of life, of what was in the popular heart. 
 Their work was as public as that of the 
 tragedians and the orators, and profited like 
 theirs from the public stricture and the pub- 
 
276 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 lie praise ; and so they, too, are among 
 the historians, exponents and chroniclers 
 of the times. The fault is not with our 
 artists ; the fault is with ourselves. Carlyle 
 was right. The problem of art is the prob 
 lem of social regeneration. When our so 
 ciety believes and sees, then the artist will 
 match the new life with his larger and braver 
 work. That the braver and larger works 
 have multiplied in England and America; 
 that the public opportunity and craving come; 
 that, even as Carlyle wrote, Ruskin, his own 
 disciple, wrote also; that William Morris has 
 lived and lives, these are encouragements 
 and warrants for the faith that broader and 
 better social visions and ideals are multiply 
 ing, too. 
 
 Carlyle doubted whether Poetry itself is 
 sincere in these days, and he inveighed 
 against it in many of his friends. He 
 inveighed against it in Emerson himself, 
 and clearly never had any true apprecia 
 tion of the beauty and worth of Emerson s 
 poetry. " I did gain, though under impedi 
 ments, a real satisfaction, and some tone of 
 the Eternal Melodies sounding afar off. . . . 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 277 
 
 But indeed you are very perverse." Really 
 he pities Emerson, and scorns him a little, 
 for wasting his time on poetry. Yet he was 
 himself truly a poet, " with the gift of 
 song," says Mr. Lowell, "he would have 
 been the greatest of epic poets since Homer"; 
 and the subjects of his great " Cromwell " and 
 " French Revolution " epics have as central 
 place in the history of the modern world 
 as the siege of Troy had to the Greeks. 
 Curiously enough, we find him asking in his 
 journal, many years before he went to Lon 
 don : " Were the true history (had we any 
 such, or even generally any dream of such) 
 the true epic poem ? I partly begin to sur 
 mise so." And, while he is beginning at 
 " The French Revolution," he writes, 
 " Gleams, too, of a work of art hover 
 past me, as if this should be a work of 
 art." Writing to Emerson himself at this 
 time, he said that " it was part of his creed 
 that history is poetry, could we tell it 
 right," which is true, as Emerson s cor 
 relative, that " our best history is still 
 poetry," is true also, and more obviously 
 and immediately true. The structural feel- 
 
278 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 ing was always powerful in Carlyle ; and 
 "Past and Present," " Sartor/ and the 
 greater essays, no less than " The French 
 Revolution," which is indeed a work of 
 art, are carefully proportioned, and every 
 member has its proper place. An essay of 
 Carlyle s always remains a moving picture in 
 the mind, while Emerson s essays, perfect 
 in each sentence, have to most neither 
 beginning, end, nor middle. Like " a bag 
 of duck shot " we have noticed that Carlyle 
 called them ; and he somewhere spoke of 
 them as like an army all made up of gen 
 erals or captains. Emerson himself defended 
 this lack of scheme in writing ; and the way 
 in which his lectures and essays grew and 
 were put together has often been described. 
 " You should start with no skeleton or 
 plan," he said to the Williams student. 
 " The natural one will grow as you work. 
 Knock away all scaffolding. Neither have 
 exordium nor peroration." Yet in another 
 mood, clearly in self-criticism, he writes : 
 " If Minerva offered me a gift and an 
 option, I would say, Give me continuity. I 
 am tired of scraps." In truth, the essays 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 279 
 
 differ much in degree of method and 
 system, and most of them are far more 
 logical in their arrangement than it is fash 
 ionable for folk who do not closely study 
 them to say. Dr. Harris has published a 
 careful analysis of " Experience," to show 
 how much can be said for its logical and 
 orderly process. That essay is but a frag 
 ment, and there are others where the ana 
 lyst would fare worse ; but there are also oth 
 ers where he would fare quite as well. Mr. 
 Chadwick has pointed out the peculiarly 
 beautiful development and order of the 
 Harvard address, which is perhaps cast more 
 completely in one mould than any other 
 single lecture or essay. It is only as we live 
 long with Emerson that we see his funda 
 mental logic and consistency, below all sur 
 face varieties, in his pervading and control 
 ling ideas. " I am not careful," he says him 
 self, in serene trust in the deep logic of his 
 life, " to see how my thoughts comport with 
 other thoughts and other moods, I trust 
 them for that, any more than how any one 
 minute of the year is related to any other 
 remote minute, which yet I know is so 
 
