an
Class"PS ^^/7
BookV?) E7
CopightN" /^j^
CiiraRIGHT DEPOSm
"ESSAYS BEFORE A
SONATA"
BY .^
CHARLES EMVES
Ube ikntcftetbocket press
NEW YORK
1920
Copyright, 1920
BY
C. E. IVES
MAV -2 1921
0)C!,A611985
r=
" These prefatory essays were written by the composer for those
who can't stand his music—and the music for those who can't stand
his essays ; to those who can't stand either, the whole is respectfully
dedicated."
CONTENTS
The following pages were written primarily as a preface or
reason for the [writer's] second Pianoforte Sonata
—"Concord,
Mass., 1845,"—a group of four pieces, called a sonata for want
of a more exact name, as the form, perhaps substance, does not
justify it. The music and prefaces were intended to be printed
together, but as it was found that this would make a cumbersome
volume they are separate. The whole is an attempt to
present [one person's] impression of the spirit of transcendentalism
that is associated in the minds of many with Concord, Mass.,
of over a half century ago. This is undertaken in impressionistic
pictures of Emerson and Thoreau, a sketch of the Alcotts,
and a Scherzo supposed to reflect a lighter quality which is often
found in the fantastic side of Hawthorne. The first and last
movements do not aim to give any programs of the life or of
any particular work of either Emerson or Thoreau but rather
composite pictures or impressions. They are, however, so general
in outline that, from some viewpoints, they may be as far from
accepted impressions (from true conceptions, for that matter)
as the valuation which they purport to be of the influence of
the life, thought, and character of Emerson and Thoreau is
inadequate.
Essays Before a Sonata
I
PROLOGUE
How far is anyone justified, be he an authorit}^ or
a layman, in expressing or trying to express in terms
of music (in sounds, if you like) the value of anything,
material, moral, intellectual, or spiritual, which is
usually expressed in terms other than music? How
far afield can music go and keep honest as well as
reasonable or artistic? Is it a matter limited only
by the composer's power of expressing what lies in
his subjective or objective consciousness? Or is it
limited by any limitations of the composer? Can
a tune literally represent a stonewall with vines on
it or with nothing on it, though it (the tune) be made
by a genius whose power of objective contemplation
is in the highest state of development? Can it be
done by anything short of an act of mesmerism on
the part of the composer or an act of kindness on the
part of the listener? Does the extreme materializing
of music appeal strongly to anyone except to those
without a sense of humor — or rather with a sense
of humor?—or, except, possibly to those who
3
4 PROLOGUE
might excuse it, as Herbert Spencer might by the
theory that the sensational element (the sensations
we hear so much about in experimental psychology)
is the true pleasurable phenomenon in music and
that the mind should not be allowed to interfere?
Does the success of program music depend more upon
the program than upon the music? If it does, what
is the use of the music, if it does not, what is the use
of the program? Does not its appeal depend to a
great extent on the listener's willingness to accept
the theory that music is the language of the emotions
and only that? Or inversely does not this theory
tend to limit music to programs?—a limitation as
bad for music itself—for its wholesome progress,—as
a diet of program music is bad for the listener's ability
to digest an3^thing beyond the sensuous (or
physical-emotional). To a great extent this depends
on what is meant by emotion or on the assumption
that the word as used above refers more to the
expression, of, rather than to a meaning in a deeper
sense—which may be a feeling inifluenced by some
experience perhaps of a spiritual nature in the expression
of which the intellect has some part. "The
nearer we get to the mere expression of emotion,"
says Professor Sturt in his Philosophy of Art and
Personality as in the antics of boys who have been
promised a holiday, the further we get away from art."
On the other hand is not all music, program-music,
—is not pure music, so called, representative in its
essence? Is it not program-music raised to the
nth power or rather reduced to the minus nth
power? Where is the line to be drawn between the
PROLOGUE 5
expression of subjective and objective emotion?
It is easier to know what each is than when each
becomes what it is. The " Separateness of Art"
theory—that art is not life but a reflection of it
"that art is not vital to life but that life is vital to it,"
does not help us. Nor does Thoreau who says not
that "life is art," but that "life is an art," which of
course is a different thing than the foregoing. Tolstoi
is even more helpless to himself and to us. For he
eliminates further. From his definition of art we
may learn little more than that a kick in the back
is a work of art, and Beethoven's 9th Symphony is not.
Experiences are passed on from one man to another.
Abel knew that. And now we know it. But where
is the bridge placed?—at the end of the road or only
at the end of our vision? Is it all a bridge?—or is
there no bridge because there is no gulf? Suppose
that a composer writes a piece of music conscious that
he is inspired, say, by witnessing an act of great selfsacrifice—another
piece by the contemplation of a
certain trait of nobility he perceives in a friend's
character—and another by the sight of a mountain
lake under moonlight. The first two, from an inspirational
standpoint would naturally seem to come under
the subjective and the last under the objective,
yet the chances are, there is something of the quality
of both in all. There may have been in the first
instance physical action so intense or so dramatic
in character that the remembrance of it aroused a
great deal more objective emotion than the composer
was conscious of while writing the music. In the
third instance, the music may have been influenced
6 PROLOGUE
strongly though subconsciously by a vague remembrance
of certain thoughts and feelings, perhaps of
a deep religious or spiritual nature, which suddenly
came to him upon realizing the beauty of the scene
and which overpowered the first sensuous pleasure
—perhaps some such feeling as of the conviction of
immortality, that Thoreau experienced and tells
about in Wolden. "I penetrated to those meadows
. . . when the wild river and the woods were bathed
in so pure and bright a light as would have waked
the dead if they had been slumbering in their graves
as some suppose. There needs no stronger proof of
immortality." Enthusiasm must permeate it, but
what it is that inspires an art-effort is not easily
determined much less classified. The word "inspire"
is used here in the sense of cause rather than effect.
A critic may say that a certain movement is not
inspired. But that may be a matter of taste—perhaps
the most inspired music sounds the least so—to the
critic. A true inspiration may lack a true expression
unless it is assumed that if an inspiration is not true
enough to produce a true expression—(if there be
anyone who can definitely determine what a true
expression is) —it is not an inspiration at all.
Again suppose the same composer at another time
writes a piece of equal merit to the other three, as
estimates go; but holds that he is not conscious of
what inspired it—that he had nothing definite in
mind—that he was not aware of any mental image or
process—that, naturally, the actual work in creating
something gave him a satisfying feeling of pleasure
perhaps of elation. What will you substitute for
PROLOGUE 7
the mountain lake, for his friend's character, etc.?
Will you substitute anything? If so why? If so
what? Or is it enough to let the matter rest on the
pleasure mainly physical, of the tones, their color,
succession, and relations, formal or informal? Can
an inspiration come from a blank mind? Well—he
tries to explain and says that he was conscious of
some emotional excitement and of a sense of something
beautiful, he doesn't know exactly what—a vague
feeling of exaltation or perhaps of profound sadness.
What is the source of these instinctive feelings,
these vague intuitions and introspective sensations?
The more we try to analyze the more vague they
become. To pull them apart and classify them as
"subjective" or "objective" or as this or as that,
means, that they may be well classified and that is
about all; it leaves us as far from the origin as ever.
What does it all mean? What is behind it all ? The
"voice of God," says the artist, "the voice of the
devil," says the man in the front row. Are we, because
we are, human beings, born with the power
of innate perception of the beautiful in the abstract
so that an inspiration can arise through no external
stimuli of sensation or experience,—no association
with the outward? Or was there present in the above
instance, some kind of subconscious, instantaneous,
composite image, of all the mountain lakes this man
had ever seen blended as kind of overtones with the
various traits of nobility of many of this friends
embodied in one personality? Do all inspirational
images, states, conditions, or whatever they may be
truly called, have for a dominant part, if not for a
8 PROLOGUE
source, some actual experience in life or of the social
relation ? To think that they do not—always at least
—would be a relief; but as we are trying to consider
music made and heard by htunan beings (and not
by birds or angels) it seems difficult to suppose that
even subconscious images can be separated from
some human experience—there must be something
behind subconsciousness to produce consciousness,
and so on. But whatever the elements and origin
of these so-called images are, that they do stir deep
emotional feelings and encourage their expression is
a part of the unknowable we know. They do often
arouse something that has not yet passed the border
line between subconsciousness and consciousness
—
an artistic intuition (well named, but)—object and
cause unknown!—here is a program!—conscious or
subconscious what does it matter? Why try to
trace any stream that flows through the garden of
consciousness to its source only to be confronted
by another problem of tracing this source to its
source? Perhaps Emerson in the Rhodora answers
by not trying to explain
That if eyes were made for seeing
Then beauty is its own excuse for being:
Why thou wert there, O, rival of the rose!
I never thought to ask, I never knew;
But, in my simple ignorance, suppose
The self-same Power that brought me there brought you.
Perhaps Sturt answers by substitution: "We cannot
explain the origin of an artistic intuition any
more than the origin of any other primary function
PROLOGUE 9
of our nature. But if as I believe civilization is
mainly founded on those kinds of unselfish human
interests which we call knowledge and morality it is
easily intelligible that we should have a parallel
interest which we call art closely akin and lending
powerful support to the other two. It is intelligible
too that moral goodness, intellectual power, high
vitality, and strength should be approved by the
intuition." This reduces, or rather brings the problem
back to a tangible basis namely:—the translation
of an artistic intuition into musical sounds
approving and reflecting, or endeavoring to approve
and reflect, a "moral goodness," a "high vitality,"
etc., or any other human attribute mental, moral, or
spiritual.
Can music do more than this? Can it do this?
and if so who and what is to determine the degree of
its failure or success? The composer, the performer
(if there be any), or those who have to listen? One
hearing or a century of hearings?—and if it isn't
successful or if it doesn't fail what matters it?—the
fear of failure need keep no one from the attempt for
if the composer is sensitive he need but launch forth
a countercharge of "being misunderstood" and hide
behind it. A theme that the composer sets up as
"moral goodness" may sound like "high vitality,"
to his friend and but like an outburst of "nervous
weakness" or only a "stagnant pool" to those not
even his enemies. Expression to a great extent is a
matter of terms and terms are anyone's. The meaning
of "God" may have a billion interpretations if
there be that many souls in the world.
lo PROLOGUE
There is a moral in the "Nominalist and Realist"
that will prove all sums. It runs something like
this: No matter how sincere and confidential men
are in trying to know or assuming that they do know
each other's mood and habits of thought, the net
result leaves a feeling that all is left unsaid; for the
reason of their incapacity to know each other, though
they use the same words. They go on from one
explanation to another but things seem to stand about
as they did in the beginning ''because of that vicious
assumption." But we would rather believe that
music is beyond any analogy to word language and
that the time is coming, but not in our lifetime, when
it will develop possibilities unconceivable now,—
a
language, so transcendent, that its heights and depths
will be common to all mankind.
II
EMERSON
It has seemed to the writer, that Emerson is greater
—his identity more complete perhaps—in the realms
or revelation—natural disclosure—than in those of
poetry, philosophy, or prophecy. Though a great
poet and prophet, he is greater, possibly, as an invader
of the unknown,—America's deepest explorer of the
spiritual immensities,—a seer painting his discoveries
in masses and with any color that may lie at hand
—cosmic, religious, human, even sensuous; a recorder,
freely describing the inevitable struggle in the soul's
uprise—perceiving from this inward source alone,
that every "ultimate fact is only the first of a new
series"; a discoverer, whose heart knows, with Voltaire,
"that man seriously reflects when left alone,"
and would then discover, if he can, that "wondrous
chain which links the heavens with earth—the world
of beings subject to one law." In his reflections
Emerson, unlike Plato, is not afraid to ride Arion's
Dolphin, and to go wherever he is carried—to Parnassus
or to " Musketaquid."
We see him standing on a summit, at the door of
the infinite where many men do not care to climb.
12 EMERSON
peering into the mysteries of life, contemplating the
eternities, hurling back whatever he discovers there,
—now, thunderbolts for us to grasp, if we can,
and translate—now placing quietly, even tenderly,
in our hands, things that we ma}^ see without
effort—if we won't see them, so much the worse for
us.
We see him,—a mountain-guide, so intensely on
the lookout for the trail of his star, that he has no
time to stop and retrace his footprints, which may
often seem indistinct to his followers, who find it
easier and perhaps safer to keep their eyes on the
ground. And there is a chance that this guide could
not always retrace his steps if he tried—and why
should he!—he is on the road, conscious only that,
though his star may not lie within walking distance,
he must reach it before his wagon can be hitched to
it—a Prometheus illuminating a privilege of the
Gods—lighting a fuse that is laid towards men.
Emerson reveals the less not by an analysis of itself,
but b}^ bringing men towards the greater. He does
not try to reveal, personally, but leads, rather, to a
field where revelation is a harvest-part, where it is
known by the perceptions of the soul towards the
absolute law. He leads us towards this law, which is
a realization of what experience has suggested and
philosophy hoped for. He leads us, conscious that the
aspects of truth, as he sees them, may change as often
as truth remains constant. Revelation perhaps, is
but prophecy intensified—the intensifying of its
mason-work as well as its steeple. Simple prophecy,
while concerned with the past, reveals but the future,
EMERSON 13
while revelation is concerned with all time. The
power in Emerson's prophecy confuses it with—or at
least makes it seem to approach—revelation. It is
prophecy with no time element. Emerson tells, as
few bards could, of what will happen in the past, for
his future is eternity and the past is a part of that.
And so like all true prophets, he is always modern,
and will grow modern with the years—for his substance
is not relative but a measure of eternal truths
determined rather by a universalist than by a partialist.
He measured, as Michel Angelo said true artists
should, "with the eye and not the hand." But to
attribute modernism to his substance, though not to
his expression, is an anachronism—and as futile as
calling to-day's sunset modern.
As revelation and prophecy, in their common
acceptance are resolved by man, from the absolute
and universal, to the relative and personal, and as
Emerson's tendency is fundamentally the opposite,
it is easier, safer and so apparently clearer, to think of
him as a poet of natural and revealed philosophy.
And as such, a prophet—but not one to be confused
with those singing soothsayers, whose pockets are
filled, as are the pockets of conservative-reaction
and radical demagoguery in pupit, street-corner,
bank and columns, with dogmatic fortune-tellings.
Emerson, as a prophet in these lower heights, was a
conservative, in that he seldom lost his head, and a
radical, in that he seldom cared whether he lost it or
not. He was a born radical as are all true conservatives.
He was too much "absorbed by the absolute,"
too much of the universal to be either—though
14 EMERSON
he could be both at once. To Cotton Mather, he
would have been a demagogue, to a real demagogue he
would not be understood, as it was with no self interest
that he laid his hand on reality. The nearer any
subject or an attribute of it, approaches to the perfect
truth at its base, the more does qualification become
necessary. Radicalism must always qualify itself.
Emerson clarifies as he qualifies, by plunging into,
rather than "emerging from Carlyle's soul-confusing
labyrinths of speculative radicalism.
'
' The radicalism
that we hear much about to-day, is not Emerson's
kind—but of thinner fiber—it qualifies itself by going
to A "root" and often cutting other roots in the process;
it is usually impotent as dynamite in its cause
and sometimes as harmful to the wholesome progress
of all causes; it is qualified by its failure. But the
Radicalism of Emerson plunges to all roots, it becomes
greater than itself—greater than all its formal or
informal doctrines—too advanced and too conservative
for any specific result—too catholic for all
the churches—for the nearer it is to truth, the farther
it is from a truth, and the more it is qualified by its
future possibilities.
Hence comes the difficulty—the futility of attempting
to fasten on Emerson any particular doctrine,
philosophic, or religious theory. Emerson wrings
the neck of any law, that would become exclusive and
arrogant, whether a definite one of metaphysics or
an indefinite one of mechanics. He hacks his way
up and down, as near as he can to the absolute, the
oneness of all nature both human and spiritual, and
to God's benevolence. To him the ultimate of a
EMERSON 15
conception is its vastness, and it is probably this,
rather than the **
blind-spots " in his expression that
makes us incline to go with him but half-way ; and
then stand and build dogmas. But if we can not
follow all the way—if we do not always clearly perceive
the whole picture, we are at least free to imagine it
he makes us feel that we are free to do so; perhaps
that is the most he asks. For he is but reaching out
through and beyond mankind, trying to see what he
can of the infinite and its immensities—throwing
back to us whatever he can—but ever conscious that
he but occasionally catches a glimpse; conscious
that if he would contemplate the greater, he must
wrestle with the lesser, even though it dims an outline;
that he must struggle if he would hurl back anything
—even a broken fragment for men to examine and
perchance in it find a germ of some part of truth;
conscious at times, of the futility of his effort and its
message, conscious of its vagueness, but ever hopeful
for it, and confident that its foundation, if not its
medium is somewhere near the eventual and "absolute
good"—the divine truth underlying all life. If
Emerson must be dubbed an optimist—then an optimist
fighting pessimism, but not wallowing in it; an
optimist, who does not study pessimism by learning
to enjoy it, whose imagination is greater than his
curiosity, who seeing the sign-post to Erebus, is strong
enough to go the other way. This strength of optimism,
indeed the strength we find always underlying
his tolerance, his radicalism, his searches, prophecies,
and revelations, is heightened and made efficient by
"imagination-penetrative," a thing concerned not
i6 EMERSON
with the combining but the apprehending of things.
