RALPH WALDO EMERSON

1803-1882

Matthew Arnold, in his lecture on Emerson, said that if we should judge him perfectly impartially we would have to admit that Emerson is not a great poet, not a great prose writer, not even a great philosopher, but that he is "preeminently the friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit." In ranking Emerson relatively in American literature, however, we do not hesitate to say that he is one of our great poets, even though he is not preeminent in this field; that he is unquestionably our greatest essayist; and that in the moral and spiritual realm he is one of the world's great teachers. No educated American can afford to be unacquainted with the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Emerson was born in Boston, May 25, 1803. He was descended from a long line of New England ministers, his father, Reverend William Emerson, being minister at the First Unitarian Church in Boston at the time of Emerson's birth, and his grandfather of the same name being minister at Concord during the American Revolution. Emerson was graduated from Harvard College at the age of eighteen. It is said that he attracted no particular notice while he was in college, but he made a good record and took some of the honors, notably the election to be class poet and the second prize in the Boylston contest in English composition. Immediately after graduation he engaged in teaching, but in 1823 he returned to the divinity school of Harvard College and began studying definitely for the ministry. He was ordained in 1829, and was at once installed as assistant minister in the Second Unitarian Church of Boston. In this year he married Miss Ellen Tucker. She did not live long, however, and some years later Emerson was married to Miss Lidian Jackson, who bore him several children and made him a happy home at Concord. Emerson became full minister of the Second Church when his colleague resigned in 1829, and for over three years he served the church acceptably. In 1832 he began to have conscientious scruples about his fitness to commemorate the Lord's Supper,

and on September 9 of that year he preached his farewell sermon and courageously resigned his pulpit.

Thus thrown on his own resources for a livelihood, Emerson began to lecture and write. He visited Europe in 1833 and met many famous men of letters, notably Wordsworth, Coleridge, Landor, De Quincey, George Eliot, and Cowper. On his return he settled in Concord (1834) and took up his residence at the famous old house known as the “Old Manse," where his grandfather, Reverend William Emerson, Sr., had lived, and where Hawthorne later lived and wrote Mosses from an Old Manse. The correspondence between Emerson and Carlyle, begun at this period, extended to the death of Carlyle in 1881, and the series of letters between these two great masters is one of the most notable in all English and American literature. The lecture platform was from this time on Emerson's pulpit. In fact, it was largely through Emerson that lyceum lecturing as a means of public entertainment and instruction was first brought into favor in this country. He had a marvelously sweet and appealing voice, and his fresh, vigorous, tonic messages attracted and inspired his audiences even when they did not fully understand the import of what he was saying.

On September 12, 1835, Emerson delivered at Concord a speech called "An Historical Discourse on the Second Centennial Anniversary of the Incorporation of the Town,' and when the monument commemorating the battle of Concord was dedicated on July 4, 1837, he was called upon to write a hymn for the occasion. The little poem which he produced, and which is included in this volume, has since become one of the national poetical treasures.

In 1836 Emerson's first book, called Nature, appeared. It was a small volume of less than one hundred pages, but it was packed full of inspiration, idealism, and profound philosophy. It was written in a tense, poetical, rhapsodic prose style, and naturally it attracted very little attention. Holmes calls it a reflective prose poem. It sets forth ideas on nature similar to those expressed by Wordsworth in his poetry, and it is the seed-field for many of the transcendental ideas later developed by Emerson on the constitution of nature, God, and the soul of man. The public was not ready for such a volume, and not more than five hundred copies of this really epoch-making book were sold within twelve years after its publication.

Nevertheless, Emerson was now rapidly becoming a notable figure in the intellectual life of New England. In 1837 he was asked to deliver the oration before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, and he prepared for this occasion that notable address, "The American Scholar." Lowell spoke of the occasion of its delivery as an event "without former parallel in our literary annals," and Holmes said, "This great oration was our intellectual Declaration of Independence."

The Essays, First Series, appeared in 1841, and the Second Series in 1844. Most of these essays were first given as lectures. Naturally the lecturer could polish and revise his addresses as he delivered them from time to time, and so when he was ready to give them to the world as essays, he had put his thought in its finished and final form. There is great compression of thought and condensation and precision of style in these compositions. It has been said that he who runs may read, but this saying cannot be applied to Emerson's essays. One must stop and think, and think deeply, or else one will miss the best of Emerson's thought. No book in our literature is more worthy of one's close study and attention, and none will give the young mind such fine practice in interpretative mental exercise. In fact, Emerson is one of the most inspiring of all writers; it is said that he has made more thoughtful readers than has any other American writer. He is certainly a stimulating mental tonic, and every ambitious youth should give his very best effort to the mastery of a few of the simpler pieces, and eventually should read all twenty-four of the essays in these two volumes. For this book we have selected "Heroism" and "Compensation" as two of the most stimulating for young readers, but there are many others equally good, not only in the two volumes of essays, but in the remaining prose works of Emerson.

Among the other prose books of Emerson are Representative Men (1850), English Traits (1850), Conduct of Life (1860), Society and Solitude (1870), Letters and Social Aims (1875). These are made up largely of lectures and essays similar in thought and style to the better known Essays. All through the years of his maturity Emerson had the habit of jotting down his thoughts in his Journals, and from this intellectual storehouse he drew material for his addresses and books. This wonderful miscellaneous source book

for the study of Emerson's thought and the development of his mind and character was recently published in ten volumes.

Emerson's style is unique. He said what he had to say in brilliant, epigrammatic sentences, often so condensed as to be almost unintelligible to the superficial reader. He had little smoothness or sweetness of style, though he possessed wonderful facility in turning expressive phrases, and occasionally he rose into passages of majestic beauty and sublimity. He may be said to be weak in the architectural or combining and arranging power of style. He throws his brilliant sentences and paragraphs together in a vague sort of order. There is certainly not that smoothness in transition that we now expect and demand of the average good prose stylist. He said himself that he sought no order or harmony of style in his writing. He speaks of his sentences as composed of "infinitely repellent particles," and he also called his method that of the lapidary who builds his house of boulders, piling them up in almost indiscriminate masses. Oliver Wendell Holmes, in his life of Emerson in the American Men of Letters Series, says: "Emerson's style is epigrammatic, incisive, authoritative, sometimes quaint, never obscure, except when he is handling nebulous subjects. His paragraphs are full of brittle sentences that break apart and are independent units, like the fragments of a coral colony. His imagery is frequently daring, leaping from the concrete to the abstract, from the special to the general and universal, and vice versa, with a bound that is like a flight."

As a poet Emerson has usually not been ranked high, but there are some who consider him the greatest of American poets. There is no use denying that he was a mediocre poetical craftsman in so far as mere technical excellences are concerned. His rhythm is often harsh and wabbly, and his rimes are sometimes untrue and even impossible. There is little or no steady evolution of thought or largeness and finality of treatment in many of his poems, but in others, particularly some of the shorter ones, there are an artistic finish and a completeness and perfection of expression that leave little to be desired. That Emerson was at bottom a real poet is no less evident in his best prose than in his best poetry. He took the office of poet seriously, and he almost always eventually put his finest thoughts into rhythmic