280 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 related." He is logical as the landscape is 
 logical, consistent as the earth is consistent, 
 in whose common soil are rooted, asking 
 no consent of each other, the lily and the 
 rose, the oak-tree and the pine, and herbs 
 great and small, wherein birds of a hun 
 dred species nest and sing. 
 
 Emerson is much more the poet than 
 Carlyle, perhaps all poet, in essays and in 
 verse alike. " I am born a poet, he 
 wrote to Miss Jackson, adding in humil 
 ity, " of a low class without doubt, yet a 
 poet : that is my nature and vocation " ; 
 and to Miss Peabody he said the same : 
 " I am not a great poet, but whatever is of 
 me is a poet." Parker said, using almost 
 Lowell s words upon Carlyle, that Emerson 
 is a poet lacking the accomplishment of 
 verse ; and he made merry with Emerson s 
 rhymes. But this is shallow, as most criti 
 cism like Arnold s on Emerson s poetry is 
 shallow. In every seeming awkwardness 
 we grow to find a wondrous strength and 
 a wondrous fitness, and should shrink from 
 a word that was simply of correcter length. 
 Poets know poets ; and every one of our 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 281 
 
 greater American poets has borne witness to 
 Emerson as the greatest of their company. 
 Holmes and Stedman have made the argu 
 ment. Howells has said that Emerson, more 
 perhaps than any other modern poet, gives 
 the notion of inspiration ; and truly, if any 
 thing in poetry ever rolled out of the heart 
 of nature, thence came " The Problem," 
 "Woodnotes," and "Each and All." No 
 other American poetry teaches truth so 
 profound as Emerson s. No poems not 
 Wordsworth s have ever taken us so to 
 the deep secrets of the woods and earth and 
 sky as Emerson s poems of nature. None 
 either are in so profound harmony with the 
 modern philosophy of nature or have given 
 it such fitting and synthetic voice. Carlyle 
 was in small sympathy with modern science, 
 coupled Darwinism with atheism ; but 
 Emerson s genius anticipated and calmly 
 mastered all. "In him," says Tyndall, 
 " we have a poet and a profoundly relig 
 ious man, who is really and entirely un 
 daunted by the discoveries of science, 
 past, present and prospective. In his case, 
 poetry, with the joy of a bacchanal, takes her 
 
282 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 graver brother, science, by the hand, and 
 cheers him with immortal laughter. By 
 Emerson scientific conceptions are con 
 tinually transmuted into the finer forms 
 and warmer lines of an ideal world." 
 
 Emerson is always definite and clear, 
 Hellenic ; Carlyle is Hebraic, turgid and 
 often ambiguous, and there are Carlylians 
 of the right and left wings and centre. The 
 difference between the men is the difference 
 to use words, otherwise applied, of Emer 
 son s own between serene sunshine and 
 lurid stormlights. Yet deeper than all dif 
 ferences, as both knew well, are the like 
 nesses. Lowell speaks, in the " Fable for 
 Critics," of the 
 
 . . . " persons, mole-blind to the soul s make and 
 
 style, 
 Who insist on a likeness twixt E. and Carlyle." 
 
