Ralph Waldo Emerson - Essays

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ESSAYS

BY

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Merrill's English Texts

SELECTED AND EDITED, WITH INTRODUCTION
AND NOTES, BY EDNA H.L. TURPIN, AUTHOR
OF "STORIES FROM AMERICAN HISTORY,"
"CLASSIC FABLES," "FAMOUS PAINTERS," ETC.

NEW YORK

CHARLES E. MERRILL CO.

1907

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
LIFE OF EMERSON
CRITICAL OPINIONS
CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF PRINCIPAL WORKS

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

COMPENSATION

SELF RELIANCE

FRIENDSHIP

HEROISM

MANNERS

GIFTS

NATURE

SHAKESPEARE; OR, THE POET

PRUDENCE

CIRCLES

NOTES

PUBLISHERS' NOTE

Merrill's English Texts

This series of books will include in complete editions those
masterpieces of English Literature that are best adapted for the use
of schools and colleges. The editors of the several volumes will be
chosen for their special qualifications in connection with the texts
to be issued under their individual supervision, but familiarity with
the practical needs of the classroom, no less than sound scholarship,
will characterize the editing of every book in the series.

In connection with each text, a critical and historical introduction,
including a sketch of the life of the author and his relation to the
thought of his time, critical opinions of the work in question chosen
from the great body of English criticism, and, where possible, a
portrait of the author, will be given. Ample explanatory notes of such
passages in the text as call for special attention will be supplied,
but irrelevant annotation and explanations of the obvious will be
rigidly excluded.

CHARLES E. MERRILL CO.

LIFE OF EMERSON

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, May 25, 1803. He was descended
from a long line of New England ministers, men of refinement and
education. As a school-boy he was quiet and retiring, reading a great
deal, but not paying much attention to his lessons. He entered Harvard
at the early age of fourteen, but never attained a high rank there,
although he took a prize for an essay on Socrates, and was made class
poet after several others had declined. Next to his reserve and the
faultless propriety of his conduct, his contemporaries at college
seemed most impressed by the great maturity of his mind. Emerson
appears never to have been really a boy. He was always serene and
thoughtful, impressing all who knew him with that spirituality which
was his most distinguishing characteristic.

After graduating from college he taught school for a time, and then
entered the Harvard Divinity School under Dr. Channing, the great
Unitarian preacher. Although he was not strong enough to attend all
the lectures of the divinity course, the college authorities deemed
the name Emerson sufficient passport to the ministry. He was
accordingly "approbated to preach" by the Middlesex Association of
Ministers on October 10, 1826. As a preacher, Emerson was interesting,
though not particularly original. His talent seems to have been in
giving new meaning to the old truths of religion. One of his hearers
has said: "In looking back on his preaching I find he has impressed
truths to which I always assented in such a manner as to make them
appear new, like a clearer revelation." Although his sermons were
always couched in scriptural language, they were touched with the
light of that genius which avoids the conventional and commonplace. In
his other pastoral duties Emerson was not quite so successful. It is
characteristic of his deep humanity and his dislike for all fuss and
commonplace that he appeared to least advantage at a funeral. A
connoisseur in such matters, an old sexton, once remarked that on such
occasions "he did not appear at ease at all. To tell the truth, in my
opinion, that young man was not born to be a minister."

Emerson did not long remain a minister. In 1832 he preached a sermon
in which he announced certain views in regard to the communion service
which were disapproved by a large part of his congregation. He found
it impossible to continue preaching, and, with the most friendly
feelings on both sides, he parted from his congregation.

A few months later (1833) he went to Europe for a short year of
travel. While abroad, he visited Walter Savage Landor, Coleridge and
Wordsworth, and Thomas Carlyle. This visit to Carlyle was to both men
a most interesting experience. They parted feeling that they had much
intellectually in common. This belief fostered a sympathy which, by
the time they had discovered how different they really were, had grown
so strong a habit that they always kept up their intimacy. This year
of travel opened Emerson's eyes to many things of which he had
previously been ignorant; he had profited by detachment from the
concerns of a limited community and an isolated church.