A possession, akin to the power, Ruskin says, all
great pictures have, which "depends on the penetration
of the imagination into the true nature of the
thing represented, and on the scorn of the imagination
for all shackles and fetters of mere external fact that
stand in the way of its suggestiveness "
—a possession
which gives the strength of distance to his eyes, and
the strength of muscle to his soul. With this he
slashes down through the loam—nor would he have
us rest there. If we would dig deep enough only to
plant a doctrine, from one part of him, he would show
us the quick-silver in that furrow. If we would
creed his Compensation, there is hardly a sentence
that could not wreck it, or could not show that the
idea is no tenet of a philosophy, but a clear (though
perhaps not clearly hurled on the canvas) illustration
of universal justice—of God's perfect balances; a
story of the analogy or better the identity of polarity
and duality in Nature with that in morality. The
essay is no more a doctrine than the law of gravitation
is. If we would stop and attribute too much to genius,
he shows us that "what is best written or done by
genius in the world, was no one man's work, but came
by wide social labor, when a thousand wrought like
one, sharing the same impulse." If we would find
in his essay on Montaigne, a biography, we are shown
a biography of scepticism—and in reducing this to
relation between "sensation and the morals" we are
shown a true Montaigne—we know the man better
perhaps by this less presentation. If we would stop
and trust heavily on the harvest of originality, he
EMERSON 17
shows us that this plant—this part of the garden—is
but a relative thing. It is dependent also on the
richness that ages have put into the soil. "Every
thinker is retrospective."
Thus is Emerson always beating down through the
crust towards the first fire of life, of death and of
eternity. Read where you will, each sentence seems
not to point to the next but to the undercurrent of all.
If you would label his a religion of ethics or of morals,
he shames you at the outset, "for ethics is but a
reflection of a divine personality." All the religions
this world has ever known, have been but the aftermath
of the ethics of one or another holy person;
"as soon as character appears be sure love will";
"the intuition of the moral sentiment is but the
insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul";
but these laws cannot be catalogued.
If a versatilist, a modern Goethe, for instance,
could put all of Emerson's admonitions into practice,
a constant permanence would result,—an eternal
short-circuit—a focus of equal X-rays. Even the
value or success of but one precept is dependent, like
that of a ball-game as much on the batting-eye as on
the pitching-arm. The inactivity of permanence is
what Emerson will not permit. He will not accept
repose against the activity of truth. But this almost
constant resolution of every insight towards the
absolute may get a little on one's nerves, if one is at
all partial-wise to the specific; one begins to ask what
is the absolute anyway, and why try to look clear
through the eternities and the unknowable even out
of the other end. Emerson's fondness for flying to
]^ EMERSON
definite heights on indefinite wings, and the tendency
to over-resolve, becomes unsatisfying to the impatient,
who want results to come as they walk. Probably
this is a reason that it is occasionally said that Emerson
has no vital message for the rank and file. He has
no definite message perhaps for the literal, but his
messages are all vital, as much, by reason of his
indefiniteness, as in spite of it.
There is a suggestion of irony in the thought that
the power of his vague but compelling vitality, which
ever sweeps us on in spite of ourselves, might not
have been his, if it had not been for those definite
religious doctrines of the old New England theologians.
For almost two centuries, Emerson's mental and
spiritual muscles had been in training for him in the
moral and intellectual contentions, a part of the religious
exercise of his forebears. A kind of higher sensitiveness
seems to culminate in him. It gives him
a power of searching for a wider freedom of soul than
theirs. The religion of Puritanism was based to a
great extent, on a search for the unknowable, limited
only by the dogma of its theology—a search for a
path, so that the soul could better be conducted to
the next world, while Emerson's transcendentalism
was based on the wider search for the unknowable,
unlimited in any way or by anything except the vast
bounds of innate goodness, as it might be revealed
to him in any phenomena of man, Nature, or God.
This distinction, tenuous, in spite of the definitesounding
words, we like to believe has something
peculiar to Emerson in it. We like to feel that it
superimposes the one that makes all transcendental-
EMERSON 19
ism but an intellectual state, based on the theory of
innate ideas, the reality of thought and the necessity
of its freedom. For the philosophy of the religion, or
whatever you will call it, of the Concord Transcendentalists
is at least, more than an intellectual state
—it has even some of the functions of the Puritan
church—it is a spiritual state in which both soul and
mind can better conduct themselves in this world,
and also in the next—when the time comes. The
search of the Puritan was rather along the path
of logic, spiritualized, and the transcendentalist
of reason, spiritualized—a difference in a broad
sense between objective and subjective contem-
plation.
The dislike of inactivity, repose and barter, drives
one to the indefinite subjective. Emerson's lack of
interest in permanence may cause him to present a
subjectivity harsher on the outside than is essential.
His very universalism occasionally seems a limitation.
Somewhere here may lie a weakness—real to some,
apparent to others—a weakness in so far as his relation
becomes less vivid—to the many; insofar as he
over-disregards the personal unit in the universal.
If Genius is the most indebted, how much does it
owe to those who would, but do not easily ride with
it ? If there is a weakness here is it the fault of substance
or only of manner? If of the former, there is
organic error somewhere, and Emerson will become
less and less valuable to man. But this seems impossible,
at least to us. Without considering his
manner or expression here (it forms the general subject
of the second section of this paper), let us ask if
20 EMERSON
Emerson's substance needs an affinity, a supplement
or even a complement or a gangplank? And if so, of
what will it be composed?
Perhaps Emerson could not have risen to his own,
if it had not been for his Unitarian training and association
with the churchmen emancipators. "Christianity
is founded on, and supposes the authorit}^ of,
reason, and cannot therefore oppose it, without subverting
itself." ... "Its office is to discern universal
truths, great and eternal principles . . . the
highest power of the soul.
'
' Thus preached Channing.
Who knows but this pulpit aroused the younger
Emerson to the possibilities of intuitive reasoning
in spiritual realms ? The influence of men like Channing
in his fight for the dignity of human nature,
against the arbitrary revelations that Calvinism had
strapped on the church, and for the belief in the divine
in human reason, doubtless encouraged Emerson in
his unshackled search for the infinite, and gave him
premises which he later took for granted instead of
carrying them around with him. An overinterest,
not an underinterest in Christian ideal aims, may
have caused him to feel that the definite paths were
well established and doing their share, and that for
some to reach the same infinite ends, more paths
might be opened—paths which would in themselves,
and in a more transcendent way, partake of the
spiritual nature of the land in quest,—another expression
of God's Kingdom in Man. Would you have the
indefinite paths always supplemented by the shadow
of the definite one of a first influence?
A characteristic of rebellion, is that its results are
EMERSON 21
often deepest, when the rebel breaks not from the
worst to the greatest, but from the great to the greater.
The youth of the rebel increases this characteristic.
The innate rebellious spirit in young men is active
and buoyant. They could rebel against and improve
the millennium. This excess of enthusiasm at the
inception of a movement, causes loss of perspective;
a natural tendency to undervalue the great in that
which is being taken as a base of departure. A
''youthful sedition" of Emerson was his withdrawal
from the communion, perhaps, the most socialistic doctrine
(or rather symbol) of the church—a "commune"
above property or class.
Picking up an essay on religion of a rather remarkable-minded
boy—perhaps with a touch of genius
written when he was still in college, and so serving as
a good illustration in point—we read
—"Every thinking
man knows that the church is dead." But every
thinking man knows that the church-part of the church
always has been dead—that part seen by candle-light,
not Christ-light. Enthusiasm is restless and hasn't
time to see that if the church holds itself as nothing
but the symbol of the greater light it is life itself
as a sj^mbol of a symbol it is dead. Many of the
sincerest followers of Christ never heard of Him. It
is the better influence of an institution that arouses
in the deep and earnest souls a feeling of rebellion to
make its aims more certain. It is their very sincerity
that causes these seekers for a freer vision to strike
down for more fundamental, universal, and perfect
truths, but with such feverish enthusiasm, that they
appear to overthink themselves—a subconscious way
22 EMERSON
of going Godward perhaps. The rebel of the twentieth
century says: "Let us discard God, immortaHty,
miracle—but be not untrue to ourselves." Here he,
no doubt, in a sincere and exalted moment, confuses
God with a name. He apparently feels that there is a
separatable difference between natural and revealed
religion. He mistakes the powers behind them, to
be fundamentally separate. In the excessive keenness
of his search, he forgets that "being true to ourselves"
is God, that the faintest thought of immortality is
God, and that God is "miracle." Overenthusiasm
keeps one from letting a common experience of a
day translate what is stirring the soul. The same
inspiring force that arouses the young rebel, brings
later in life a kind of "experience-afterglow," a realization
that the soul cannot discard or limit anything.
Would you have the youthful enthusiasm of rebellion,
which Emerson carried beyond his youth always
supplemented by the shadow of experience?
Perhaps it is not the narrow minded alone that
have no interest in anything, but in its relation to
their personality. Is the Christian Religion, to which
Emerson owes embryo-ideals, anything but the revelation
of God in a personality—a revelation so that
the narrow mind could become opened? But the
tendency to over-personalize personality may also
have suggested to Emerson the necessity for more
universal, and impersonal paths, though they be
indefinite of outline and vague of ascent. Could
you journey, with equal benefit, if they were less so?
Would you have the universal always supplemented
by the shadow of the personal? If this view is ac-
EMERSON 23
cepted, and we doubt that it can be by the majority,
Emerson's substance could well bear a supplement,
perhaps an affinity. Something that will support
that which some conceive he does not offer. Something
that will help answer Alton Locke's question:
"What has Emerson for the working-man?" and
questions of others who look for the gangplank
before the ship comes in sight. Something that will
supply the definite banister to the infinite, which it
is said he keeps invisible. Something that will point
a crossroad from "his personal" to "his nature."
Something that may be in Thoreau or Wordsworth,
or in another poet whose songs "breath of a new morning
of a higher life though a definite beauty in Nature
"
—or something that will show the birth of his ideal
and hold out a background of revealed religion, as a
perspective to his transcendent religion—a counterpoise
in his rebellion—which we feel Channing or
Dr. Bushnell, or other saints known and unknown
might supply.
If the arc must be completed—if there are those
who would have the great, dim outlines of Emerson
fulfilled, it is fortunate that there are Bushnells, and
Wordsworths, to whom they may appeal—to say
nothing of the Vedas, the Bible, or their own souls.
But such possibilities and conceptions, the deeper
they are received, the more they seem to reduce their
need. Emerson's Circle may be a better whole,
without its complement. Perhaps his "unsatiable
demand for unity, the need to recognize one nature
in all variety of objects," would have been impaired,
if something should make it simpler for men to find
24 EMERSON
the identity they at first want in his substance.
"Draw if thou canst the mystic Hne severing rightly
his from thine, which is human, which divine."
Whatever means one would use to personalize Emerson's
natural revelation, whether by a vision or a
board walk, the vastness of his aims and the dignity
of his tolerance would doubtless cause him to accept
or at least try to accept, and use "magically as a part
of his fortune." He would modestly say, perhaps,
"that the world is enlarged for him, not by finding
new objects, but by more affinities, and potencies
than those he already has." But, indeed, is not
enough manifestation already there? Is not the
asking that it be made more manifest forgetting that
"we are not strong by our power to penetrate, but
by our relatedness ?
" Will more signs create a greater
sympathy? Is not our weak suggestion needed only
for those content with their own hopelessness?
Others may lead others to him, but he finds his
problem in making "gladness hope and fortitude
flow from his page," rather than in arranging that
our hearts be there to receive it. The first is his
duty—the last ours
!
II
A devotion to an end tends to undervalue the
means. A power of revelation may make one more
concerned about his perceptions of the soul's nature
than the way of their disclosure. Emerson is more
interested in what he perceives than in his expression
of it. He is a creator whose intensity is consumed
EMERSON 25
more with the substance of his creation than with
the manner by which he shows it to others. Like
Petrarch he seems more a discoverer of Beauty than
an imparter of it. But these discoveries, these devotions
to aims, these struggles tow^ard the absolute,
do not these in themselves, impart something, if
not all, of their own unity and coherence—which is
not received, as such, at first, nor is foremost in their
expression. It must be remembered that "truth"
was what Emerson was after—not strength of outline,
or even beauty except in so far as they might
reveal themselves, naturally, in his explorations towards
the infinite. To think hard and deeply and
to say what is thought, regardless of consequences, may
produce a first impression, either of great translucence,
or of great muddiness, but in the latter there
may be hidden possibilities. Some accuse Brahms'
orchestration of being muddy. This may be a good
name for a first impression of it. But if it should
seem less so, he might not be saying what he thought.
The mud may be a form of sincerity which demands
that the heart be translated, rather than handed
around through the pit. A clearer scoring might
have lowered the thought. Carlyle told Emerson
that some of his paragraphs didn't cohere. Emerson
wrote by sentences or phrases, rather than by logical
sequence. His underlying plan of work seems based
on the large unity of a series of particular aspects of a
subject, rather than on the continuity of its expression.
As thoughts surge to his mind, he fills the
heavens with them, crowds them in, if necessary, but
seldom arranges them, along the ground first. Among
26 EMERSON
class-room excuses for Emerson's imperfect coherence
and lack of unity, is one that remembers that his
essays were made from lecture notes. His habit,
often in lecturing, was to compile his ideas as they
came to him on a general subject, in scattered notes,
and when on the platform, to trust to the mood
of the occasion, to assemble them. This seems a
specious explanation, though true to fact. Vagueness,
is at times, an indication of nearness to a perfect
truth. The definite glory of Bernard of Cluny's
Celestial City, is more beautiful that true—probably.
Orderly reason does not always have to be a visible
part of all great things. Logic may possibly require
that unity means something ascending in self-evident
relation to the parts and to the whole, with no ellipsis
in the ascent. But reason may permit, even demand
an ellipsis, and genius may not need the self-evident
part. In fact, these parts may be the "blind-spots"
in the progress of unity. They may be filled with
little but repetition, "Nature loves analogy and
hates repetition." Botany reveals evolution not
permanence. An apparent confusion if lived with
long enough may become orderly. Emerson was not
writing for lazy minds, though one of the keenest of
his academic friends said that, he (Emerson) could
not explain many of his own pages. But why should
he!—he explained them when he discovered them
—
the moment before he spoke or wrote them. A rare
experience of a moment at daybreak, when something
in nature seems to reveal all consciousness, cannot
be explained at noon. Yet it is a part of the day's
unity. At evening, nature is absorbed by another
EMERSON 27
experience. She dislikes to explain as much as to
repeat. It is conceivable, that what is unified form
to the author, or composer, may of necessity be formless
to his audience. A home-run will cause more
unity in the grand stand than in the season's batting
average. If a composer once starts to compromise, his
work will begin to drag on him. Before the end is
reached, his inspiration has all gone up in sounds
pleasing to his audience, ugly to him—sacrificed for
the first acoustic—an opaque clarity, a picture painted
for its hanging. Easy unity, like easy virtue, is
easier to describe, when judged from its lapses than
from its constancy. When the infidel admits God is
great, he means only: "I am lazy—it is easier to talk
than live." Ruskin also says: "Suppose I like the
finite curves best, who shall say I'm right or wrong?
No one. It is simply a question of experience."
You may not be able to experience a symphony, even
after twenty performances. Initial coherence to-day
may be dullness to-morrow probably because formal
or outward unity depends so much on repetition,
sequences, antitheses, paragraphs with inductions
and summaries. Macaulay had that kind of unity.
Can you read him to-day? Emerson rather goes
out and shouts :
" I'm thinking of the sun's glory to-day
and I'll let his light shine through me. I'll say any
damn thing that this inspires me with. Perhaps there
are flashes of light, still in cipher, kept there by unity,
the code of which the world has not yet discovered.
The unity of one sentence inspires the unity of the
whole—though its physique is as ragged as the
Dolomites.
28 EMERSON
Intense lights—vague shadows—great pillars in
a horizon are difficult things to nail signboards to.
Emerson's outward-inward qualities make him hard
to classify, but easy for some. There are many who
like to say that he—even all the Concord men—are
intellectuals. Perhaps—but intellectuals who wear
their brains nearer the heart than some of their
critics. It is as dangerous to determine a characteristic
by manner as by mood. Emerson is a pure intellectual
to those who prefer to take him as literally
as they can. There are reformers, and in "the form"
lies their interest, who prefer to stand on the plain,
and then insist they see from the summit. Indolent
legs supply the strength of eye for their inspiration.