 But Lowell said many things in the 
 " Fable for Critics " more smart than true, 
 as he would doubtless be quickest to own, 
 not careful to trim the sentiment to a nicety, 
 if the words jingled well. The likeness be 
 tween Emerson and Carlyle was profound, 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 283 
 
 extending to the root conceptions and pur 
 poses of life, while the diversities were much 
 more superficial. " Their effects upon the 
 mind," says John Burroughs, with a high 
 degree of truth, " are essentially the same ; 
 both have the c tart cathartic virtue of 
 courage and self-reliance ; both nourish char 
 acter and spur genius. Carlyle does not 
 communicate the gloom he feels ; tis the 
 most tonic despair to be found in literature." 
 Yet there were never more striking differ 
 ences between two men, and some of these 
 are touched with acute discrimination in 
 Lowell s familiar lines.* 
 
 * The books abound with parallelisms bringing out the likenesses 
 and contrasts between the two; and the deductions and additions to 
 which each of us is impelled in every case witness to the vitality and 
 various impressive aspects of their thought. Says Whipple, in his 
 essay on "Emerson and Carlyle," one of his three valuable essays 
 relating to Emerson: "Emerson was the champion of the Ideal; Car 
 lyle asserted the absolute dominion of fact. Emerson declared that 
 Truth is mighty, and will prevail ; Carlyle retorted that truth is mighty, 
 and has prevailed. Emerson looked serenely at the ugly aspect of 
 contemporary life, because, as an optimist, he was a herald of the 
 Future; Carlyle, as a pessimist, denounced the Present, and threw all 
 the energy of his vivid dramatic genius into vitalizing the Past. Emer 
 son was a prophet ; Carlyle, a resurrectionist. Emerson gloried in what 
 was to be ; Carlyle exulted in what had been. Emerson declared, even 
 when current events appeared ugliest to the philanthropist, that the 
 highest thought and the deepest love is born with victory on his head, 
 
284 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 Emerson is " sweetness and light " become 
 flesh and dwelling among us. " What can 
 you say of Carlyle," said Ruskin, " but that 
 he was born in the clouds and struck by 
 lightning ? " Carlyle is sometimes half mad 
 man ; Emerson is always sane and sanity- 
 strengthening. Carlyle was Essene, and 
 Emerson was Stoic ; but the Stoic loved 
 Hymettus and Ilissus better than the Porch, 
 and the Essene loved Jerusalem more than 
 Jordan. Carlyle was in many ways least 
 human, and yet needed men the most, was 
 most dependent on society and books, had 
 least resources in himself. Both were hu 
 morists. Emerson, with his Yankee shrewd 
 ness, laughed quietly to himself at Brook 
 Farm, religiously as he respected it, and in 
 secret moods, doubtless, enjoyed as much as 
 Hawthorne the succotash of philosopher 
 
 and must triumph in the end; Carlyle, gloomily surveying the pres 
 ent, insisted that high thought and deep love must be sought and 
 found in generations long past, which Dr. Dryasdust had so covered up 
 with his mountains of mud that it was only by immense toil that he 
 [Carlyle] had been able to reproduce them as they actually existed. 
 Look up, says Emerson, cheerily; hitch your wagon to a star ; look 
 down, growls Carlyle, * and see that your wagon is an honest one, 
 safe and strong in passing over miry roads, before you have the impu 
 dence to look up to the smallest star in the rebuking heavens. " 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 285 
 
 and cabbage and Margaret Fuller s " tran 
 scendental heifer " ; and Carlyle s sense of 
 the ridiculous always saved him from the 
 final catastrophe, made his prophesying so 
 much the better, and, by setting him outside 
 himself, enabled him to become the artist, 
 too. Both were great conversationalists. 
 " Thomas Carlyle," said Emerson, " is even 
 more extraordinary in his conversation than 
 in his writing." " Emerson s conversation," 
 says Mr. Con way, "was unequalled by that 
 of any person I have ever met with, unless it 
 be Thomas Carlyle." But Emerson needed 
 the stimulus of sympathetic minds to draw 
 him out, and was more ready to listen than 
 to speak ; while Carlyle was a haranguer, like 
 Coleridge, whom he ridiculed. " You can 
 not interrupt him," Margaret Fuller found. 
 "If you get a chance to remonstrate for a 
 moment, he raises his voice and bears you 
 down," which to Margaret Fuller must 
 certainly have been severe. Both men were, 
 by training and nature, scholars, loving quiet 
 and not noise, yet both compelled by the 
 needs of the time to enter the social arena 
 and become leaders of reform. " Carlyle 
 
286 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 thinks it the only question for wise men/ 
 wrote Emerson, " instead of art, and fine 
 fancies, and poetry, and such things, to ad 
 dress themselves to the problem of society"; 
 and Emerson s own lyre was hung up, when 
 the national sin became rampant, until the 
 nation s life was purified. 
 