After his return he began to find his true field of activity in the
lecture-hall, and delivered a number of addresses in Boston and its
vicinity. While thus coming before the open public on the lecture
platform, he was all the time preparing the treatise which was to
embody all the quintessential elements of his philosophical doctrine.
This was the essay _Nature_, which was published in 1836. By its
conception of external Nature as an incarnation of the Divine Mind it
struck the fundamental principle of Emerson's religious belief. The
essay had a very small circulation at first, though later it became
widely known.

In the winter of 1836 Emerson followed up his discourse on Nature by a
course of twelve lectures on the "Philosophy of History," a
considerable portion of which eventually became embodied in his
essays. The next year (1837) was the year of the delivery of the _Man
Thinking, or the American Scholar_ address before the Phi Beta Kappa
Society at Cambridge.

This society, composed of the first twenty-five men in each class
graduating from college, has annual meetings which have called forth
the best efforts of many distinguished scholars and thinkers.
Emerson's address was listened to with the most profound interest. It
declared a sort of intellectual independence for America. Henceforth
we were to be emancipated from clogging foreign influences, and a
national literature was to expand under the fostering care of the
Republic.

These two discourses, _Nature_ and _The American Scholar_, strike the
keynote of Emerson's philosophical, poetical, and moral teachings. In
fact he had, as every great teacher has, only a limited number of
principles and theories to teach. These principles of life can all be
enumerated in twenty words--self-reliance, culture, intellectual and
moral independence, the divinity of nature and man, the necessity of
labor, and high ideals.

Emerson spent the latter part of his life in lecturing and in literary
work. His son, Dr. Edward Emerson, gave an interesting account of how
these lectures were constructed. "All through his life he kept a
journal. This book, he said, was his 'Savings Bank.' The thoughts thus
received and garnered in his journals were indexed, and a great many
of them appeared in his published works. They were religiously set
down just as they came, in no order except chronological, but later
they were grouped, enlarged or pruned, illustrated, worked into a
lecture or discourse, and, after having in this capacity undergone
repeated testing and rearranging, were finally carefully sifted and
more rigidly pruned, and were printed as essays."

Besides his essays and lectures Emerson left some poetry in which is
embodied those thoughts which were to him too deep for prose
expression. Oliver Wendell Holmes in speaking of this says: "Emerson
wrote occasionally in verse from his school-days until he had reached
the age which used to be known as the grand climacteric,
sixty-three.... His poems are not and hardly can become popular; they
are not meant to be liked by the many, but to be dearly loved and
cherished by the few.... His occasional lawlessness in technical
construction, his somewhat fantastic expressions, his enigmatic
obscurities hardly detract from the pleasant surprise his verses so
often bring with them.... The poetic license which we allow in the
verse of Emerson is more than excused by the noble spirit which makes
us forget its occasional blemishes, sometimes to be pleased with them
as characteristic of the writer."

Emerson was always a striking figure in the intellectual life of
America. His discourses were above all things inspiring. Through them
many were induced to strive for a higher self-culture. His influence
can be discerned in all the literary movements of the time. He was the
central figure of the so-called transcendental school which was so
prominent fifty years ago, although he always rather held aloof from
any enthusiastic participation in the movement.

Emerson lived a quiet life in Concord, Massachusetts. "He was a
first-rate neighbor and one who always kept his fences up." He
traveled extensively on his lecturing tours, even going as far as
England. In _English Traits_ he has recorded his impressions of what
he saw of English life and manners.

Oliver Wendell Holmes has described him in this wise: "His personal
appearance was that of the typical New Englander of college-bred
ancestry. Tall, spare, slender, with sloping shoulders, slightly
stooping in his later years, with light hair and eyes, the scholar's
complexion, the prominent, somewhat arched nose which belongs to many
of the New England sub-species, thin lips, suggestive of delicacy, but
having nothing like primness, still less of the rigidity which is
often noticeable in the generation succeeding next to that of the men
in their shirt-sleeves, he would have been noticed anywhere as one
evidently a scholarly thinker astray from the alcove or the study,
which were his natural habitats. His voice was very sweet, and
penetrating without any loudness or mark of effort. His enunciation
was beautifully clear, but he often hesitated as if waiting for the
right word to present itself. His manner was very quiet, his smile was
pleasant, but he did not like explosive laughter any better than
Hawthorne did. None who met him can fail to recall that serene and
kindly presence, in which there was mingled a certain spiritual
remoteness with the most benignant human welcome to all who were
privileged to enjoy his companionship."