The intellect is never a whole. It is where the soul
finds things. It is often the only track to the overvalues.
It appears a whole—but never becomes one
even in the stock exchange, or the convent, or the
laboratory. In the cleverest criminal, it is but a way
to a low ideal. It can never discard the other part
of its duality—the soul or the void where the soul
ought to be. So why classify a quality always so
relative that it is more an agency than substance;
a quality that disappears when classified. "The life
of the All must stream through us to make the man
and the moment great." A sailor with a precious
cargo doesn't analyze the water.
Because Emerson had generations of Calvinistic
sermons in his blood, some cataloguers, would localize
or provincialize him, with the sternness of the old
Puritan mind. They make him that, hold him there.
They lean heavily on what they find of the above
EMERSON 29
influence in him. They won't follow the rivers in his
thought and the play of his soul. And their cousin
cataloguers put him in another pigeon-hole. They
label him "ascetic." They translate his outward
serenity into an impression of severity. But truth
keeps one from being hysterical. Is a demagogue a
friend of the people because he will lie to them to
make them cry and raise false hopes? A search for
perfect truths throws out a beauty more spiritual
than sensuous. A sombre dignity of style is often
confused by under-imagination and by surface-sentiment,
with austerity. If Emerson's manner is not
always beautiful in accordance with accepted standards,
why not accept a few other standards? He is
an ascetic, in that he refuses to compromise content
with manner. But a real ascetic is an extremist who
has but one height. Thus may come the confusion,
of one who says that Emerson carries him high, but
then leaves him always at that height—no higher
a confusion, mistaking a latent exultation for an
ascetic reserve. The rules of Thorough Bass can be
applied to his scale of flight no more than they can to
the planetary system. Jadassohn, if Emerson were
literally a composer, could no more analyze his
harmony than a guide-to-Boston could. A microscope
might show that he uses chords of the 9th, i ith,
or the 99th, but a lens far different tells us they are
used with different aims from those of Debussy.
Emerson is definite in that his art is based on something
stronger than the amusing or at its best the
beguiling of a few mortals. If he uses a sensuous
chord, it is not for sensual ears. His harmonies may
30 EMERSON
float, if the wind blows in that direction, through a
voluptuous atmosphere, but he has not Debussy's
fondness for trying to blow a sensuous atmosphere
from his own voluptuous cheeks. And so he is an
ascetic! There is a distance between jowl and soul
—and it is not measured by the fraction of an inch
between Concord and Paris. On the other hand, if
one thinks that his harmony contains no dramatic
chords, because no theatrical sound is heard, let him
listen to the finale of "Success," or of "Spiritual
Laws," or to some of the poems, "Brahma" or
"Sursum Corda," for example. Of a truth his Codas
often seem to crystallize in a dramatic, though serene
and sustained way, the truths of his subject—they
become more active and intense, but quieter and
deeper.
Then there comes along another set of cataloguers.
The}^ put him down as a "classist," or a romanticist,
or an eclectic. Because a prophet is a child of romanticism—because
revelation is classic, because eclecticism
quotes from eclectic Hindu Philosophy, a more
sympathetic cataloguer may say, that Emerson inspires
courage of the quieter kind and delight of the
higher kind.
The same well-bound school teacher who told the
boys that Thoreau was a naturalist because he didn't
like to work, puts down Emerson as a "classic," and
Hawthorne as a "romantic." A loud voice made this
doubly true and sure to be on the examination paper.
But this teacher of "truth and dogma" apparently
forgot that there is no such thing as "classicism or
romanticism." One has but to go to the various
EMERSON 31
definitions of these to know that. If you go to a
classic definition you know what a true classic is,
and similarly a ''true romantic." But if you go to
both, you have an algebraic formula, x = x, a cancellation,
an apercu, and hence satisfying ; if you go to all
definitions you have another formula x > x, a destruction,
another apercu, and hence satisfying. Professor
Beers goes to the dictionary (you wouldn't think a
college professor would be as reckless as that). And
so he can say that "romantic" is "pertaining to the
style of the Christian and popular literature of the
Middle Ages,"—a Roman Catholic mode of salvation
(not this definition but having a definition).
And so Prof. B. can say that Walter Scott is a
romanticist (and Billy Phelps a classic—sometimes).
But for our part Dick Croker is a classic and Job a
romanticist. Another professor. Babbitt by name,
links up Romanticism with Rousseau, and charges
against it many of man's troubles. He somehow
likes to mix it up with sin. He throws saucers
at it, but in a scholarly, interesting, sincere, and
accurate way. He uncovers a deformed foot,
gives it a name, from which we are allowed to infer
that the covered foot is healthy and named classicism.
But no Christian Scientist can prove that
Christ never had a stomach ache. The Architecture
of Humanism ^ tells us that
'
' romanticism consists of
... a poetic sensibility towards the remote, as such."
But is Plato a classic or towards the remote? Is
Classicism a poor relation of time—not of man? Is
a thing classic or romantic because it is or is not
^ Geoffrey Scott (Constable & Co.)
32 EMERSON
passed by that biologic—that indescribable streamof-change
going on in all life? Let us settle the
point for ''good," and say that a thing is classic if it
is thought of in terms of the past and romantic if
thought of in terms of the future—and a thing thought
of in terms of the present is—well, that is impossible!
Hence, we allow ourselves to say, that Emerson is
neither a classic or romantic but both—and both not
only at different times in one essay, but at the same
time in one sentence—in one word. And must we
admit it, so is everyone. If you don't believe it,
there must be some true definition you haven't seen.
Chopin shows a few things that Bach forgot—but
he is not eclectic, they say. Brahms shows many
things that Bach did remember, so he is an eclectic,
they say. Leoncavallo writes pretty verses and
Palestrina is a priest, and Confucius inspires Scriabin.
A choice is freedom. Natural selection is but one of
Nature's tunes. "All melodious poets shall be hoarse
as street ballads, when once the penetrating keynote
of nature and spirit is sounded—the earth-beat,
sea-beat, heart-beat, which make the tune to which
the sun rolls, and the globule of blood and the sap of
the trees."
An intuitive sense of values, tends to make Emerson
use social, political, and even economic phenomena,
as means of expression, as the accidental notes in his
scale—rather than as ends, even lesser ends. In
the realization that they are essential parts of the
greater values, he does not confuse them with each
other. He remains undisturbed except in rare
instances, when the lower parts invade and seek to
EMERSON 33
displace the higher. He was not afraid to say that
"there are laws which should not be too well obeyed."
To him, slavery was not a social or a political or an
economic question, nor even one of morals or of
ethics, but one of universal spiritual freedom only.
It mattered little what party, or what platform, or
what law of commerce governed men. Was man
governing himself? Social error and virtue were
but relative.
This habit of not being hindered by using, but still
going beyond the great truths of living, to the greater
truths of life gave force to his influence over the
materialists. Thus he seems to us more a regenerator
than a reformer—more an interpreter of life's reflexes
than of life's facts, perhaps. Here he appears greater
than Voltaire or Rousseau and helped, perhaps, by
the centrality of his conceptions, he could arouse the
deeper spiritual and moral emotions, without causing
his listeners to distort their physical ones. To prove
that mind is over matter, he doesn't place matter
over mind. He is not like the man who, because he
couldn't afford both, gave up metaphysics for an
automobile, and when he ran over a man blamed
metaphysics. He would not have us get over-excited
about physical disturbance but have it accepted as
a part of any progress in culture, moral, spiritual or
aesthetic. If a poet retires to the mountain-side, to
avoid the vulgar unculture of men, and their physical
disturbance, so that he may better catch a nobler
theme for his symphony, Emerson tells him that
"man's culture can spare nothing, wants all material,
converts all impediments into instruments, all enemies
3
34 EMERSON
into power." The latest product of man's culture
—
the aeroplane, then sails o'er the mountain and
instead of an inspiration—a spray of tobacco-juice
falls on the poet. "Calm yourself, Poet!" says
Emei*son, "culture will convert furies into muses
and hells into benefit. This wouldn't have befallen
you if it hadn't been for the latest transcendent product
of the genius of culture" (we won't say what
kind), a consummation of the dreams of poets, from
David to Tennyson. Material progress is but a
means of expression. Realize that man's coarseness
has its future and will also be refined in the gradual
uprise. Turning the world upside down may be one
of its lesser incidents. It is the cause, seldom the
effect that interests Emerson. He can help the cause
—the effect must help itself. He might have said
to those who talk knowingly about the cause of war
—or of the last war, and who would trace it down
through long vistas of cosmic, political, moral evolution
and what not—he might say that the cause of
it was as simple as that of any dog-fight—the "hogmind"
of the minority against the universal mind,
the majority. The un-courage of the former fears
to believe in the innate goodness of mankind. The
cause is always the same, the effect different by
chance; it is as easy for a hog, even a stupid one,
to step on a box of matches under a tenement with
a thousand souls, as under an empty bird-house.
The many kindly burn up for the few ; for the minority
is selfish and the majority generous. The minority
has ruled the world for physical reasons. The
physical reasons are being removed by this "convert-
EMERSON 35
ing culture." Webster will not much longer have to
grope for the mind of his constituency. The majority
—the people—will need no intermediary. Governments
will pass from the representative to the direct.
The hog-mind is the principal thing that is making
this transition slow. The biggest prop to the hogmind
is pride—pride in property and the power property
gives. Ruskin backs this up—"it is at the
bottom of all great mistakes; other passions do
occasional good, but whenever pride puts in its word
. . . it is all over with the artist." The hog-mind
and its handmaidens in disorder, superficial brightness,
fundamental dullness, then cowardice and suspicion—all
a part of the minority (the non-people)
the antithesis of everything called soul, spirit, Christianity,
truth, freedom—will give way more and more
to the great primal truths—that there is more good
than evil, that God is on the side of the majority
(the people) —that he is not enthusiastic about the
minority (the non-people)—that he has made men
greater than man, that he has made the universal
mind and the over-soul greater and a part of the
individual mind and soul—that he has made the
Divine a part of all.
Again, if a picture in economics is before him,
Emerson plunges down to the things that are because
they are better than they are. If there is a row, which
there usually is, between the ebb and flood tide, in
the material ocean—for example, between the theory
of the present order of competition, and of attractive
and associated labor, he would sympathize with
Ricardo, perhaps, that labor is the measure of value,
36 EMERSON
but "embrace, as do generous minds, the proposition
of labor shared by all." He would go deeper than
political economics, strain out the self-factor from
both theories, and make the measure of each pretty
much the same, so that the natural (the majority)
would win, but not to the disadvantage of the minority
(the artificial) because this has disappeared—it
is of the majority. John Stuart Mill's political
economy is losing value because it was written by a
mind more "a banker's" than a "poet's." The poet
knows that there is no such thing as the perpetual law
of supply and demand, perhaps not of demand and
supply—or of the wage-fund, or price-level, or increments
earned or unearned; and that the existence of
personal or public property may not prove the existence
of God.
Emerson seems to use the great definite interests
of humanity to express the greater, indefinite,
spiritual values—to fulfill what he can in his realms
of revelation. Thus, it seems that so close a relation
exists between his content and expression, his substance
and manner, that if he were more definite in
the latter he would lose power in the former,—perhaps
some of those occasional flashes would have been unexpressed—flashes
that have gone down through the
world and will flame on through the ages—flashes that
approach as near the Divine as Beethoven in his most
inspired moments—flashes of transcendent beauty,
of such universal import, that they may bring, of a'
sudden, some intimate personal experience, and produce
the same indescribable effect that comes in rare
instances, to men, from some common sensation. In
EMERSON 37
the early morning of a Memorial Day, a boy is awakened
by martial music—a village band is marching
down the street, and as the strains of Reeves' majestic
Seventh Regiment March come nearer and nearer,
he seems of a sudden translated—a moment of vivid
power comes, a consciousness of material nobility,
an exultant something gleaming with the possibilities
of this life, an assurance that nothing is impossible,
and that the whole world lies at his feet. But as the
band turns the corner, at the soldiers' monument,
and the march steps of the Grand Army become fainter
and fainter, the boy's vision slowly vanishes his
"world" becomes less and less probable—but the
experience ever lies within him in its reality. Later
in life, the same boy hears the Sabbath morning bell
ringing out from the white steeple at the "Center,"
and as it draws him to it, through the autumn fields
of sumach and asters, a Gospel hymn of simple
devotion comes out to him—"There's a wideness in
God's mercy"—an instant suggestion of that Memorial
Day morning comes—but the moment is of deeper
import—there is no personal exultation—no intimate
world vision—no magnified personal hope—and in
their place a profound sense of a spiritual truth,—a sin
within reach of forgiveness—and as the hymn voices die
away, there lies at his feet—not the world, but the
figure of the Saviour—he sees an unfathomable courage,
an immortality for the lowest, the vastness in
humility, the kindness of the human heart, man's
noblest strength, and he knows that God is nothing
—nothing but love! Whence cometh the wonder of
a moment? From sources we know not. But we
38 EMERSON
do know that from obscurity, and from this higher
Orpheus come measures of sphere melodies^ flowing
in wild, native tones, ravaging the souls of men, flowing
now with thousand-fold accompaniments and
rich symphonies through all our hearts; modulating
and divinely leading them.
Ill
What is character? In how far does it sustain the
soul or the soul it ? Is it a part of the soul ? And then
—what is the soul? Plato knows but cannot tell
us. Every new-born man knows, but no one tells
us. "Nature will not be disposed of easily. No
power of genius has ever yet had the smallest success
in explaining existence. The perfect enigma remains.
'
'
As every blind man sees the sun, so character may be
the part of the soul we, the blind, can see, and then
have the right to imagine that the soul is each man's
share of God, and character the muscle which tries
to reveal its mysteries—a kind of its first visible
radiance—the right to know that it is the voice which
is always calling the pragmatist a fool.
At any rate, it can be said that Emerson's character
has much to do with his power upon us. Men who
have known nothing of his life, have borne witness
to this. It is directly at the root of his substance,
and affects his manner only indirectly. It gives the
sincerity to the constant spiritual hopefulness we
are always conscious of, and which carries with it
often, even when the expression is somber, a note
* Paraphrased from a passage in Sartor Resartus.
EMERSON 39
of exultation in the victories of "the innate virtues"
of man. And it is this, perhaps, that makes us feel
his courage—not a self-courage, but a sympathetic
one—courageous even to tenderness. It is the open
courage of a kind heart, of not forcing opinions—
thing much needed when the cowardly, underhanded
courage of the fanatic would force opinion. It is the
courage of believing in freedom, per se, rather than
of trying to force everyone to see that you believe in it
—the courage of the willingness to be reformed,
rather than of reforming—the courage teaching that
sacrifice is bravery, and force, fear. The courage of
righteous indignation, of stammering eloquence, of
spiritual insight, a courage ever contracting or unfolding
a philosophy as it grows—a courage that would
make the impossible possible. Oliver Wendell Holmes
says that Emerson attempted the impossible in the
Over-Soul—"an overflow of spiritual imagination."
But he (Emerson) accomplished the impossible in
attempting it, and still leaving it impossible. A
courageous struggle to satisfy, as Thoreau saj^s,
"Hunger rather than the palate"—the hunger of a
lifetime sometimes by one meal. His essay on the
Pre-Soul (which he did not write) treats of that part
of the over-soul's influence on unborn ages, and
attempts the impossible only when it stops attempting
it.
Like all courageous souls, the higher Emerson soars,
the more lowly he becomes. "Do you think the
porter and the cook have no experiences, no wonders
for you? Everyone knows as much as the Savant."
To some, the way to be humble is to admonish the
40 EMERSON
humble, not learn from them. Carlyle would have
Emerson teach by more definite signs, rather than
interpret his revelations, or shall we say preach?
Admitting all the inspiration and help that Sartor
Resartus has given in spite of its vaudeville and
tragic stages, to many young men getting under way
in the life of tailor or king, we believe it can be said
(but very broadly said) that Emerson, either in the
first or second series of essays, taken as a whole, gives,
it seems to us, greater inspiration, partly because
his manner is less didactic, less personally suggestive,
perhaps less clearly or obviously human than Carlyle's.
How direct this inspiration is a matter of personal
viewpoint, temperament, perhaps inheritance. Augustine
Birrell says he does not feel it—and he seems
not to even indirectly. Apparently "a non-sequacious
author" can't inspire him, for Emerson, seems
to him a "little thin and vague." Is Emerson or the
English climate to blame for this^ He, Birrell, says
a really great author dissipates all fears as to his
staying-power. (Though fears for our staying-power,
not Emerson's, is what we would like dissipated.)
Besides, around a really great author, there are no
fears to dissipate. "A wise author never allows his
reader's mind to be at large," but Emerson is not a
wise author. His essay on Prudence has nothing to
do with prudence, for to be wise and prudent he must
put explanation first, and let his substance dissolve
because of it. "How carefully," says Birrell again,
"a really great author like Dr. Newman, or M.