 It is foolish almost to ask which was 
 the greater man, Carlyle or Emerson, 
 and whose influence will endure the longer. 
 It was an Englishman, Matthew Arnold, 
 who said categorically, " Emerson s work is 
 more important than Carlyle s." It was an 
 Englishwoman, George Eliot, who said, " I 
 have seen Emerson, the first man I have 
 seen." She also said, as she read the warm 
 words which Carlyle had written concerning 
 Emerson, " This is a world worth abiding in 
 while one man can thus venerate and love 
 another." Carlyle was in many ways the 
 more remarkable personality, made the 
 greater sensation in the world. The im 
 pression which he made upon his time was 
 probably deeper, as the effects of the great 
 Mississippi flood upon the Louisiana low 
 lands were greater than the effects of the 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 287 
 
 showers of a hundred Aprils, and will be 
 talked of more by the next generation and 
 the next. No such flood of reminiscences 
 followed the death of Emerson as followed 
 the death of Carlyle ; and fifty years from 
 now Carlyle perhaps will be read the more. 
 He will have revivals, look out for one 
 about this time, and he will have eclipses. 
 Emerson will have no eclipses : he shines 
 with a steady light. Like Plato, he will 
 have his dozen readers through the ages; 
 and for them his book will ever live, and 
 they will be the teachers of the teachers. 
 
 The great work which Carlyle and Emer 
 son did for their time, various as were the 
 ways in which they did it, was essentially 
 the same. It was not the literary work, for 
 literary ends, poetry, history, essays on 
 Goethe and Napoleon and Montaigne. It 
 was the work of social and spiritual renova 
 tion. It is as awakeners and inspirers, as 
 preachers of self-reliance and individualism 
 against the compliance, superstitions, grega- 
 riousness and sham that were rusting out 
 the world, as prophets of the soul, eternity, 
 and God, the universal miracle, against 
 
288 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 agnosticism, mechanical philosophy, and a 
 utilitarian morality, that they will be chiefly 
 remembered, and that, being dead, they 
 speak. They were the great prophets for 
 England and America of the new idealistic 
 epoch in the world s thought and life in 
 which we stand and which began with Kant 
 in Germany. Philosopher in the pedant s 
 or precisian s sense system-maker, cos 
 mic pigeon-holer neither Carlyle nor 
 Emerson was, unless, indeed, Emerson, by 
 virtue of the " Nature " essay and the lect 
 ures on the "Intellect," as "systematic" 
 surely as Plato, may have earned that dis 
 tinction. Philosophers in the true and 
 antique sense, lovers of the high wisdom 
 and teachers of first principles to men, they 
 were the greatest in the England and Amer 
 ica of their time. 
 
 "Carlyle," says Mr. Froude, "was a Cal- 
 vinist without the theology," the Calvinis- 
 tic theology. " Emerson," says Mr. Cooke, 
 " was a Puritan, with all that is harsh, re 
 pulsive and uncomfortable in Puritanism 
 removed." They were the Puritans of this 
 time, the pure men and sincere. They 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 289 
 
 threw man back on himself and God once 
 more, instead of on the congregation and 
 tradition. " I cannot find language of suf 
 ficient energy," said Emerson, "to convey 
 my sense of the sacredness of private integ 
 rity." "The priest of the intellect" Alcott 
 named him. Timely is it to recall the words 
 in days of shuffling with the creeds, as all 
 days seem to be. " If we had any vivacity 
 of soul, and could get the old Hebrew 
 spectacles off our nose," said Carlyle, in 
 such days, "should we run to Judea or 
 Houndsditch to look at the doings of the 
 Supreme?" "It is in religion with us as 
 in astronomy we know now that the 
 earth moves. But it has not annihilated 
 the stars for us ; it has infinitely exalted 
 and expanded the stars and universe." 
 The circumscribing of God s energy to par 
 ticular places and periods was irreverence 
 to Carlyle and Emerson. He is a living 
 God, his Bible has no covers, and the only 
 supernatural is the " natural supernatural." 
 The gateway to divinity they knew to be 
 humanity. "The true shekinah is man," 
 Carlyle quotes fondly from Saint Chrysos- 
 