Emerson died April 27, 1882, after a few days' illness from pneumonia.
Dr. Garnett in his excellent biography says: "Seldom had 'the reaper
whose name is Death' gathered such illustrious harvest as between
December 1880 and April 1882. In the first month of this period George
Eliot passed away, in the ensuing February Carlyle followed; in April
Lord Beaconsfield died, deplored by his party, nor unregretted by his
country; in February of the following year Longfellow was carried to
the tomb; in April Rossetti was laid to rest by the sea, and the
pavement of Westminster Abbey was disturbed to receive the dust of
Darwin. And now Emerson lay down in death beside the painter of man
and the searcher of nature, the English-Oriental statesman, the poet
of the plain man and the poet of the artist, and the prophet whose
name is indissolubly linked with his own. All these men passed into
eternity laden with the spoils of Time, but of none of them could it
be said, as of Emerson, that the most shining intellectual glory and
the most potent intellectual force of a continent had departed along
with him."

CRITICAL OPINIONS OF EMERSON AND HIS WRITINGS.

Matthew Arnold, in an address on Emerson delivered in Boston, gave
an excellent estimate of the rank we should accord to him in the great
hierarchy of letters. Some, perhaps, will think that Arnold was
unappreciative and cold, but dispassionate readers will be inclined to
agree with his judgment of our great American.

After a review of the poetical works of Emerson the English critic
draws his conclusions as follows:

"I do not then place Emerson among the great poets. But I go farther,
and say that I do not place him among the great writers, the great men
of letters. Who are the great men of letters? They are men like
Cicero, Plato, Bacon, Pascal, Swift, Voltaire--writers with, in the
first place, a genius and instinct for style.... Brilliant and
powerful passages in a man's writings do not prove his possession of
it. Emerson has passages of noble and pathetic eloquence; he has
passages of shrewd and felicitous wit; he has crisp epigram; he has
passages of exquisitely touched observation of nature. Yet he is not a
great writer.... Carlyle formulates perfectly the defects of his
friend's poetic and literary productions when he says: 'For me it is
too ethereal, speculative, theoretic; I will have all things condense
themselves, take shape and body, if they are to have my sympathy.' ...

".... Not with the Miltons and Grays, not with the Platos and Spinozas,
not with the Swifts and Voltaires, not with the Montaignes and
Addisons, can we rank Emerson. No man could see this clearer than
Emerson himself. 'Alas, my friend,' he writes in reply to Carlyle, who
had exhorted him to creative work,--'Alas, my friend, I can do no such
gay thing as you say. I do not belong to the poets, but only to a low
department of literature,--the reporters; suburban men.' He deprecated
his friend's praise; praise 'generous to a fault' he calls it; praise
'generous to the shaming of me,--cold, fastidious, ebbing person that
I am.'"

After all this unfavorable criticism Arnold begins to praise. Quoting
passages from the Essays, he adds:

"This is tonic indeed! And let no one object that it is too general;
that more practical, positive direction is what we want.... Yes,
truly, his insight is admirable; his truth is precious. Yet the secret
of his effect is not even in these; it is in his temper. It is in the
hopeful, serene, beautiful temper wherewith these, in Emerson, are
indissolubly united; in which they work and have their being.... One
can scarcely overrate the importance of holding fast to happiness and
hope. It gives to Emerson's work an invaluable virtue. As Wordsworth's
poetry is, in my judgment, the most important done in verse, in our
language, during the present century, so Emerson's Essays are, I
think, the most important work done in prose.... But by his conviction
that in the life of the spirit is happiness, and by his hope that this
life of the spirit will come more and more to be sanely understood,
and to prevail, and to work for happiness,--by this conviction and
hope Emerson was great, and he will surely prove in the end to have
been right in them.... You cannot prize him too much, nor heed him too
diligently."