Renan, explains to you what he is going to do, and
how he is going to do it." Personally we like the
EMERSON 41
chance of having a hand in the "explaining." We
prefer to look at flowers, but not through a botany,
for it seems that if we look at them alone, we see a
beauty of Nature's poetry, a direct gift from the
Divine, and if we look at botany alone, we see the
beauty of Nature's intellect, a direct gift of the Divine
—if we look at both together, we see nothing.
Thus it seems that Carlyle and Birrell would have
it that courage and humility have something to do
with "explanation"—and that it is not "a respect
for all"—a faith in the power of "innate virtue" to
perceive by "relativeness rather than penetration"
that causes Emerson to withhold explanation to a
greater degree than many writers. Carlyle asks
for more utility, and Birrell for more inspiration.
But we like to believe that it is the height of
Emerson's character, evidenced especially in his
courage and humility that shades its quality, rather
than that its virtue is less—that it is his height that
will make him more and more valuable and more
and more within the reach of all—whether it be by
utilit}^ inspiration, or other needs of the human soul.
Cannot some of the most valuable kinds of utility
and inspiration come from humility in its highest and
purest forms ? For is not the truest kind of humility
a kind of glorified or transcendent democracy—the
practicing it rather than the talking it—the notwanting
to level all finite things, but the being willing
to be leveled towards the infinite? Until humility
produces that frame of mind and spirit in the artist
can his audience gain the greatest kind of utility and
inspiration, which might be quite invisible at first?
42 EMERSON
Emerson realizes the value of ''the many,''—that the
law of averages has a divine source. He recognizes
the various life-values i7i reality—not by reason of
their closeness or remoteness, but because he sympathizes
with men who live them, and the majority
do. "The private store of reason is not great—would
that there were a pubHc store for man," cries Pascal,
but there is, says Emerson, it is the universal mind,
an institution congenital with the common or oversoul.
Pascal is discouraged, for he lets himself be influenced
by surface political and religious history which
shows the struggle of the group, led by an individual,
rather than that of the individual led by himself—
a
struggle as much privately caused as privately led.
The main-path of all social progress has been spiritual
rather than intellectual in character, but the many
by-paths of individual-materialism, though never obliterating
the highway, have dimmed its outlines and
caused travelers to confuse the colors along the road.
A more natural way of freeing the congestion in the
benefits of material progress will make it less difficult
for the majority to recognize the true relation between
the important spiritual and religious values
and the less important intellectual and economic
values. As the action of the intellect and universal
mind becomes more and more identical, the
clearer will the relation of all values become. But for
physical reasons, the group has had to depend upon
the individual as leaders, and the leaders with few
exceptions restrained the universal mind—they
trusted to the "private store," but now, thanks to
the lessons of evolution, which Nature has been teach-
EMERSON 43
ing men since and before the days of Socrates, the
public store of reason is gradually taking the place
of the once-needed leader. From the Chaldean
tablet to the wireless message this public store has
been wonderfully opened. The results of these lessons,
the possibilities they are offering for ever coordinating
the mind of humanity, the culmination of
this age-instruction, are seen to-day in many ways.
Labor Federation, Suffrage Extension, are two instances
that come to mind among the many. In these
manifestations, by reason of tradition, or the badhabit
part of tradition, the hog-mind of the few (the
minority), comes in play. The possessors of this
are called leaders, but even these "thick-skins" are
beginning to see that the movement is the leader, and
that they are only clerks. Broadly speaking, the
effects evidenced in the political side of history have
so much of the physical because the causes have been
so much of the physical. As a result the leaders for
the most part have been under-average men, with
skins thick, wits slick, and hands quick with undervalues,
otherwise they would not have become leaders.
But the day of leaders, as such, is gradually closing
the people are beginning to lead themselves—the
public store of reason is slowly being opened—the
common universal mind and the common over-soul
is slowly but inevitabh^ coming into its own. "Let
a man believe in God, not in names and places and
persons. Let the great soul incarnated in some poor
. . . sad and simple Joan, go out to service and sweep
chimneys and scrub floors ... its effulgent day
beams cannot be muffled ..." and then "to sweep
44 EMERSON
and scrub will instantly appear supreme and beautiful
actions . . . and all people will get brooms and
mops." Perhaps, if all of Emerson—his works and
his life—were to be swept away, and nothing of him
but the record of the following incident remained to
men—the influence of his soul would still be great.
A working woman after coming from one of his lectures
said: "I love to go to hear Emerson, not because
I understand him, but because he looks as though
he thought everybody was as good as he was." Is
it not the courage—the spiritual hopefulness in his
humility that makes this story possible and true?
Is it not this trait in his character that sets him above
all creeds—that gives him inspired belief in the common
mind and soul? Is it not this courageous universalism
that gives conviction to his prophecy and that
makes his S3^mphonies of revelation begin and end
with nothing but the strength and beauty of innate
goodness in man, in Nature and in God, the greatest
and most inspiring theme of Concord Transcendental
Philosophy, as we hear it.
And it is from such a world-compelling theme
and from such vantage ground, that Emerson rises to
almost perfect freedom of action, of thought and of
soul, in any direction and to any height. A vantage
ground, somewhat vaster than Schelling's conception
of transcendental philosophy
—"a philosophy of
Nature become subjective." In Concord it includes
the objective and becomes subjective to nothing but
freedom and the absolute law. It is this underlying
courage of the purest humility that gives Emerson
that outward aspect of serenity which is felt to so
EMERSON 45
great an extent in much of his work, especially in his
codas and perorations. And within this poised
strength, we are conscious of that "original authentic
fire" which Emerson missed in Shelley—we are conscious
of something that is not dispassionate, something
that is at times almost turbulent—a kind of furious
calm lying deeply in the conviction of the eventual
triumph of the soul and its union with God!
Let us place the transcendent Emerson where he,
himself, places Milton, in Wordsworth's apostrophe:
"Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free, so didst
thou travel on life's common way in cheerful
Godliness."
The Godliness of spiritual courage and hopefulness
—these fathers of faith rise to a glorified peace in the
depth of his greater perorations. There is an " oracle
'
at the beginning of the Fifth Symphony—in those
four notes lies one of Beethoven's greatest messages.
We would place its translation above the relentlessness
of fate knocking at the door, above the greater
human-message of destiny, and strive to bring it
towards the spiritual message of Emerson's revelations—even
to the "common heart" of Concord
—the Soul of humanity knocking at the door of the
Divine mysteries, radiant in the faith that it will be
opened—and the human become the Divine
Ill
HAWTHORNE
The substance of Hawthorne is so dripping wet
with the supernatural, the phantasmal, the mystical
—so surcharged with adventures, from the deeper
picturesque to the illusive fantastic, one unconsciously
finds oneself thinking of him as a poet of greater
imaginative impulse than Emerson or Thoreau. He
was not a greater poet possibly than they—but
a greater artist. Not only the character of his
substance, but the care in his manner throws his
workmanship, in contrast to theirs, into a kind of
bas-relief. Like Poe he quite naturally and unconsciously
reaches out over his subject to his reader. His
mesmerism seeks to mesmerize us—beyond Zenobia's
sister. But he is too great an artist to show his
hand "in getting his audience," as Poe and Tschaikowsky
occasionally do. His intellectual muscles
are too strong to let him become over-influenced,
as Ravel and Stravinsky seem to be by the morbidly
fascinating—a kind of false beauty obtained by
artistic monotony. However, we cannot but feel
that he would weave his spell over us—as would the
Grimms and ^sop. We feel as much under magic
as the " Enchanted Frog." This is part of the artist's
46
HAWTHORNE 47
business. The effect is a part of his art-effort in its
inception. Emerson's substance and even his manner
has little to do with a designed effect—his thunderbolts
or delicate fragments are flashed out regardless
—they may knock us down or just spatter us—it
matters little to him—but Hawthorne is more considerate;
that is, he is more artistic, as men say.
Hawthorne may be more noticeably indigenous
or may have more local color, perhaps more national
color than his Concord contemporaries. But the
work of anyone who is somewhat more interested in
psychology than in transcendental philosophy, will
weave itself around individuals and their personalities.
If the same anyone happens to live in Salem, his
work is likely to be colored by the Salem wharves
and Salem witches. If the same anyone happens to
live in the ''Old Manse" near the Concord Battle
Bridge, he is likely "of a rainy day to betake himself
to the huge garret," the secrets of which he wonders
at, "but is too reverent of their dust and cobwebs to
disturb." He is likely to "bow below the shriveled
canvas of an old (Puritan) clergyman in wig and gown
—the parish priest of a century ago—a friend of
Whitefield." He is likely to come under the spell
of this reverend Ghost who haunts the "Manse"
and as it rains and darkens and the sky glooms through
the dusty attic windows, he is likely "to muse deeply
and wonderingly upon the humiliating fact that the
works of man's intellect decay like those of his hands"
. . . "that thought grows moldy," and as the garret
is in Massachusetts, the "thought" and the "mold"
are likely to be quite native. When the same anyone
48 HAWTHORNE
puts his poetry into novels rather than essays, he is
likely to have more to say about the life around him
—
about the inherited mystery of the town—than a
poet of philosophy is.
In Hawthorne's usual vicinity, the atmosphere was
charged with the somber errors and romance of eighteenth
century New England,—ascetic or noble New
England as you like. A novel, of necessity, nails an
art-effort down to some definite part or parts of the
earth's surface—the novelist's wagon can't always
be hitched to a star. To say that Hawthorne was
more deeply interested than some of the other Concord
writers—Emerson, for example—in the idealism
peculiar to his native land (in so far as such idealism
of a country can be conceived of as separate from the
political) would be as unreasoning as to hold that he
was more interested in social progress than Thoreau,
because he was in the consular service and Thoreau
was in no one's service—or that the War Governor of
Massachusetts was a greater patriot than Wendell
Phillips, who was ashamed of all political parties.
Hawthorne's art was true and typically American
—as is the art of all men living in America who believe
in freedom of thought and who live wholesome lives
to prove it, whatever their means of expression.
Any comprehensive conception of Hawthorne,
either in words or music, must have for its basic theme
something that has to do with the influence of sin
upon the conscience—something more than the Puritan
conscience, but something which is permeated
by it. In this relation he is wont to use what Hazlitt
calls the "moral power of imagination." Hawthorne
HAWTHORNE 49
would try to spiritualize a guilty conscience. He
would sing of the relentlessness of guilt, the inheritance
of guilt, the shadow of guilt darkening innocent
posterity. All of its sins and morbid horrors, its
specters, its phantasmas, and even its hellish hopelessness
play around his pages, and vanishing between
the lines are the less guilty Elves of the Concord
Elms, which Thoreau and Old Man Alcott may have
felt, but knew not as intimately as Hawthorne. There
is often a pervading melancholy about Hawthorne, as
Faguet says of de Musset ''without posture, without
noise but penetrating." There is at times the mysticism
and serenity of the ocean, which Jules Michelet
sees in "its horizon rather than in its waters." There
is a sensitiveness to supernatural sound waves.
Hawthorne feels the mysteries and tries to paint
them rather than explain them—and here, some may
say that he is wiser in a more practical way and so
more artistic than Emerson. Perhaps so, but no
greater in the deeper ranges and profound mysteries
of the interrelated worlds of human and spiritual life.
This fundamental part of Hawthorne is not attempted
in our music (the 26. movement of the series)
which is but an "extended fragment" trying to suggest
some of his wilder, fantastical adventures into
the half-childlike, half-fairylike phantasmal realms.
It may have something to do with the children's
excitement on that "frosty Berkshire morning, and
the frost imagery on the enchanted hall window" or
something to do with "Feathertop," the "Scarecrow,"
and his "Looking Glass" and the little demons dancing
around his pipe bowl; or something to do with the
50 HAWTHORNE
old hymn tune that haunts the church and sings
only to those in the churchyard, to protect them
from secular noises, as when the circus parade comes
down Main Street; or something to do with the concert
at the Stamford camp meeting, or the "Slave's
Shuffle"; or something to do with the Concord henymph,
or the "Seven Vagabonds," or "Circe's
Palace," or something else in the wonderbook—not
something that happens, but the way something
happens; or something to do with the "Celestial
Railroad," or "Phoebe's Garden," or something personal,
which tries to be "national" suddenly at
twilight, and universal suddenly at midnight; or
something about the ghost of a man who never lived,
or about something that never will happen, or
something else that is not.
IV
"THE ALCOTTS"
If the dictagraph had been perfected in Bronson
Alcott's time, he might now be a great writer. As it
is, he goes down as Concord's greatest talker. "Great
expecter," says Thoreau; "great feller," says Sam
Staples, "for talkin' big . . . but his daughters is
the gals though—always doin' somethin'." Old Man
Alcott, however, was usually " doin' somethin'"
within. An internal grandiloquence made him melodious
without; an exuberant, irrepressible, visionary
absorbed with philosophy as such; to him it was a
kind of transcendental business, the profits of which
supported his inner man rather than his family. Apparently
his deep interest in spiritual physics, rather
than metaphysics, gave a kind of hypnotic mellifluous
effect to his voice when he sang his oracles ; a manner
something of a cross between an inside pompous
self-assertion and an outside serious benevolence.
But he was sincere and kindly intentioned in his
eagerness to extend what he could of the better influence
of the philosophic world as he saw it. In fact,
there is a strong didactic streak in both father and
daughter. Louisa May seldom misses a chance to
bring out the moral of a homely virtue. The power
51
52 "THE ALCOTTS"
of repetition was to them a natural means of illustration.
It is said that the elder Alcott, while teaching
school, would frequently whip himself when the
scholars misbehaved, to show that the Divine Teacher
—God—was pained when his children of the earth
were bad. Quite often the boy next to the bad boy
was punished, to show how sin involved the guiltless.
And Miss Alcott is fond of working her story around,
so that she can better rub in a moral precept—and
the moral sometimes browbeats the story. But with
all the elder Alcott's vehement, impracticable, visionary
qualities, there was a sturdiness and a courage
—
at least, we like to think so. A Yankee boy who
would cheerfully travel in those days, when distances
were long and unmotored, as far from Connecticut
as the Carolinas, earning his way by peddling, laying
down his pack to teach school when opportunity
offered, must possess a basic sturdiness. This was
apparently not very evident when he got to preaching
his idealism. An incident in Alcott's life helps confirm
a theory—not a popular one—that men accustomed
to wander around in the visionary unknown
are the quickest and strongest when occasion requires
ready action of the lower virtues. It often appears
that a contemplative mind is more capable of action
than an actively objective one. Dr. Emerson says:
"It is good to know that it has been recorded
of Alcott, the benign idealist, that when the Rev.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, heading the rush on
the U. S. Court House in Boston, to rescue a fugitive
slave, looked back for his following at the court-room
door, only the apostolic philosopher was there cane
"THE ALCOTTS" 53
in hand." So it seems that his idealism had some
substantial virtues, even if he couldn't make a living.
The daughter does not accept the father as a prototype—she
seems to have but few of her father's qualities
"in female." She supported the family and at
the same time enriched the lives of a large part of
young America, starting off many little minds with
wholesome thoughts and many little hearts with
wholesome emotions. She leaves memory-wordpictures
of healthy, New England childhood days,
pictures which are turned to with affection by middleaged
children,—pictures, that bear a sentiment, a
leaven, that middle-aged America needs nowadays
more than we care to admit.
Concord village, itself, reminds one of that common
virtue lying at the height and root of all the Concord
divinities. As one walks down the broad-arched
street, passing the white house of Emerson—ascetic
guard of a former prophetic beauty—he comes presently
beneath the old elms overspreading the Alcott
house. It seems to stand as a kind of homely but
beautiful witness of Concord's common virtue—it
seems to bear a consciousness that its past is living,
that the "mosses of the Old Manse" and the hickories
of Walden are not far away. Here is the home of the
"Marches"—all pervaded with the trials and happiness
of the family and telling, in a simple way, the
story of "the richness of not having." Within the
house, on every side, lie remembrances of what imagination
can do for the better amusement of fortunate
children who have to do for themselves—much-needed
lessons in these days of automatic, ready-made, easy
54 "THE ALCOTTS"
entertainment which deaden rather than stimulate
the creative faculty. And there sits the little old
spinet-piano Sophia Thoreau gave to the Alcott
children, on which Beth played the old Scotch airs,
and played at the Fifth Symphony.
There is a commonplace beauty about "Orchard
House"—a kind of spiritual sturdiness underlying
its quaint picturesqueness—a kind of common triad
of the New England homestead, whose overtones tell
us that there must have been something aesthetic
fibered in the Puritan severity—the self-sacrificing
part of the ideal—a value that seems to stir a deeper
feeling, a stronger sense of being nearer some perfect
truth than a Gothic cathedral or an Etruscan villa.