290 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 torn, and adds, " Where else is the God s- 
 Presence manifested not to our eyes only, 
 but to our hearts, as in our fellow-man ? " 
 The Christs are rooted where we are rooted. 
 Jesus, said Emerson, was "true to what is in 
 you and me ; " his life is the life of every 
 faithful soul, "written large." Both Carlyle 
 and Emerson broke with the church of their 
 day, the breach in Carlyle s case being 
 wider than in Emerson s. " Do not imag 
 ine," he said, " that you can, by any 
 hocus-pocus, distil astral spirits from the 
 ruins of the old church." " The church," 
 Emerson said, " is not large enough for the 
 man ; in the churches every healthy and 
 thoughtful mind finds itself checked, cribbed, 
 confined." To no other do we owe it so 
 much that this is not so true to-day. When 
 Dean Stanley returned from America, wrote 
 Mr. Conway in 1879, it was to report that 
 religion had there passed through an evolu 
 tion from Edwards to Emerson, and that 
 " the genial atmosphere which Emerson 
 has done so much to promote is shared 
 by all the churches equally." " There will 
 be a new church," Emerson prophesied, 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 291 
 
 "founded on moral science, at first cold 
 and naked, a babe in the manger again, the 
 algebra and mathematics of ethical law, the 
 church of men to come, without shawms 
 or psaltery or sackbut; but it will have 
 heaven and earth for its beams and rafters ; 
 science for symbol and illustration ; it will 
 fast enough gather beauty, music, picture, 
 poetry." Emerson was one of the founders 
 of the Free Religious Association ; and he 
 never stated his creed so tersely and well as 
 in his second address to the Association. 
 Looking to the future prophetically, he 
 looked to the past, and especially to his 
 Christian inheritance, reverently and grate 
 fully. He would have sung at eve with 
 deeper feeling even than he sang at 
 prime, 
 
 " We love the venerable house 
 Our fathers built to God " ; 
 
 and Christ and Christianity ever held to 
 him the central place in human history. 
 " The name of Jesus is not so much written 
 as ploughed into the history of this world." 
 He was glad to be called Christian, and 
 
292 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 protested with sturdy sanity against splen 
 etic jealousy of the word because it had 
 been prostituted to narrowness and super 
 stition. " I see no objection," he said, " to 
 being called a Platonist, a Christian, or any 
 other affirmative name, and no good in 
 negation " ; and, condemning finical and 
 arbitrary criticisms, he said : " Always put 
 the best interpretation on a tenet. Why 
 not on Christianity ? " The protest which 
 singles out Christ as the one leader in 
 religion and thought to be denied his adjec 
 tive he saw to be as narrow as the supersti 
 tion which applies the term in some excep 
 tional and unnatural way ; but he would be 
 Christian or Platonist in no way which did 
 not always leave him first an Emersonian 
 himself with no commanding allegiance 
 save to God and truth. No irreverence ever 
 drew from him words so severe as irrev 
 erence toward that great son of God to 
 whom all the truly divine and religious 
 souls of our portion of the race have looked 
 back with highest veneration for highest 
 inspiration. To Emerson, as to Carlyle, 
 Jesus was the elder brother and supreme 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 293 
 
 friend and aider of those who would 
 live in the spirit. Most Hellenic of all 
 great American minds, Greek philosophy 
 can no more explain Emerson than it can 
 explain Milton. Milton, defending the 
 purity of his youth, declared that, " though 
 Christianity had been but slightly taught 
 him," yet a " certain reservedness of natural 
 disposition and moral discipline, learned out 
 of the noblest philosophy," had been enough 
 to keep him from all that was ignoble and 
 unclean. But to the antique heroism of the 
 mature Milton there is added a new and 
 deeper element. It was, as Emerson him 
 self said with such beautiful exactness, " the 
 genius of the Christian sanctity " ; and, in 
 saying it, Emerson paid tribute to that in 
 Milton which we can pay tribute to in him 
 self in no other words so good as his : " Few 
 men could be cited who have so well under 
 stood what is peculiar in the Christian ethics 
 and the precise aid it has brought to men, in 
 being an emphatic affirmation of the omnipo 
 tence of spiritual laws and, by way of mark 
 ing the contrast to vulgar opinions, laying 
 its chief stress on humility. The indiffer- 
 