Herman Grimm, a German critic of great influence in his own country,
did much to obtain a hearing for Emerson's works in Germany. At first
the Germans could not understand the unusual English, the unaccustomed
turns of phrase which are so characteristic of Emerson's style.

"Macaulay gives them no difficulty; even Carlyle is comprehended. But
in Emerson's writings the broad turnpike is suddenly changed into a
hazardous sandy foot-path. His thoughts and his style are American. He
is not writing for Berlin, but for the people of Massachusetts.... It
is an art to rise above what we have been taught.... All great men are
seen to possess this freedom. They derive their standard from their
own natures, and their observations on life are so natural and
spontaneous that it would seem as if the most illiterate person with a
scrap of common-sense would have made the same.... We become wiser
with them, and know not how the difficult appears easy and the
involved plain.

"Emerson possesses this noble manner of communicating himself. He
inspires me with courage and confidence. He has read and seen but
conceals the labor. I meet in his works plenty of familiar facts, but
he does not employ them to figure up anew the old worn-out problems:
each stands on a new spot and serves for new combinations. From
everything he sees the direct line issuing which connects it with the
focus of life....

".... Emerson's theory is that of the 'sovereignty of the individual.'
To discover what a young man is good for, and to equip him for the
path he is to strike out in life, regardless of any other
consideration, is the great duty to which he calls attention. He makes
men self-reliant. He reveals to the eyes of the idealist the
magnificent results of practical activity, and unfolds before the
realist the grandeur of the ideal world of thought. No man is to allow
himself, through prejudice, to make a mistake in choosing the task to
which he will devote his life. Emerson's essays are, as it were,
printed sermons--all having this same text.... The wealth and harmony
of his language overpowered and entranced me anew. But even now I
cannot say wherein the secret of his influence lies. What he has
written is like life itself--the unbroken thread ever lengthened
through the addition of the small events which make up each day's
experience."

Froude in his famous "Life of Carlyle" gives an interesting description
of Emerson's visit to the Carlyles in Scotland:

"The Carlyles were sitting alone at dinner 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 connected with his wherever the English language is
spoken. Emerson, the younger of the two, had just broken his Unitarian
fetters, and was looking out around him like a young eagle longing for
light. 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.... The acquaintance then begun to their mutual pleasure
ripened into a deep friendship, which has remained unclouded in spite
of wide divergences of opinion throughout their working lives."

Carlyle wrote to his mother after Emerson had left:

"Our third happiness 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'Eichthal's
nephew) whom John knew at Rome. Of course, we could do no other than
welcome him; the rather as he seemed to be one of the most lovable
creatures in himself we had ever looked on. He stayed till next day
with us, and talked and heard to his heart's content, and left us all
really sad to part with him."

In 1841 Carlyle wrote to John Sterling a few words apropos of the
recent publication of Emerson's essays in England:

"I love Emerson's book, not for its detached opinions, not even for
the scheme of the general world he has framed for himself, or any
eminence of talent he has expressed that with, but simply because it
is his own book; because there is a tone of veracity, an unmistakable
air of its being _his_, and a real utterance of a human soul, not a
mere echo of such. I consider it, in that sense, highly remarkable,
rare, very rare, in these days of ours. Ach Gott! It is frightful to
live among echoes. The few that read the book, I imagine, will get
benefit of it. To America, I sometimes say that Emerson, such as he
is, seems to me like a kind of New Era."

John Morley, the acute English critic, has made an analytic study of
Emerson's style, which may reconcile the reader to some of its
exasperating peculiarities.