All around you, under the Concord sky, there still
floats the influence of that human faith melody,
transcendent and sentimental enough for the enthusiast
or the cynic respectively, reflecting an innate
hope—a common interest in common things and
common men—a tune the Concord bards are ever
playing, while they pound away at the immensities
with a Beethovenlike sublimity, and with, may we
say, a vehemence and perseverance—for that part of
greatness is not so difficult to emulate.
We dare not attempt to follow the philosophic
raptures of Bronson Alcott—unless you will assume
that his apotheosis will show how "practical" his
vision in this world would be in the next. And so
we won't try to reconcile the music sketch of the
Alcotts with much besides the memory of that home
under the elms—the Scotch songs and the family
hymns that were sung at the end of each day—though
"THE ALCOTTS" 55
there may be an attempt to catch something of that
common sentiment (which we have tried to suggest
above)—a strength of hope that never gives way to
despair—a conviction in the power of the common
soul which, when all is said and done, may be as
typical as any theme of Concord and its transcen-
dentalists.
THOREAU
Thoreau was a great musician, not because he
played the flute but because he did not have to go
to Boston to hear "the Symphony." The rhythm
of his prose, were there nothing else, would determine
his value as a composer. He was divinely conscious
of the enthusiasm of Nature, the emotion of her
rhythms and the harmony of her solitude. In this
consciousness he sang of the submission to Nature,
the religion of contemplation, and the freedom of
simplicity—a philosophy distinguishing between the
complexity of Nature which teaches freedom, and
the complexity of materialism which teaches slavery.
In music, in poetry, in all art, the truth as one sees
it must be given in terms which bear some proportion
to the inspiration. In their greatest moments the
inspiration of both Beethoven and Thoreau express
profound truths and deep sentiment, but the intimate
passion of it, the storm and stress of it, affected
Beethoven in such a way that he could not but be
ever showing it and Thoreau that he could not easily
expose it. They were equally* imbued with it, but
with different results. A difference in temperament
had something to do with this, together with a
56
THOREAU 57
difference in the quality of expression between the
two arts. "Who that has heard a strain of music
feared lest he would speak extravagantly forever,"
says Thoreau. Perhaps music is the art of speaking
extravagantly. Herbert Spencer says that some men,
as for instance Mozart, are so peculiarly sensitive
to emotion . . . that music is to them but a continuation
not only of the expression but of the actual
emotion, though the theory of some more modern
thinkers in the philosophy of art doesn't always bear
this out. However, there is no doubt that in its
nature music is predominantly subjective and tends
to subjective expression, and poetry more objective
tending to objective expression. Hence the poet when
his muse calls for a deeper feeling must invert this
order, and he may be reluctant to do so as these depths
often call for an intimate expression which the physical
looks of the words may repel. They tend to reveal
the nakedness of his soul rather than its warmth.
It is not a matter of the relative value of the aspiration,
or a difference between subconsciousness and
consciousness but a difference in the arts themselves;
for example, a composer may not shrink from having
the public hear his "love letter in tones," while a
poet may feel sensitive about having everyone read
his "letter in words." When the object of the love is
mankind the sensitiveness is changed only in degree.
But the message of Thoreau, though his fervency
may be inconstant and his human appeal not always
direct, is, both in thought and spirit, as universal as
that of any man who ever wrote or sang—as universal
as it is nontemporaneous—as universal as it is
58 THOREAU
free from the measure of history, as "solitude is free
from the measure of the miles of space that intervene
between man and his fellows." In spite of the fact
that Henry James (who knows almost everything)
says that "Thoreau is more than provincial—that he
is parochial," let us repeat that Henry Thoreau, in
respect to thought, sentiment, imagination, and
soul, in respect to every element except that of place
of physical being—a thing that means so much to
some—is as universal as any personality in literature.
That he said upon being shown a specimen grass from
Iceland that the same species could be found in Concord
is evidence of his universality, not of his parochialism.
He was so universal that he did not need
to travel around the world to prove it. "I have
more of God, they more of the road." "It is not
worth while to go around the world to count the cats
in Zanzibar." With Marcus Aurelius, if he had seen
the present he had seen all, from eternity and all
time forever.
Thoreau's susceptibility to natural sounds was
probably greater than that of many practical musicians.
True, this appeal is mainly through the
sensational element which Herbert Spencer thinks
the predominant beauty of music. Thoreau seems
able to weave from this source some perfect transcendental
symphonies. Strains from the Orient
get the best of some of the modern French music
but not of Thoreau. He seems more interested
in than influenced hy Oriental philosophy. He admires
its ways of resignation and self-contemplation
but he doesn't contemplate himself in the same way.
THOREAU 59
He often quotes from the Eastern scriptures passages
which were they his own he would probably omit,
i.e., the Vedas say "all intelligences awake with
the morning." This seems unworthy of "accompanying
the undulations of celestial music" found
on this same page, in which an "ode to morning " is
sung
—"the awakening to newly acquired forces and
aspirations from within to a higher life than we fell
asleep from . . . for all memorable events transpire
in the morning time and in the morning atmosphere."
Thus it is not the whole tone scale of the Orient but
the scale of a Walden morning—"music in single
strains," as Emerson says, which inspired many of
the polyphonies and harmonies that come to us through
his poetry. Who can be forever melancholy "with
^olian music like this " ?
This is but one of many ways in which Thoreau
looked to Nature for his greatest inspirations. In her
he found an analogy to the Fundamental of Transcendentalism.
The "innate goodness" of Nature is
or can be a moral influence; Mother Nature, if man
will but let her, will keep him straight—straight
spiritually and so morally and even mentally. If he
will take her as a companion, and teacher, and not
as a duty or a creed, she will give him greater thrills
and teach him greater truths than man can give or
teach—she will reveal mysteries that mankind has
long concealed. It was the soul of Nature not natural
history that Thoreau was after. A naturalist's mind
is one predominantly scientific, more interested in
the relation of a flower to other flowers than its relation
to any philosophy or anyone's philosophy. A
6o THOREAU
transcendent love of Nature and writing "Rhus
glabra " after sumach doesn't necessarily make a
naturalist. It would seem that although thorough
in observation (not very thorough according to
Mr. Burroughs) and with a keen perception of the
specific, a naturalist—inherently—was exactly what
Thoreau was not. He seems rather to let Nature put
him under her microscope than to hold her under
his. He was too fond of Nature to practice vivisection
upon her. He would have found that painful,
*
' for
was he not a part with her?" But he had this trait
of a naturalist, which is usually foreign to poets, even
great ones; he observed acutely even things that
did not particularly interest him—a useful natural
gift rather than a virtue.
The study of Nature may tend to make one dogmatic,
but the love of Nature surely does not. Thoreau
no more than Emerson could be said to have compounded
doctrines. His thinking was too broad for
that. If Thoreau's was a religion of Nature, as some
say,—and by that they mean that through Nature's
influence man is brought to a deeper contemplation,
to a more spiritual self-scrutiny, and thus closer to
God,—it had apparently no definite doctrines. Some
of his theories regarding natural and social phenomena
and his experiments in the art of living are
certainly not doctrinal in form, and if they are in
substance it didn't disturb Thoreau and it needn't
us. . . . "In proportion as he simplifies his life the
laws of the universe will appear less complex and
solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor
weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the
THOREAU 6i
air your work need not be lost; that is where they
should be, now put the foundations under them." . . .
"Then we will love with the license of a higher order
of beings." Is that a doctrine? Perhaps. At any
rate, between the lines of some such passage as this
lie some of the fountain heads that water the spiritual
fields of his philosophy and the seeds from which they
are sown (if indeed his whole philosophy is but one
spiritual garden). His experiments, social and economic,
are a part of its cultivation and for the harvest
—and its transmutation, he trusts to moments of in-
spiration
—"only what is thought, said, and done
at a certain rare coincidence is good."
Thoreau's experiment at Walden was, broadly
speaking, one of these moments. It stands out in
the casual and popular opinion as a kind of adventure
—harmless and amusing to some, significant and
important to others; but its significance lies in
the fact that in trying to practice an ideal he prepared
his mind so that it could better bring others "into the
Walden-state-of-mind." He did not ask for a literal
approval, or in fact for any approval. "I would not
stand between any man and his genius." He would
have no one adopt his manner of life, unless in doing
so he adopts his own—besides, by that time "I may
have found a better one." But if he preached hard
he practiced harder what he preached—harder than
most men. Throughout Walden a text that he is
always pounding out is "Time." Time for inside
work out-of-doors; preferably out-of-doors, "though
you perhaps may have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious
hours, even in a poor house." Wherever the place
62 THOREAU
—time there must be. Time to show the unnecessariness
of necessities which clog up time. Time to
contemplate the value of man to the universe, of the
universe to man, man's excuse for being. Time from
the demands of social conventions. Time from too
much labor for some, which means too much to eat,
too much to wear, too much material, too much materialism
for others. Time from the "hurry and waste
of life." Time from the "St. Vitus Dance." But, on
the other side of the ledger, time for learning that
"there is no safety in stupidity alone." Time for
introspection.. Time /or reality. Time/or expansion.
Time /or practicing the art, of living the art of living.
Thoreau has been criticized for practicing his policy
of expansion by living in a vacuum—but he peopled
that vacuum with a race of beings and established a
social order there, surpassing any of the precepts in
social or political history. "... for he put some
things behind and passed an invisible boundary;
new, universal, and more liberal laws were around and
within him, the old laws were expanded and interpreted
in a more liberal sense and he lived with the
license of a higher order"—a community in which
"God was the only President" and "Thoreau not
Webster was His Orator." It is hard to believe that
Thoreau really refused to believe that there was any
other life but his own, though he probably did think
that there was not any other life besides his own for
him. Living for society may not always be best
accomplished by living with society. "Is there any
virtue in a man's skin that you must touch it?" and
the "rubbing of elbows may not bring men's minds
THOREAU 63
closer together "; or if he were talking through a
'
' worst
seller
'
' (magazine) that
'
' had to put it over
'
' he might
say, "forty thousand souls at a ball game does not,
necessarily, make baseball the highest expression of
spiritual emotion." Thoreau, however, is no cynic,
either in character or thought, though in a side glance
at himself, he may have held out to be one; a "cynic
in independence," possibly because of his rule laid
down that "self-culture admits of no compromise."
It is conceivable that though some of his philosophy
and a good deal of his personality, in some of
its manifestations, have outward colors that do not
seem to harmonize, the true and intimate relations they
bear each other are not affected. This peculiarity, frequently
seen in his attitude towards social-economic
problems, is perhaps more emphasized in some of his
personal outbursts. "I love my friends very much,
but I find that it is of no use to go to see them. I
hate them commonly when I am near." It is easier
to see what he means than it is to forgive him for saying
it. The cause of this apparent lack of harmon}^
between philosophy and personality, as far as they
can be separated, may have been due to his refusal
"to keep the very delicate balance" which Mr.
Van Doren in his Critical Study of Thoreau says "it
is necessary for a great and good man to keep between
his public and private lives, between his own personality
and the whole outside universe of personalities."
Somehow one feels that if he had kept this balance
he would have lost
'
' hitting power." Again, it seems
that something of the above depends upon the degree
of greatness or goodness. A very great and espe-
64 THOREAU
cially a very good man has no separate private and
public life. His own personality though not identical
with outside personalities is so clear or can be so
clear to them that it appears identical, and as the
world progresses towards its inevitable perfection
this appearance becomes more and more a reality.
For the same reason that all great men now agree,
in principle but not in detail, in so far as words are
able to communicate agreement, on the great fundamental
truths. Someone says: "Be specific—what
great fundamentals?" Freedom over slavery; the
natural over the artificial; beauty over ugliness;
the spiritual over the material; the goodness of man;
the Godness of man; God; with all other kindred
truths that have been growing in expression through
the ages, eras, and civilizations, innate things which
once seemed foreign to the soul of humankind. All
great men—there are millions of them now—agree
on these. Around the relative and the absolute
value of an attribute, or quality, or whatever it may
be called, is where the fight is. The relative not from
the absolute—but of it, always of it. Geniuses—and
there are millions of them—differ as to what is beautiful
and what is ugly, as to what is right and what is wrong
—there are many interpretations of God—but they
all agree that beauty is better than ugliness and right
is better than wrong, and that there is a God—all
are one when they reach the essence. Every analysis
of a criticism or quality of Thoreau invariably leads
back and stands us against the great problems of
life and eternity. It is a fair indication of the greatness
of his problems and ideals.
THOREAU 65
The unsympathetic treatment accorded Thoreau
on account of the false colors that his personality
apparently gave to some of his important ideas and
virtues, might be lessened if it were more constantly
remembered that a command of his to-day is but a
mood of yesterday and a contradiction to-morrow.
He is too volatile to paint, much less to catalogue.
If Thoreau did not over-say he said nothing. He
says so himself. "I desire to speak somewhere
without bounds like a man in a waking moment to
men in their waking moments . . . for I am convinced
that I cannot exaggerate enough even to lay
a foundation for a true expression." For all that, it
is not safe to think that he should never be taken
literally, as for instance in the sentence above. His
extravagance at times involves him but Thoreau
never rejoices in it as Meredith seems to. He struggles
against it and seems as much ashamed of being involved
as the latter seems of not being. He seldom
gets into the situation of Meredith—timidly wandering
around with no clothes after stepping out of one
of his involvedensities. This habit may be a part
of the novelists' license, for perhaps their inspiration
is less original and less natural than that of the poets,
as traits of human weakness are unnatural to or " not
an innate part with human nature." Perhaps if they
(novelists) had broader sources for their inspiration
they would hardly need licenses and perhaps they
would hardly become novelists. For the same reason
that Shakespeare might have been greater if he hadn't
written plays. Some say that a true composer will
never write an opera because a truly brave man will
66 THOREAU
not take a drink to keep up his courage; which is
not the same thing as saying that Shakespeare is not
the greatest figure in all literature; in fact, it is an
attempt to say that many novels, most operas, all
Shakespeares, and all brave men and women (rum or
no rum) are among the noblest blessings with which
God has endowed mankind—because, not being perfect,
they are perfect examples pointing to that perfection
which nothing yet has attained.
Thoreau's mysticism at times throws him into
elusive moods—but an elusiveness held by a thread
to something concrete and specific, for he had too
much integrity of mind for any other kind. In these
moments it is easier to follow his thought than to
follow him. Indeed, if he were always easy to follow,
after one had caught up with him, one might find
that it was not Thoreau.
It is, however, with no mystic rod that he strikes
at institutional life. Here again is felt the influence
of the great transcendental doctrine of "innate
goodness" in human nature—a reflection of the like
in nature; a philosophic part which, by the way,
was a more direct inheritance in Thoreau than in his
brother transcendentalists. For besides what he received
from a native Unitarianism a good part must
have descended to him through his Huguenot blood
from the "eighteenth-century French philosophy."
We trace a reason here for his lack of interest in * *
the
church." For if revealed religion is the path between
God and man's spiritual part—a kind of formal causeway—Thoreau's
highly developed spiritual life felt, apparently
unconsciously, less need of it than most men.
THOREAU 67
But he might have been more charitable towards
those who do need it (and most of us do) if he had
been more conscious of his freedom. Those who look
to-day for the cause of a seeming deterioration in
the influence of the church may find it in a wider
development of this feeling of Thoreau's; that the
need is less because there is more of the spirit of
Christianity in the world to-day. Another cause for
his attitude towards the church as an institution is
one always too common among "the narrow minds"
to have influenced Thoreau. He could have been
more generous. He took the arc for the circle,
the exception for the rule, the solitary bad example
for the many good ones. His persistent emphasis on
the value of "example" may excuse this lower viewpoint.
"The silent influence of the example of one
sincere life . . . has benefited society more than all
the projects devised for its salvation." He has little
patience for the unpracticing preacher. "In some
countries a hunting parson is no uncommon sight.
Such a one might make a good shepherd dog but is
far from being a good shepherd." It would have
been interesting to have seen him handle the speculating
parson, who takes a good salary—more per
annum than all the disciples had to sustain their bodies
during their whole lives—from a metropolitan religious
corporation for "speculating" on Sunday
about the beauty of poverty, who preaches: "Take
no thought (for your life) what ye shall eat or what
ye shall drink nor yet what ye shall put on . . .
lay not up for yourself treasure upon earth . . .
take up thy cross and follow me"; who on Monday
68 THOREAU
becomes a "speculating" disciple of another god,
and by questionable investments, successful enough
to get into the "press," seeks to lay up a treasure of a
million dollars for his old age, as if a million dollars
could keep such a man out of the poor-house.