294 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 ency of a wise mind to what is called high 
 and low, and the fact that true greatness is 
 a perfect humility, are revelations of Chris 
 tianity which he well understood." The 
 distinctive Christian element, although this 
 not in respect of humility, is more pro 
 nounced in Milton than in Emerson ; but 
 in no man since Milton have the Christian 
 and the Greek been compounded in such 
 harmony and fair proportion. Klopstock s 
 " Messias " would have been endured by 
 him less patiently perhaps than by Milton, 
 although hardly less ; and both knew alike 
 how, and how only, paradise is regained 
 or gained by every Christ and every man. 
 Both Emerson and Carlyle did much to 
 destroy that grotesque exaggeration of Jesus 
 as an unreal demigod and of Christianity as 
 the absolute and only religion, which has 
 delayed and hindered the legitimate and 
 beautiful influence of both as sadly as 
 capricious dogmas of infallibility and plenary 
 inspiration have obscured the charm and 
 virtue of the Christian scriptures ; they have 
 both been potent forces in the reformation 
 which is at last restoring to the Christian 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 295 
 
 Church itself a real Bible and a real Christ, 
 and lifting the religious world to a compre 
 hensive and worthy philosophy of history. 
 If Carlyle sometimes went too far in his 
 protest and impatience, it was because the 
 Church s own sham and cant, inertia, and 
 intellectual impiety compelled the extremest 
 word of arrest and arousal. Emerson seldom 
 went too far in aught, and never here. 
 
 o J 
 
 Carlyle and Emerson believed in a living 
 God. " Through every star, through every 
 grass-blade," says Carlyle, "and most through 
 every living soul, the glory of a present God 
 still beams." " The first simple foundation 
 of my belief," said Emerson, " is that the 
 Author of nature has not left himself without 
 a witness in any sane mind : that the moral 
 sentiment speaks to every man the law after 
 which the universe was made." 
 
 They believed in prayer, not as a means 
 to effect a private end, the craving of a par 
 ticular commodity, " as soon as the man 
 is at one with God, he will not beg," but 
 as communion with God. u As well," said 
 Emerson, " might a child live without its 
 mother s milk as a soul without prayer." 
 
296 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 The first sermon which he ever preached 
 was on Prayer; and prayer was the atmos 
 phere of his life. His paper on " Prayers " 
 in the Dial is an impressive collection of 
 passages showing wherein true prayer con 
 sists. He loved to write "at large leisure 
 in noble mornings, opened by prayer or by 
 readings of Plato " or others of the divine 
 masters. He prayed before the Harvard 
 address of 1838; and, in discussing late in 
 life the question of morning prayer in the 
 Harvard chapel, he said it secured to the 
 young men "the opportunity of assuming 
 once a day the noblest attitude man is 
 capable of." " Prayer," said Carlyle to a 
 young friend, in his latter days, " is and 
 remains always a native and deepest impulse 
 of the soul of man ; and, correctly gone 
 about, is of the very highest benefit (nay, 
 one might say, indispensability) to every 
 man aiming morally high in this world. No 
 prayer, no religion, or at least only a dumb 
 and lamed one ! The modern hero ought 
 not to give up praying, as he has latterly all 
 but done. Prayer is the aspiration of our 
 poor, struggling, heavy-laden soul towards 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 297 
 
 its eternal Father ; and, with or without 
 words, ought not to become impossible, nor, 
 I persuade myself, need it ever. Loyal sons 
 and subjects can approach the King s throne 
 who have no request to make there, except 
 that they may continue loyal." 
 