"One of the traits that every critic notes in Emerson's writing is
that it is so abrupt, so sudden in its transitions, so discontinuous,
so inconsecutive. Dislike of a sentence that drags made him
unconscious of the quality that French critics name _coulant_.
Everything is thrown in just as it comes, and sometimes the pell-mell
is enough to persuade us that Pope did not exaggerate when he said
that no one qualification is so likely to make a good writer as the
power of rejecting his own thoughts.... Apart from his difficult
staccato, Emerson is not free from secondary faults. He uses words
that are not only odd, but vicious in construction; he is sometimes
oblique and he is often clumsy; and there is a visible feeling after
epigrams that do not always come. When people say that Emerson's style
must be good and admirable because it fits his thought, they forget
that though it is well that a robe should fit, there is still
something to be said about its cut and fashion.... Yet, as happens to
all fine minds, there came to Emerson ways of expression deeply marked
with character. On every page there is set the strong stamp of
sincerity, and the attraction of a certain artlessness; the most
awkward sentence rings true; and there is often a pure and simple note
that touches us more than if it were the perfection of elaborated
melody. The uncouth procession of the periods discloses the travail of
the thought, and that, too, is a kind of eloquence. An honest reader
easily forgives the rude jolt or unexpected start when it shows a
thinker faithfully working his way along arduous and unworn tracks.
Even at the roughest, Emerson often interjects a delightful cadence.
As he says of Landor, his sentences are cubes which will stand firm,
place them how or where you will. He criticised Swedenborg for being
superfluously explanatory, and having an exaggerated feeling of the
ignorance of men. 'Men take truths of this nature,' said Emerson,
'very fast;' and his own style does no doubt very boldly take this
capacity for granted in us. In 'choice and pith of diction,' again, of
which Mr. Lowell speaks, he hits the mark with a felicity that is
almost his own in this generation. He is terse, concentrated, and free
from the important blunder of mistaking intellectual dawdling for
meditation. Nor in fine does his abruptness ever impede a true
urbanity. The accent is homely and the apparel plain, but his bearing
has a friendliness, a courtesy, a hospitable humanity, which goes
nearer to our hearts than either literary decoration or rhetorical
unction. That modest and lenient fellow-feeling which gave such charm
to his companionship breathes in his gravest writing, and prevents us
from finding any page of it cold or hard or dry."

E.P. Whipple, the well-known American critic, wrote soon after Emerson's
death:

"But 'sweetness and light' are precious and inspiring only so far as
they express the essential sweetness of the disposition of the
thinker, and the essential illuminating power of his intelligence.
Emerson's greatness came from his character. Sweetness and light
streamed from him because they were _in_ him. In everything he
thought, wrote, and did, we feel the presence of a personality as
vigorous and brave as it was sweet, and the particular radical thought
he at any time expressed derived its power to animate and illuminate
other minds from the might of the manhood, which was felt to be within
and behind it. To 'sweetness and light' he therefore added the prime
quality of fearless manliness.

"If the force of Emerson's character was thus inextricably blended
with the force of all his faculties of intellect and imagination, and
the refinement of all his sentiments, we have still to account for the
peculiarities of his genius, and to answer the question, why do we
instinctively apply the epithet 'Emersonian' to every characteristic
passage in his writings? We are told that he was the last in a long
line of clergymen, his ancestors, and that the modern doctrine of
heredity accounts for the impressive emphasis he laid on the moral
sentiment; but that does not solve the puzzle why he unmistakably
differed in his nature and genius from all other Emersons. An
imaginary genealogical chart of descent connecting him with Confucius
or Gautama would be more satisfactory.

"What distinguishes _the_ Emerson was his exceptional genius and
character, that something in him which separated him from all other
Emersons, as it separated him from all other eminent men of letters,
and impressed every intelligent reader with the feeling that he was
not only 'original but aboriginal.' Some traits of his mind and
character may be traced back to his ancestors, but what doctrine of
heredity can give us the genesis of his genius? Indeed, the safest
course to pursue is to quote his own words, and despairingly confess
that it is the nature of genius 'to spring, like the rainbow daughter
of Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish the past, and refuse all
history.'"

CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF EMERSON'S PRINCIPAL WORKS.

Nature 1836
Essays (First Series) 1841
Essays (Second Series) 1844
Poems 1847
Miscellanies 1849
Representative Men 1850
English Traits 1856
Conduct of Life 1860
Society and Solitude 1870
Correspondence of Thomas
Carlyle and R.W. Emerson 1883

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