Thoreau might observe that this one good example
of Christian degeneracy undoes all the acts of regeneracy
of a thousand humble five-hundred-dollar
country parsons; that it out-influences the "unconscious
influence" of a dozen Dr. Bushnells if there
be that many; that the repentance of this man who
did not "fall from grace" because he never fell into
it—that this unnecessary repentance might save this
man's own soul but not necessarily the souls of the
million head-line readers; that repentance would
put this preacher right with the powers that be in
this world—and the next. Thoreau might pass a
remark upon this man's intimacy with God "as if he
had a monopoly of the subject"—an intimacy that
perhaps kept him from asking God exactly what his
Son meant by the "camel," the "needle"—to say
nothing of the "rich man." Thoreau might have
wondered how this man nailed down the last plank
in his bridge to salvation, by rising to sublime heights
of patriotism, in his war against materialism; but
would even Thoreau be so unfeeling as to suggest to
this exhorter that his salvation might be clinched
"if he would sacrifice his income" (not himself)
and come-in to a real Salvation Army, or that the
final triumph, the supreme happiness in casting aside
this mere ^10,000 or $20,000 every year must be
denied him—for was he not captain of the ship—must
THOREAU 69
he not stick to his passengers (in the first cabin—the
very first cabin) —not that the ship was sinking but
that he was ... we will go no further. Even
Thoreau would not demand sacrifice for sacrifice
sake—no, not even from Nature.
Property from the standpoint of its influence in
checking natural self-expansion and from the standpoint
of personal and inherent right is another institution
that comes in for straight and cross-arm jabs,
now to the stomach, now to the head, but seldom
sparring for breath. For does he not say that "wherever
a man goes, men will pursue him with their dirty
institutions
'
' ? The influence of property, as he saw it,
on morality or immorality and how through this it
may or should influence "government" is seen by the
following :
" I am convinced that if all men were to
live as simply as I did, then thieving and robbery
would be unknown. These take place only in communities
where some have got more than is sufficient
while others have not enough
Nee bella fuerunt,
Fagimus astabat dum
Scyphus ante dapes
You who govern public affairs, what need have
you to employ punishments? Have virtue and the
people will be virtuous." If Thoreau had made the
first sentence read: "If all men were like me and
were to live as simply," etc., everyone would agree
with him. We ma}^ wonder here how he would account
for some of the degenerate types we are told
70 THOREAU
about in some of our backwoods and mountain
regions. Possibly by assuming that they are an
instance of perversion of the species. That the
little civilizing their forbears experienced rendered
these people more susceptible to the physical than
to the spiritual influence of nature; in other words,
if they had been purer naturists, as the Aztecs for
example, they would have been purer men. Instead
of turning to any theory of ours or of Thoreau for
the true explanation of this condition—which is a
kind of pseudo-naturalism—for its true diagnosis
and permanent cure, are we not far more certain to
find it in the radiant look of humilit3% love, and hope
in the strong faces of those inspired souls who are
devoting their lives with no little sacrifice to these
outcasts of civilization and nature. In truth, may
not mankind find the solution of its eternal problem
—find it after and beyond the last, most perfect
system of wealth distribution which science can ever
devise—after and beyond the last sublime echo of
the greatest socialistic symphonies—after and beyond
every transcendent thought and expression in the
simple example of these Christ-inspired souls—be they
Pagan, Gentile, Jew, or angel.
However, underlying the practical or impractical
suggestions implied in the quotation above, which
is from the last paragraph of Thoreau's Village, is the
same transcendental theme of "innate goodness."
For this reason there must be no limitation except
that which will free mankind from limitation, and
from a perversion of this "innate" possession. And
"property" may be one of the causes of this perver-
THOREAU 71
sion—property in the two relations cited above. It
is conceivable that Thoreau, to the consternation of
the richest members of the Bolsheviki and Bourgeois,
would propose a policy of liberation, a policy
of a limited personal property right, on the ground
that congestion of personal property tends to limit
the progress of the soul (as well as the progress of the
stomach) —letting the economic noise thereupon take
care of itself—for dissonances are becoming beautiful
—and do not the same waters that roar in a storm
take care of the eventual calm? That this limit of
property be determined not by the voice of the
majority but by the brain of the majority under a
government limited to no national boundaries. ''The
government of the world I live in is not framed in
after-dinner conversation"—around a table in a capital
city, for there is no capital—a government of
principles not parties; of a few fundamental truths
and not of many political expediencies. A government
conducted by virtuous leaders, for it will be led
by all, for all are virtuous, as then their "innate virtue"
will no more be perverted by unnatural institutions.
This will not be a millennium but a practical
and possible application of uncommon common sense.
For is it not sense, common or otherwise, for Nature
to want to hand back the earth to those to whom it
belongs—that is, to those who have to live on it? Is
it not sense, that the average brains like the average
stomachs will act rightly if they have an equal amount
of the right kind of food to act upon and universal
education is on the way with the right kind of food?
Is it not sense then that all grown men and women
72 THOREAU
(for all are necessary to work out the divine "law of
averages") shall have a direct not an indirect say
about the things that go on in this world ?
Some of these attitudes, ungenerous or radical,
generous or conservative (as you will) , towards institutions
dear to many, have no doubt given impressions
unfavorable to Thoreau's thought and personality.
One hears him called, by some who ought to know
what they say and some who ought not, a crabbed,
cold-hearted, sour-faced Yankee—a kind of a visionary
sore-head—a cross-grained, egotistic recluse,
—
even non-hearted. But it is easier to make a statement
than prove a reputation. Thoreau may be
some of these things to those who make no distinction
between these qualities and the manner which
often comes as a kind of by-product of an intense
devotion to a principle or ideal. He was rude and
unfriendly at times but shyness probably had something
to do with that. In spite of a certain selfpossession
he was diffident in most company, but,
though he may have been subject to those spells
when words do not rise and the mind seems wrapped
in a kind of dull cloth which everyone dumbly stares
at, instead of looking through—he would easily get
off a rejoinder upon occasion. When a party of
visitors came to Walden and some one asked Thoreau
if he found it lonely there, he replied: "Only by
your help." A remark characteristic, true, rude, if
not witty. The writer remembers hearing a schoolteacher
in English literature dismiss Thoreau (and
a half hour lesson, in which time all of Walden,
—
its surface—was sailed over) by saying that this
THOREAU 73
author (he called everyone "author" from Solomon
down to Dr. Parkhurst) "was a kind of a crank
who styled himself a hermit-naturalist and who idled
about the woods because he didn't want to work."
Some such stuff is a common conception, though
not as common as it used to be. If this teacher
had had more brains, it would have been a lie.
The word idled is the hopeless part of this criticism,
or rather of this uncritical remark. To ask
this kind of a man, who plays all the "choice gems
from celebrated composers " literally, always literally,
and always with the loud pedal, who plays all hymns,
wrong notes, right notes, games, people, and jokes literally,
and with the loud pedal, who will die literally
and with the loud pedal—to ask this man to smile even
faintly at Thoreau's humor is like casting a pearl before
a coal baron. Emerson implies that there is one
thing a genius must have to be a genius and that is
"mother wit." . . . " Doctor Johnson, Milton, Chaucer,
and Burns had it. Aunt Mary Moody Emerson
has it and can write scrap letters. Who has it need
never write anything but scraps. Henry Thoreau has
it." His humor though a part of this wit is not always
as spontaneous, for it is sometimes pun shape (so is
Charles Lamb's) —but it is nevertheless a kind that
can serenely transport us and which we can enjoy without
disturbing our neighbors. If there are those who
think him cold-hearted and with but little human
sympathy, let them read his letters to Emerson's
little daughter, or hear Dr. Emerson tell about the
Thoreau home life and the stories of his boyhood
the ministrations to a runaway slave; or let them
74 THOREAU
ask old Sam Staples, the Concord sheriff about him.
That he "was fond of a few intimate friends, but
cared not one fig for people in the mass," is a statement
made in a school history and which is superficially
true. He cared too much for the masses
—
too much to let his personality be "massed"; too
much to be unable to realize the futility of wearing
his heart on his sleeve but not of wearing his path
to the shore of "Walden" for future masses to walk
over and perchance find the way to themselves. Some
near-satirists are fond of telling us that Thoreau came
so close to Nature that she killed him before he
had discovered her whole secret. They remind us
that he died with consumption but forget that he
lived with consumption. And without using much
charity, this can be made to excuse many of his
irascible and uncongenial moods. You to whom that
gaunt face seems forbidding—look into the eyes ! If
he seems "dry and priggish" to you, Mr. Stevenson,
"with little of that large unconscious geniality of the
world's heroes," follow him some spring morning to
Baker Farm, as he "rambles through pine groves . . .
like temples, or like fleets at sea, full-rigged, with
wavy boughs and rippling with light so soft and green
and shady that the Druids would have forsaken their
oaks to worship in them." Follow him to "the cedar
wood beyond Flint's Pond, where the trees covered
with hoary blue berries, spiring higher and higher, are
fit to stand before Valhalla." Follow him, but not too
closely, for you may see little, if you do—"as he walks
in so pure and bright a light gilding its withered grass
and leaves so softly and serenely bright that he thinks
THOREAU 75
he has never bathed in such a golden flood." Follow
him as "he saunters towards the holy land till one day
the sun shall shine more brightly than ever it has
done, perchance shine into your minds and hearts
and light up your whole lives with a great awakening,
light as warm and serene and golden as on a bankside
in autumn." Follow him through the golden flood
to the shore of that "holy land," where he lies dying
as men say—dying as bravely as he lived. You may
be near when his stern old aunt in the duty of her
Puritan conscience asks him: "Have you made your
peace with God"? and you may see his kindly smile
as he replies, "I did not know that we had ever
quarreled." Moments like these reflect more nobility
and equanimity perhaps than geniality—qualities,
however, more serviceable to world's heroes.
The personal trait that one who has affection for
Thoreau may find worst is a combative streak, in
which he too often takes refuge. "An obstinate
elusiveness," almost a "contrary cussedness," as if
he would say, which he didn't: "If a truth about
something is not as I think it ought to be, I'll make
it what I think, and it will be the truth—but if you
agree with me, then I begin to think it may not be
the truth." The causes of these unpleasant colors
(rather than characteristics) are too easily attributed
to a lack of human sympathy or to the assumption
that they are at least symbols of that lack instead of
to a supersensitiveness, magnified at times by ill
health and at times by a subconsciousness of the
futility of actually living out his ideals in this life.
It has been said that his brave hopes were unrealized
76 THOREATJ
anywhere in his career—but it is certain that they
started to be realized on or about May 6, 1862, and
we doubt if 1920 will end their fulfillment or his career.
But there were many in Concord who knew that within
their village there was a tree of wondrous growth,
the shadow of which—alas, too frequently—was the
only part they were allowed to touch. Emerson
was one of these. He was not only deeply conscious
of Thoreau's rare gifts but in the Woodland Notes
pays a tribute to a side of his friend that many others
missed. Emerson knew that Thoreau's sensibilities
too often veiled his nobilities, that a self-cultivated
stoicism ever fortified with sarcasm, none the less securely
because it seemed voluntary, covered a warmth
of feeling. "His great heart, him a hermit made."
A breadth of heart not easily measured, found only
in the highest type of sentimentalists, the type which
does not perpetually discriminate in favor of mankind.
Emerson has much of this sentiment and touches it
when he sings of Nature as "the incarnation of a
thought," when he generously visualizes Thoreau,
"standing at the Walden shore invoking the vision
of a thought as it drifts heavenward into an incarnation
of Nature." There is a Godlike patience in
Nature,—in her mists, her trees, her mountains
—
as if she had a more abiding faith and a clearer
vision than man of the resurrection and immor-
tality!
There comes to memory an old yellow-papered
composition of school-boy days whose peroration
closed with "Poor Thoreau; he communed with
nature for forty odd years, and then died." "The
THOREAU 77
forty odd years,"—we'll still grant that part, but he
is over a hundred now, and maybe, Mr. Lowell, he
is more lovable, kindlier, and more radiant with
human sympathy to-day, than, perchance, you were
fifty years ago. It may be that he is a far stronger,
a far greater, an incalculably greater force in the moral
and spiritual fibre of his fellow-countrymen throughout
the world to-day than you dreamed of fifty years
ago. You, James Russell Lowells! You, Robert
Louis Stevensons! You, Mark Van Dorens! with
your literary perception, your power of illumination,
your brilliancy of expression, yea, and with your love
of sincerity, you know your Thoreau, but not my
Thoreau—that reassuring and true friend, who stood
by me one "low" day, when the sun had gone down,
long, long before sunset. You may know something
of the affection that heart yearned for but knew it
a duty not to grasp; you may know something of
the great human passions which stirred that soul
too deep for animate expression—you may know all
of this, all there is to know about Thoreau, but you
know him not, unless you love him!
And if there shall be a program for our music let
it follow his thought on an autumn day of Indian
summer at Walden—a shadow of a thought at first,
colored by the mist and haze over the pond:
Low anchored cloud,
Fountain head and
Source of rivers. . . .
Dew cloth, dream draperyDrifting
meadow of the air. . . .
78 THOREAU
but this is momentary; the beauty of the day moves
him to a certain restlessness—to aspirations more specific—an
eagerness for outward action, but through
it all he is conscious that it is not in keeping with the
mood for this "Day." As the mists rise, there comes
a clearer thought more traditional than the first, a
meditation more calm. As he stands on the side
of the pleasant hill of pines and hickories in front of
his cabin, he is still disturbed by a restlessness and
goes down the white-pebbled and sandy eastern shore,
but it seems not to lead him where the thought suggests—he
climbs the path along the "bolder northern"
and "western shore, with deep bays indented," and
now along the railroad track, "where the ^olian
harp plays." But his eagerness throws him into the
lithe, springy stride of the specie hunter—the naturalist—he
is still aware of a restlessness ; with these
faster steps his rhythm is of shorter span—it is still
not the tempo of Nature, it does not bear the mood
that the genius of the day calls for, it is too specific,
its nature is too external, the introspection too buoyant,
and he knows now that he must let Nature flow
through him and slowly; he releases his more personal
desires to her broader rhythm, conscious that
this blends more and more with the harmony of her
solitude; it tells him that his search for freedom on
that day, at least, lies in his submission to her, for
Nature is as relentless as she is benignant. He
remains in this mood and while outwardly still, he
seems to move with the slow, almost monotonous
swaying beat of this autumnal day. He is more
contented with a "homely burden" and is more as-
THOREAU 79
sured of "the broad margin to his life; he sits in
his sunny doorway . . . rapt in revery . . . amidst
goldenrod, sandcherry, and sumach ... in undisturbed
solitude." At times the more definite personal
strivings for the ideal freedom, the former more
active speculations come over him, as if he would
trace a certain intensity even in his submission. "He
grew in those seasons like corn in the night and they
were better than any works of the hands. They
were not time subtracted from his life but so much
over and above the usual allowance." "He realized
what the Orientals meant by contemplation and forsaking
of works." "The day advanced as if to light
some work of his—it was morning and lo ! now it is
evening and nothing memorable is accomplished . .
."
" The evening train has gone by," and "all the restless
world with it. The fishes in the pond no longer feel
its rumbling and he is more alone than ever. ..."
His meditations are interrupted only by the faint
sound of the Concord bell
—'tis prayer-meeting night
in the village
—"a melody as it were, imported into
the wilderness. ..." " At a distance over the woods
the sound acquires a certain vibratory hum as if the
pine needles in the horizon were the strings of a harp
which it swept. ... A vibration of the universal
lyre. . . . Just as the intervening atmosphere makes
a distant ridge of earth interesting to the eyes by the
azure tint it imparts." . . . Part of the echo may
be "the voice of the wood; the same trivial words
and notes sung by the wood nymph." It is darker,
the poet's flute is heard out over the pond and Walden
hears the swan song of that "Day" and faintly
8o THOREAU
echoes. ... Is it a transcendental tune of Concord?
T'is an evening when the "whole body is one sense,"
. . . and before ending his day he looks out over the
clear, crystalline water of the pond and catches a
glimpse of the shadow-thought he saw in the morning's
mist and haze—he knows that by his final submission,
he possesses the "Freedom of the Night."
He goes up the "pleasant hillside of pines, hickories,"
and moonlight to his cabin, "with a strange liberty
in Nature, a part of herself."
VI
EPILOGUE
The futility of attempting to trace the source or
primal impulse of an art-inspiration may be admitted
without granting that human qualities or attributes
which go with personality cannot be suggested, and
that artistic intuitions which parallel them cannot be
reflected in music. Actually accomplishing the latter
is a problem, more or less arbitrary to an open mind,
more or less impossible to a prejudiced mind.
That which the composer intends to represent as
"high vitality" sounds like something quite different
to different listeners. That which I like to think
suggests Thoreau's submission to nature may, to
another, seem something like Hawthorne's "conception
of the relentlessness of an evil conscience"—and
to the rest of our friends, but a series of unpleasant
sounds. How far can the composer be held accountable?
Beyond a certain point the responsibility is
more or less undeterminable. The outside characteristics—that
is, the points furthest away from the
mergings—are obvious to mostly anyone. A child
knows a "strain of joy," from one of sorrow. Those
a little older know the dignified from the frivolous
6 8i
82 EPILOGUE
the Spring Song from the season in which the "melancholy
days have come" (though is there not a
glorious hope in autumn!). But where is the definite
expression of late-spring against early-summer, of
happiness against optimism? A painter paints a
sunset—can he paint the setting sun?