 They believed in immortality. "What 
 is excellent, as God lives, is permanent." 
 Carlyle, it has been said, led us out of 
 Egypt, but into the desert ; and the pessi 
 mists who claim him for their father say that 
 the mistake of men is in thinking there is 
 anything else than a desert. But Carlyle 
 had been on Nebo, and caught the vision of 
 what was beyond Jordan. " Know of a 
 truth/ he said, " that only the Time-shad 
 ows have perished or are perishable; that 
 the real Being of whatever was, and what 
 ever is, and whatever will be, is even now 
 and forever." " Everything is prospective," 
 Emerson said, " and man is to live here 
 after. That the world is for his education 
 is the only sane solution of the enigma." 
 " When we accept joyfully the tide of being 
 which floats us into the secrets of nature, 
 and live and work with her, all unawares 
 
298 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 the advancing soul has built and forged for 
 itself a new condition, and the question and 
 the answer are one." " When we pro 
 nounce the name of man, we pronounce 
 the belief of immortality. All great men 
 find eternity affirmed in the very promise 
 of their faculties. . . . The evidence from 
 intellect is as valid as the evidence from 
 love. The being that can share a thought 
 and feeling so sublime as confidence of 
 truth is no mushroom. Our dissatisfac 
 tion with any other solution is the blazing 
 evidence of immortality." 
 
 What must this gospel vital, vernacular, 
 self-vouching, and not as of the scribes 
 not have meant, coming into the Puseyism 
 and Simeonism and Jeffreyism and Whig- 
 gism, the rust and dust, and " great and 
 Thursday lecture " of sixty years ago ! 
 Church, State, book, and man were gal 
 vanized and moribund. What was wanted 
 was reality, shock, impulse, soul. Carlyle 
 and Emerson came down as out of the sky 
 at noon and troubled the stagnant waters, 
 and there was life again. " Emerson," says 
 Lowell, "awakened us, saved us from the 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 299 
 
 body of this death." " The works of two 
 men," said Tyndall to the students of Lon 
 don University, " have placed me here 
 to-day, the English Carlyle and the Amer 
 ican Emerson. They told me what to do 
 in a way that caused me to do it, and all 
 my consequent intellectual action is to be 
 traced to this purely moral source." He 
 spoke for ten thousand men. 
 
 Individualism, that was the need of the 
 time, as it is indeed the need of every time ; 
 but perhaps it is not the greatest need of 
 this time. The shuffling with the creeds 
 goes on and will go on ; but it is seen to 
 be poor business now, the business of pale 
 and dilatory men, with whom the word of 
 Kant and Lessing, of Channing and Parker, 
 of Carlyle and Emerson, has not yet done its 
 work. It will do its work. What we need 
 to concern ourselves about is synthesis, re 
 organization, and advance. Indeed, is it not 
 clear that true constructive elements are be 
 ginning in a hundred places to emerge, and 
 that a time of faith and positive religion is 
 nearer than many fears have augured to this 
 distracted, analytic age ? The way to enter 
 
300 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 into it is by associated action in good work. 
 Emerson, always in advance, saw that the 
 time had come for this a generation ago. 
 That another believed, as he did not, that 
 Christ turned water into wine at Cana, was 
 a slight thing compared with having the 
 Christ spirit in the heart. With the man 
 of this spirit he had fellowship ; he had 
 none with the man whose sole " religion " 
 was pride in emancipation from some real 
 or fancied superstition. His primary coun 
 sel to the Free Religious Association, in that 
 strong speech in which he stated so clearly 
 his own simple creed, was the counsel to 
 sympathy and synthesis. " I think we have 
 disputed long enough. I think we might 
 now relinquish our theological controversies 
 to communities more idle and ignorant than 
 we. I am glad that a more realistic church 
 is coming to be the tendency of society, 
 and that we are likely one day to forget our 
 obstinate polemics in the ambition to excel 
 each other in good works." Emerson, it 
 has been said, did us more good than any 
 other among us, " first, by encouraging self- 
 reliance ; and, secondly, by encouraging God- 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 301 
 
 reliance." What we now also need is the 
 encouragement of man-reliance, of co-opera 
 tion and fraternity ; and here also he spoke 
 the prophetic word, if it was not indeed the 
 burden of his gospel. Carlyle preached 
 righteousness to us, and Emerson taught 
 us truthfulness, and we are debtors both 
 to the Jew and to the Greek ; but to these 
 we need to add fellowship and brotherhood, 
 to the Judaism of Carlyle and the Plato n- 
 ism of Emerson the warm Christianism and 
 humanism of Mazzini, which knows God 
 in its heart of hearts as our Father and our 
 Mother too, and we one body and every 
 one members one of another. 
 
 Yet so much I say with misgivings and 
 repentances, and remember that while, as the 
 sun of the late afternoon fell on Carlyle, it 
 mellowed him, and whereas, in the period 
 of the " Frederick," he seemed more and 
 more to deify pure will, preach blood and 
 iron, and have almost no good word for 
 what most of us count progress, he now 
 showed greater kindness to the spirit of the 
 age and let fall words which said the criti 
 cism of the forties and the fifties was too 
 
302 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 harsh, so Emerson rose steadily above 
 the bare individualism which goes into the 
 closet ever and shuts the door, to hear what 
 the great God speaketh, into ever fuller com 
 munion with the nation and the race. Ever 
 he was the pleader for humaner politics and 
 more generous social institutions ; but more 
 and more he saw that we must consider the 
 communal problem and communal good. 
 " There will dawn erelong on our politics, 
 on our modes of living, a nobler morning, 
 in the sentiment of love. This is the one 
 remedy for all ills, the panacea of nature. 
 We must be lovers, and at once the im 
 possible becomes the possible. Our age 
 and history, for these thousand years, has 
 not been the history of kindness, but of 
 selfishness. See this wide society of labor 
 ing men and women. We allow ourselves to 
 be served by them, we live apart from them, 
 and meet them without a salute in the streets. 
 We do not greet their talents, nor rejoice in 
 their good fortune, nor foster their hopes, 
 nor in the assembly of the people vote for 
 what is dear to them. Thus we enact the 
 part of the selfish noble and king from the 
 
Emerson and Carlyle 303 
 
 foundation of the world." "The State," 
 he said again, " must consider the poor man, 
 and all voices must speak for him. Every 
 child that is born must have a just chance 
 for his bread. . . . No one should take more 
 than his share." He warned the republic of 
 the dangers ahead, if our social inequalities 
 and injustices are not corrected, and that 
 it is " better to work on institutions by the 
 sun than by the wind." The same deep 
 thought and feeling were at the bottom of 
 Carlyle s impatience with laissez-faire and 
 his preaching of strong government, which 
 is why the socialist finds so many points of 
 contact with him. 
 
 The War and the uprising of the North 
 had much to do with deepening in Emerson 
 the communal, national, and social sense. 
 They made a profound impression on him, 
 gave him a new idea of men s relations to 
 each other, of the value of the State, and 
 of the solidarity of the race. " Emerson," 
 says Lowell, "reverencing strength, seeking 
 the highest outcome of the individual, has 
 found that society and politics are also main 
 elements in the attainment of the desired 
 
304 The Influence of Emerson 
 
 end, and has drawn steadily manward and 
 worldward." " Age brought with it/ says 
 his biographer, " an even warmer glow of in 
 terest in his fellow-men ; and the new life 
 of the Republic brought to him an enlarged 
 perception of the organic life of the race in 
 its relations to morals and religion. He 
 came to see a new value in a united religious 
 life for the people, though abating no jot of 
 his soul-trust." 
 
 Thus always is Emerson his own best bal 
 ancer and correcter. A high philosophy and 
 devotion to humanity, that is the conjunc 
 tion for which the world hungers and thirsts ; 
 and that conjunction is his message. If in 
 some moment of new insight we except to 
 this or that upon his page, so also we know 
 might he ; and we suspect that he is our 
 forerunner in the apprehension. Always the 
 just mind, the perfect faith, the wholly ex 
 cellent spirit, the good will. The rest is but 
 a question of the days and years : it does 
 not touch the soul. And so all criticism is 
 disarmed. This, we say, was the wise man, 
 the perfect and upright ; we find in him no 
 fault at all. 
 
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