In some century to come, when the school children
will whistle popular tunes in quarter-tones—when
the diatonic scale will be as obsolete as the pentatonic
is now—perhaps then these borderland experiences
may be both easily expressed and readily recognized.
But maybe music was not intended to satisfy the
curious definiteness of man. Maybe it is better to
hope that music may always be a transcendental
language in the most extravagant sense. Possibly
the power of literally distinguishing these "shades
of abstraction"—these attributes paralleled by "artistic
intuitions" (call them what you will) —is ever to
be denied man for the same reason that the beginning
and end of a circle are to be denied.
There may be an analogy—and on first sight it
seems that there must be—between both the state and
power of artistic perceptions and the law of perpetual
change, that ever-flowing stream partly biological,
partly cosmic, ever going on in ourselves, in nature,
in all life. This may account for the difficulty of
identifying desired qualities with the perceptions of
them in expression. Many things are constantly
coming into being, while others are constantly going
EPILOGUE 83
out—one part of the same thing is coming in while
another part is going out of existence. Perhaps this
is why the above conformity in art (a conformity
which we seem naturally to look for) appears at times
so unrealizable, if not impossible. It will be assumed,
to make this theory clearer, that the "flow" or
"change" does not go on in the art-product itself.
As a matter of fact it probably does, to a certain
extent—a picture, or a song, may gain or lose in value
beyond what the painter or composer knew, by the
progress and higher development in all art. Keats
may be only partially true when he says that "A work
of beauty is a joy forever"—a thing that is beautiful
to me, is a joy to me, as long as it remains beautiful
to me—and if it remains so as long as I live, it is so
forever, that is, forever to me. If he had put it this
way, he would have been tiresome, inartistic, but
perhaps truer. So we will assume here that this
change only goes on in man and nature; and that
this eternal process in mankind is paralleled in some
way during each temporary, personal life.
A young man, two generations ago, found an identity
with his ideals, in Rossini; when an older man
in Wagner. A young man, one generation ago, found
his in Wagner, but when older in Cesar Franck or
Brahms. Some may say that this change may not
be general, universal, or natural, and that it may be
due to a certain kind of education, or to a certain
inherited or contracted prejudice. We cannot deny
or affirm this, absolutely, nor will we try to even
qualitatively—except to say that it will be generally
admitted that Rossini, to-day, does not appeal to
84 EPILOGUE
this generation, as he did to that of our fathers. As
far as prejudice or undue influence is concerned, and
as an illustration in point, the following may be cited
to show that training may have but little effect in
this connection, at least not as much as usually supposed—for
we believe this experience to be, to a
certain extent, normal, or at least, not uncommon.
A man remembers, when he was a boy of about fifteen
years, hearing his music-teacher (and father) who
had just returned from a performance of Siegfried
say with a look of anxious surprise that "somehow
or other he felt ashamed of enjoying the music as he
did," for beneath it all he was conscious of an undercurrent
of "make-believe" —the bravery was makebelieve,
the love was make-believe, the passion, the
virtue, all make-believe, as was the dragon—P. T.
Barnum would have been brave enough to have gone
out and captured a live one! But, that same boy at
twenty-five was listening to Wagner with enthusiasm,
his reality was real enough to inspire a devotion. The
"Pries-Lied," for instance, stirred him deeply. But
when he became middle-aged—and long before the
Hohenzollern hog-marched into Belgium—this music
had become cloying, the melodies threadbare—a sense
of something commonplace —yes —of make-believe
came. These feelings were fought against for association's
sake, and because of gratitude for bygone pleasures—but
the former beauty and nobility were not
there, and in their place stood irritating intervals of
descending fourths and fifths. Those once transcendent
progressions, luxuriant suggestions of Debussy
chords of the 9th, nth, etc., were becoming slimy.
EPILOGUE 85
An unearned exultation—a sentimentality deadening
something within hides around in the music. Wagner
seems less and less to measure up to the substance
and reality of Cesar Franck, Brahms, d'Indy, or even
Elgar (with all his tiresomeness), the wholesomeness,
manliness, humility, and deep spiritual, possibly
religious feeling of these men seem missing and not
made up for by his (Wagner's) manner and eloquence,
even if greater than theirs (which is very doubtful).
From the above we would try to prove that as this
stream of change flows towards the eventual ocean
of mankind's perfection, the art-works in which we
identify our higher ideals come by this process to be
identified with the lower ideals of those who embark
after us when the stream has grown in depth. If we
stop with the above experience, our theory of the
effect of man's changing nature, as thus explaining
artistic progress, is perhaps sustained. Thus would
we show that the perpetual flow of the life stream is
affected by and affects each individual river-bed of
the universal watersheds. Thus would we prove that
the Wagner period was normal, because we intuitively
recognized whatever identity we were looking for at
a certain period in our life, and the fact that it was so
made the Franck period possible and then normal
at a later period in our life. Thus would we assume
that this is as it should be, and that it is not Wagner's
content or substance or his lack of virtue, that something
in us has made us flow past him and not he
past us. But something blocks our theory! Something
makes our hypotheses seem purely speculative
if not useless. It is men like Bach and Beethoven.
86 EPILOGUE
Is it not a matter nowadays of common impression
or general opinion (for the law of averages plays
strongly in any theory relating to human attributes)
that the world's attitude towards the substance and
quality and spirit of these two men, or other men of
like character, if there be such, has not been affected
by the flowing stream that has changed us? But if
by the measure of this public opinion, as well as it
can be measured. Bach and Beethoven are being
flowed past—not as fast perhaps as Wagner is, but
if thc}^ are being passed at all from this deeper viewpoint,
then this "change" theory holds.
Here we shall have to assume, for we haven't
proved it, that artistic intuitions can sense in music
a weakening of moral strength and vitality, and that
it is sensed in relation to Wagner and not sensed in
relation to Bach and Beethoven. If, in this common
opinion, there is a particle of change toward the latter's
art, our theory stands—mind you, this admits a
change in the manner, form, external expression, etc.,
but not in substance. If there is no change here
towards the substance of these two men, our theory
not only falls but its failure superimposes or allows
us to presume a fundamental duality in music, and
in all art for that matter.
Does the progress of intrinsic beauty or truth (we
assume there is such a thing) have its exposures as
well as its discoveries? Does the non-acceptance of
the foregoing theory mean that Wagner's substance
and reality are lower and his manner higher; that
his beauty was not intrinsic; that he was more interested
in the repose of pride than in the truth of hu-
EPILOGUE 87
mility? It appears that he chose the representative
instead of the spirit itself, —that he chose consciously
or unconsciously, it matters not,—the lower set of
values in this dualism. These are severe accusations
to bring—especially when a man is a little down as
Wagner is to-day. But these convictions were present
some time before he was banished from the Metro-
politan.
Wagner seems to take Hugo's place in Faguet's
criticism of de Vigny that, "The staging to him
(Hugo) was the important thing—not the conception
—that in de Vigny, the artist was inferior to the poet "
finally that Hugo and so Wagner have a certain
pauvrete de fond. Thus would we ungenerously make
Wagner prove our sum! But it is a sum that won't
prove! The theory at its best does little more than
suggest something, which if it is true at all, is a platitude,
viz. : that progressive growth in all life makes
it more and more possible for men to separate, in an
art-work, moral weakness from artistic strength.
Ill
Human attributes are definite enough when it
comes to their description, but the expression of them,
or the paralleling of them in an art-process, has to
be, as said above, more or less arbitrary, but we believe
that their expression can be less vague if the
basic distinction of this art-dualism is kept in mind.
It is morally certain that the higher part is founded,
as Sturt suggests, on something that has to do with
those kinds of unselfish human interests which we
88 EPILOGUE
call knowledge and morality—knowledge, not in the
sense of erudition, but as a kind of creation or creative
truth. This allows us to assume that the higher
and more important value of this dualism is composed
of what may be called reality, quality, spirit, or substance
against the lower value of form, quantity, or
manner. Of these terms "substance" seems to us
the most appropriate, cogent, and comprehensive
for the higher and "manner" for the under-value.
Substance in a human-art-quality suggests the body
of a conviction which has its birth in the spiritual
consciousness, whose youth is nourished in the moral
consciousness, and whose maturity as a result of all
this growth is then represented in a mental image.
This is appreciated by the intuition, and somehow
translated into expression by "manner"—a process
always less important than it seems, or as suggested
by the foregoing (in fact we apologize for this attempted
definition). So it seems that "substance" is too
indefinite to analyze, in more specific terms. It is
practically indescribable. Intuitions (artistic or not?)
will sense it—process, unknown. Perhaps it is an
unexplained consciousness of being nearer God, or
being nearer the devil—of approaching truth or approaching
unreality—a silent something felt in the
truth-of-nature in Turner against the truth-of-art
in Botticelli, or in the fine thinking of Ruskin against
the fine soundings of Kipling, or in the wide-expanse
of Titian against the narrow-expanse of Carpaccio,
or in some such distinction that Pope sees between
what he calls Homer's "invention" and Virgil's
"judgment"—apparently an inspired imagination
EPILOGUE 89
against an artistic care, a sense of the difference,
perhaps, between Dr. Bushnell's Knowing God and
knowing ahotd God. A more vivid explanation or
illustration may be found in the difference between
Emerson and Poe. The former seems to be almost
wholly "substance" and the latter "manner." The
measure in artistic satisfaction of Poe's manner is
equal to the measure of spiritual satisfaction in Emerson's
"substance." The total value of each man is
high, but Emerson's is higher than Poe's because
"substance" is higher than "manner"—because
"substance" leans towards optimism, and "manner"
pessimism. We do not know that all this is so, but
we feel, or rather know by intuition that it is so, in
the same way we know intuitively that right is higher
than wrong, though we can't always tell why a thing
is right or wrong, or what is always the difference or
the margin between right and wrong.
Beauty, in its common conception, has nothing to
do with it (substance), unless it be granted that its
outward aspect, or the expression between sensuous
beauty and spiritual beauty can be always and distinctly
known, which it cannot, as the art of music
is still in its infancy. On reading this over, it seems
only decent that some kind of an apology be made for
the beginning of the preceding sentence. It cannot
justly be said that anything that has to do with art
has nothing to do with beauty in any degree, —that
is, whether beauty is there or not, it has something
to do with it. A casual idea of it, a kind of a first
necessary-physical impression, was what we had in
mind. Probably nobody knows what actual beauty
90 EPILOGUE
is—except those serious writers of humorous essays in
art magazines, who accurately, but kindly, with club
in hand, demonstrate for all time and men that beauty
is a quadratic monomial; that it is absolute; that it
is relative; that it is not relative, that it is not. . . .
The word "beauty" is as easy to use as the word
"degenerate." Both come in handy when one does
or does not agree with you. For our part, something
that Roussel-Despierres says comes nearer to what
we like to think beauty is . . . "an infinite source
of good . . . the love of the beautiful ... a constant
anxiety for moral beauty." Even here we go
around in a circle—a thing apparently inevitable, if
one tries to reduce art to philosophy. But personally,
we prefer to go around in a circle than around in a
parallelepipedon, for it seems cleaner and perhaps
freer from mathematics—or for the same reason we
prefer Whittier to Baudelaire—a poet to a genius,
or a healthy to a rotten apple—probably not so much
because it is more nutritious, but because we like its
taste better; we like the beautiful and don't like the
ugly; therefore, what we like is beautiful, and what
we don't like is ugly—and hence we are glad the beautiful
is not ugly, for if it were we would like something
we don't like. So having unsettled what beauty is,
let us go on.
At any rate, we are going to be arbitrary enough to
claim, with no definite qualification, that substance
can be expressed in music, and that it is the only
valuable thing in it, and moreover that in two separate
pieces of music in which the notes are almost identical,
one can be of "substance" with little "manner,''
EPILOGUE 91
and the other can be of "manner" with little "substance."
Substance has something to do with character.
Manner has nothing to do with it. The
"substance" of a tune comes from somewhere near
the soul, and the "manner" comes from—God knows
where.
IV
The lack of interest to preserve, or ability to perceive
the fundamental divisions of this duality accounts
to a large extent, we believe, for some or many
various phenomena (pleasant or unpleasant according
to the personal attitude) of modern art, and all
art. It is evidenced in many ways—the sculptors'
over-insistence on the "mold," the outer rather than
the inner subject or content of his statue—overenthusiasm
for local color—over-interest in the multiplicity
of techniques, in the idiomatic, in the effect as
shown, by the appreciation of an audience rather than
in the effect on the ideals of the inner conscience of
the artist or the composer. This lack of perceiving
is too often shown by an over-interest in the material
value of the effect. The pose of self-absorption,
which some men, in the advertising business (and
incidentally in the recital and composing business)
put into their photographs or the portraits of themselves,
while all dolled up in their purple-dressinggowns,
in their twofold wealth of golden hair, in
their cissy-like postures over the piano keys—this
pose of "manner" sometimes sounds out so loud
that the more their music is played, the less it is
heard. For does not Emerson tell them this when
92 EPILOGUE
he says "What you are talks so loud, that I cannot
hear what you say"? The unescapable impression
that one sometimes gets by a glance at these publicinflicted
trade-marks, and without having heard or
seen any of their music, is that the one great underlying
desire of these appearing-artists, is to impress,
perhaps startle and shock their audiences and at
any cost. This may have some such effect upon
some of the lady-part (male or female) of their
listeners but possibly the members of the men-part,
who as boys liked hockey better than birthdayparties,
may feel like shocking a few of these picturesitters
with something stronger than their own
forzandos.
The insistence upon manner in its relation to local
color is wider than a self-strain for effect. If local color
is a natural part, that is, a part of substance, the arteffort
cannot help but show its color—and it will be a
true color, no matter how colored; if it is a part, even
a natural part of "manner," either the color part is
bound eventuall}^ to drive out the local part or the
local drive out all color. Here a process of cancellation
or destruction is going on—a kind of "compromise"
which destroys by deadlock; a compromise purchasing
a selfish pleasure—a decadence in which art becomes
first dull, then dark, then dead, though throughout
this process it is outwardly very much alive,
—
especially after it is dead. The same tendency may
even be noticed if there is over-insistence upon the
national in art. Substance tends to create affection;
manner prejudice. The latter tends to efface the
distinction between the love of both a country's
EPILOGUE 93
virtue and vices, and the love of only the virtue. A
true love of country is likely to be so big that it will
embrace the virtue one sees in other countries and,
in the same breath, so to speak. A composer born
in America, but who has not been interested in the
"cause of the Freedmen," may be so interested in
"negro melodies," that he writes a symphony over
them. He is conscious (perhaps only subconscious)
that he wishes it to be "American music." He tries
to forget that the paternal negro came from Africa.
Is his music American or African? That is the great
question which keeps him awake! But the sadness
of it is, that if he had been born in Africa, his music
might have been just as American, for there is good
authority that an African soul under an X-ray looks
identically like an American soul. There is a futility
in selecting a certain type to represent a "whole,"
unless the interest in the spirit of the type coincides
with that of the whole. In other words, if this composer
isn't as deeply interested in the "cause" as
Wendell Phillips was, when he fought his way through
that anti- abolitionist crowd at Faneuil Hall, his
music is liable to be less American than he wishes.
If a middle-aged man, upon picking up the Scottish
Chiefs, finds that his boyhood enthusiasm for the
prowess and noble deeds and character of Sir Wm.
Wallace and of Bruce is still present, let him put,
or try to put that glory into an overture, let him fill
it chuck-full of Scotch tunes, if he will. But after
all is said and sung he will find that his music is
American to the core (assuming that he is an American
and wishes his music to be). It will be as national
94 EPILOGUE
in character as the heart of that Grand Army Grandfather,
who read those Cragmore Tales of a summer
evening, when that boy had brought the cows home
without witching. Perhaps the memories of the old
soldier, to which this man still holds tenderly, may be
turned into a "strain" or a "sonata," and though the
music does not contain, or even suggest any of the old
war-songs, it will be as sincerely American as the
subject, provided his (the composer's) interest, spirit,
arid character sympathize with, or intuitively coincide
with that of the subject.
Again, if a man finds that the cadences of an Apache
war-dance come nearest to his soul, provided he has
taken pains to know enough other cadences—for
eclecticism is part of his duty—sorting potatoes means
a better crop next year—let him assimilate whatever
he finds highest of the Indian ideal, so that he can use
it with the cadences, fervently, transcendentally, inevitably,
furiously, in his symphonies, in his operas,
in his whistlings on the way to work, so that he can
paint his house with them—make them a part of his
prayer-book—this is all possible and necessary, if he
is confident that they have a part in his spiritual
consciousness. With this assurance his music will
have everything it should of sincerity, nobility,
strength, and beauty, no matter how it sounds; and
if, with this, he is true to none but the highest of
American ideals (that is, the ideals only that coincide
with his spiritual consciousness) his music will be
true to itself and incidentally American, and it will
be so even after it is proved that all our Indians came
from Asia.
EPILOGUE 95
The man "born down to Babbitt's Corners," may
find a deep appeal in the simple but acute "Gospel
Hymns of the New England camp meetin'," of a
generation or so ago. He finds in them—some of
them—a vigor, a depth of feeling, a natural-soil
rhythm, a sincerity, emphatic but inartistic, which,
in spite of a vociferous sentimentality, carries him
nearer the "Christ of the people" than does the Te
Deum of the greatest cathedral. These tunes have,
for him, a truer ring than many of those groovemade,
even-measured, monotonous, non-rhythmed,
indoor-smelling, priest-taught, academic, English or
neo-English hymns (and anthems) — well-written,
well-harmonized things, well-voice-led, well-counterpointed,
well corrected, and well O.K'd, by well
corrected Mus. Bac. R.F.O.G.'s—personified sounds,
correct and inevitable to sight and hearing—in a
word, those proper forms of stained-glass beauty,
which our over-drilled mechanisms—boy-choirs are
limited to. But, if the Yankee can reflect the fervency
with which
'
' his gospels
'
' were sung—the fervency
of "Aunt Sarah," who scrubbed her life away,
for her brother's ten orphans, the fervency with
which this woman, after a fourteen-hour work day
on the farm, would hitch up and drive five miles,
through the mud and rain to "prayer meetin'
"
—her one articulate outlet for the fullness of her
unselfish soul—if he can reflect the fervency of such
a spirit, he may find there a local color that will do
all the world good. If his music can but catch that
"spirit" by being a part with itself, it will come somewhere
near his ideal—and it will be American, too.
96 EPILOGUE
perhaps nearer so than that of the devotee of Indian
or negro melody. In other words, if local color,
national color, any color, is a true pigment of the
universal color, it is a divine quality, it is a part of
substance in art—not of manner.
The preceding illustrations are but attempts to
show that whatever excellence an artist sees in life,
a community, in a people, or in any valuable object
or experience, if sincerely and intuitively reflected in
his work, his work, and so he himself, is, in a way,
a reflected part of that excellence. Whether he be accepted
or rejected, whether his music is always played,
or never played—all this has nothing to do with it
—
it is true or false by his own measure. If we may be
permitted to leave out two words, and add a few more,
a sentence of Hegel appears to sum up this idea,
"The universal need for expression in art lies in man's
rational impulse to exalt the inner . . . world {i. e.,
the highest ideals he sees in the inner life of others)
together with what he finds in his own life—into a
spiritual consciousness for himself." The artist does
feel or does not feel that a sympathy has been approved
by an artistic intuition and so reflected in his
work. Whether he feels this sympathy is true or not
in the final analysis, is a thing probably that no one
but he (the artist) knows—but the truer he feels it,
the more substance it has, or as Sturt puts it, "his
work is art, so long as he feels in doing it as true artists
feel, and so long as his object is akin to the objects
that true artists admire."
Dr. Griggs in an Essay on Debussy,^ asks if
*
John C. Griggs, " Debussy," Yale Review, 1914.
EPILOGUE 97
this composer's content is worthy the manner. Perhaps
so, perhaps not—Debussy himself, doubtless,
could not give a positive answer. He would better
know how true his feeling and sympathy was, and
anyone else's personal opinion can be of but little help
here.
We might offer the suggestion that Debussy's
content would have been worthier his manner, if he
had hoed corn or sold newspapers for a living, for in
this way he might have gained a deeper vitality and
truer theme to sing at night and of a Sunday. Or we
might say that what substance there is, is "too
coherent"—it is too clearly expressed in the first
thirty seconds. There you have the **
whole fragment,"
a translucent syllogism, but then the reality,
the spirit, the substance stops and the "form," the
"parfume," the "manner," shimmer right along, as
the soapsuds glisten after one has finished washing.
Or we might say that his substance would have been
worthier, if his adoration or contemplation of Nature,
which is often a part of it, and which rises to great
heights, as is felt for example, in La Mer, had been
more the quality of Thoreau's. Debussy's attitude
toward Nature seems to have a kind of sensual sensuousness
underlying it, while Thoreau's is a kind of
spiritual sensuousness. It is rare to find a farmer or
peasant whose enthusiasm for the beauty in Nature
finds outward expression to compare with that of
the city-man who comes out for a Sunday in the
country, but Thoreau is that rare country-man and
Debussy the city-man with his week-end flights into
country-aesthetics. We would be inclined to say
7
98 EPILOGUE
that Thoreau leaned towards substance and Debussy
towards manner.
There comes from Concord, an offer to every mind
—the choice between repose and truth, and God
makes the offer. "Take which you please . . .
between these, as a pendulum, man oscillates. He in
whom the love of repose predominates will accept
the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political
party he meets," most likely his father's. He gets
rest, commodity, and reputation. Here is another
aspect of art-duality, but it is more drastic than
ours, as it would eliminate one part or the other. A
man ma^^ aim as high as Beethoven or as high as
Richard Strauss. In the former case the shot may
go far below the mark; in truth, it has not been
reached since that "thunder storm of 1828" and there
is little chance that it will be reached by anyone living
to-day, but that matters not, the shot will never
rebound and destroy the marksman. But, in the
latter case, the shot may often hit the mark, but as
often rebound and harden, if not destroy, the shooter's
heart—even his soul. What matters it, men say, he
will then find rest, commodity, and reputation—what
matters it—if he find there but few perfect truths
—
what matters (men say) —he will find there perfect
media, those perfect instruments of getting in the
way of perfect truths.
This choice tells why Beethoven is always modern
and Strauss always mediaeval—try as he may to
cover it up in new bottles. He has chosen to capital-
EPILOGUE 99
ize a "talent"—he has chosen the complexity of
media, the shining hardness of externals, repose,
against the inner, invisible activity of truth. He has
chosen the first creed, the easy creed, the philosophy
of his fathers, among whom he found a half-idiotgenius
(Nietzsche). His choice naturally leads him
to glorify and to magnify all kind of dull things—
stretched-out geigermusik—which in turn naturally
leads him to "windmills" and "human heads on
silver platters." Magnifying the dull into the
colossal, produces a kind of "comfort"—the comfort
of a woman who takes more pleasure in the fit of
fashionable clothes than in a healthy body—the kind
of comfort that has brought so many "adventures of
baby-carriages at county fairs" — "the sensation
of Teddy bears, smoking their first cigarette "—on
the program of symphony orchestras of one hundred
performers,—the lure of the media—the means
not the end—but the finish, —thus the failure to
perceive that thoughts and memories of childhood
are too tender, and some of them too sacred to be
worn lightly on the sleeve. Life is too short for these
one hundred men, to say nothing of the composer
and the "dress-circle," to spend an afternoon in this
way. They are but like the rest of us, and have only
the expectancy of the mortality-table to survive
perhaps only this "piece." V'e cannot but feel that
a too great desire for "repose" accounts for such
phenomena. A MS. score is brought to a concertmaster—he
may be a violinivSt—he is kindly disposed,
he looks it over, and casually fastens on a passage
"that's bad for the fiddh';., it doesn't hang just right,
100 EPILOGUE
write it like this, they will play it better." But that
one phrase is the germ of the whole thing. "Never
mind, it will fit the hand better this way—it will
sound better." My God! what has sound got to
do with music! The waiter brings the only fresh
egg he has, but the man at breakfast sends it back
because it doesn't fit his eggcup. Why can't music
go out in the same way it comes in to a man, without
having to crawl over a fence of sounds, thoraxes,
catguts, wire, wood, and brass? Consecutive-fifths
are as harmless as blue laws compared with the relentless
tyranny of the "media." The instrument!
—
there is the perennial difficulty—there is music's
limitations. Why must the scarecrow of the keyboard—the
tyrant in terms of the mechanism (be it
Caruso or a Jew's-harp) stare into every measure?
Is it the composer's fault that man has only ten
fingers? Why can't a musical thought be presented
as it is bom—perchance "a bastard of the slums,"
or a "daugh*-er of a bishop"—and if it happens to
go better later on a bass-drum (than upon a harp)
get a good bass-drummer.^ That music must be
heard, is not essential—what it sounds like may not
be what it is. Perhaps the day is coming when musicbelievers
will learn "that silence is a solvent . . . that
gives us leave to be universal" rather than personal.
^The first movement (Emerson) of the music, which is the
cause of all these words, was f^rst thought of (we believe) in
terms of a large orchestra, the second (Hawthorne) in terms of
a piano or a dozen pianos, the third (Allcotts) —of an organ (or
piano with voice or violin), an«. the last (Thoreau), in terms of
strings, colored possibly with a '
tne or horn.
EPILOGUE loi
Some fiddler was once honest or brave enough, or
perhaps ignorant enough, to say that Beethoven
didn't know how to write for the violin, —that, maybe,
is one of the many reasons Beethoven is not a
Vieuxtemps. Another man says Beethoven's piano
sonatas are not pianistic—with a little effort, perhaps,
Beethoven could have become a Thalberg. His
symphonies are perfect-truths and perfect for the
orchestra of 1820—but Mahler could have made
them—possibly did make them—we will say, "more
perfect," as far as their media clothes are concerned,
and Beethoven is to-day big enough to rather like it.
He is probably in the same amiable state of mind that
the Jesuit priest said, "God was in," when He looked
down on the camp ground and saw the priest sleeping
with a Congregational Chaplain. Or in the same state
of mind you'll be in when you look down and see the
sexton keeping your tombstone up to date. The
truth of Joachim offsets the repose of Paganini and
Kubelik. The repose and reputation of a successful
pianist—(whatever that means) who plays Chopin
so cleverly that he covers up a sensuality, and in such
a way that the purest-minded see nothing but sensuous
beauty in it, which, by the way, doesn't disturb
him as much as the size of his income-tax—the
repose and fame of this man is offset by the truth
and obscurity of the village organist who plays
Lowell Mason and Bach with such affection that he
would give his life rather than lose them. The truth
and courage of this organist, who risks his job, to
fight the prejudice of the congregation, offset the
repose and large salar}^ of a more celebrated choir-
102 EPILOGUE
master, who holds his job by lowering his ideals,
who is willing to let the organ smirk under an insipid,
easy-sounding barcarolle for the offertory, who is
willing to please the sentimental ears of the music
committee (and its wives) —who is more willing to
observe these forms of politeness than to stand up
for a stronger and deeper music of simple devotion,
and for a service of a spiritual unity, the kind of thing
that Mr. Bossitt, who owns the biggest country place,
the biggest bank, and the biggest "House of God"
in town (for is it not the divine handiwork of his
own—pocketbook) —the kind of music that this man,
his wife, and his party (of property right in pews)
can't stand because it isn't "pretty."
The doctrine of this "choice" may be extended to
the distinction between literal-enthusiasm and naturalenthusiasm
(right or wrong notes, good or bad tones
against good or bad interpretation, good or bad sentiment)
or between observation and introspection, or
to the distinction between remembering and dreaming.
Strauss remembers, Beethoven dreams. We see
this distinction also in Goethe's confusion of the
moral with the intellectual. There is no such confusion
in Beethoven—to him they are one. It is told,
and the story is so well known that we hesitate to
repeat it here, that both these men were standing
in the street one day when the Emperor drove by
—Goethe, like the rest of the crowd, bowed and
uncovered—but Beethoven stood bolt upright, and
refused even to salute, saying: "Let him bow to us,
for ours is a nobler empire." Goethe's mind knew this
was true, but his moral courage was not instinctive.
EPILOGUE 103
This remembering faculty of "repose," throws the
mind in unguarded moments quite naturally towards
"manner" and thus to the many things the media
can do. It brings on an itching to over-use them
to be original (if anyone will tell what that is) with
nothing but numbers to be original with. We are
told that a conductor (of the orchestra) has written
a symphony requiring an orchestra of one hundred
and fifty men. If his work perhaps had one hundred
and fifty valuable ideas, the one hundred and fifty
men might be justifiable—but as it probably contains
not more than a dozen, the composer may be unconsciously
ashamed of them, and glad to cover them
up under a hundred and fifty men. A man may
become famous because he is able to eat nineteen
dinners a day, but posterity will decorate his stomach,
not his brain.
Manner breeds a cussed-cleverness —only to be
clever—a satellite of super-industrialism, and perhaps
to be witty in the bargain, not the wit in mother-wit,
but a kind of indoor, artificial, mental arrangement
of things quickly put together and which have been
learned and studied—it is of the material and stays
there, while humor is of the emotional and of the
approaching spiritual. Even Dukas, and perhaps
other Gauls, in their critical heart of hearts, may admit
that "wit" in music, is as impossible as "wit" at a
funeral. The wit is evidence of its lack. Mark
Twain could be humorous at the death of his dearest
friend, but in such a way as to put a blessing into the
heart of the bereaved. Humor in music has the same
possibilities. But its quantity has a serious effect
I04 EPILOGUE
on its qualit}^ "inverse ratio" is a good formula to
adopt here. Comedy has its part, but wit never.
Strauss is at his best in these lower rooms, but his
comedy reminds us more of the physical fun of Lever
rather than "comedy in the Meredithian sense" as
Mason suggests. Meredith is a little too deep or too
subtle for Strauss—unless it be granted that cynicism
is more a part of comedy than a part of refinedinsult.
Let us also remember that Mr. Disston, not
Mr. Strauss, put the funny notes in the bassoon.
A symphony written only to amuse and entertain
is likely to amuse only the writer—and him not long
after the check is cashed.
"Genius is always ascetic and piety and love,"
thus Emerson reinforces "God's offer of this choice"
by a transcendental definition. The moment a famous
violinist refused "to appear" until he had received
his check, —at that moment, precisely (assuming for
argument's sake, that this was the first time that
materialism had the ascendency in this man's soul)
at that moment he became but a man of "talent"
—
incidentally, a small man and a small violinist, regardless
of how perfectly he played, regardless to what
heights of emotion he stirred his audience, regardless
of the sublimity of his artistic and financial
success.
d'Annunzio, it is told, becoming somewhat discouraged
at the result of some of his Fiume adventures
said :
" We are the only Idealists left." This
remark ma}^ have been made in a moment of careless
impulse, but if it is taken at its face value, the
moment it was made that moment his idealism started
EPILOGUE 105
downhill. A grasp at monopoly indicates that a sudden
shift has taken place from the heights where genius
may be found, to the lower plains of talent. The
mind of a true idealist is great enough to know that
a monopoly of idealism or of wheat is a thing nature
does not support.
A newspaper music column prints an incident
(so how can we assume that it is not true?) of an
American violinist who called on Max Reger, to tell
him how much he (the American) appreciated his
music. Reger gives him a hopeless look and cries:
'
' What ! a musician and not speak German !
" At that
moment, by the clock, regardless of how great a genius
he may have been before that sentence was uttered—at
that moment he became but a man of
*
' talent.
'
'
*
' For
the man of talent affects to call his transgressions of
the laws of sense trivial and to count them nothing
considered with his devotion to his art." His art
never taught him prejudice or to wear only one eye.
" His art is less for every deduction from his holiness
and less for every defect of common sense." And
this common sense has a great deal to do with this
distinguishing difference of Emerson's between genius
and talent, repose and truth, and between all evidences
of substance and manner in art. Manner breeds
partialists. "Is America a musical nation?"—if the
man who is ever asking this question would sit down
and think something over he might find less interest in
asking it—he might possibly remember that all nations
are more musical than any nation, especially the
nation that pays the most—and pays the most eagerly,
for anything, after it has been professionally—rubber-
io6 EPILOGUE
stamped. Music may be yet unborn. Perhaps no
music has ever been written or heard. Perhaps the
birth of art will take place at the moment, in which the
last man, who is willing to make a living out of art
is gone and gone forever. In the history of this
youthful world the best product that human-beings
can boast of is probably, Beethoven—but, maybe,
even his art is as nothing in comparison with the future
product of some coal-miner's soul in the forty-first
century. And the same man who is ever asking about
the most musical nation, is ever discovering the most
musical man of the most musical nation. When
particularly hysterical he shouts, "I have found him
!
Smith Grabholz—the one great American poet,—at
last, here is the Moses the country has been waiting
for"—(of course we all know that the country has not
been waiting for anybody—and we have many Moses
always with us). But the discoverer keeps right on
shouting "Here is the one true American poetry, I
pronounce it the work of a genius. I predict for him
the most brilliant career—for his is an art that . .
.
—
for his is a soul that . . . for his is a . . . and Grabholz
is ruined;—but ruined, not alone, by this perennial
discoverer of pearls in any oyster-shell that treats
him the best, but ruined by his own (Grabholz's)
talent,—for genius will never let itself be discovered by
**a man." Then the world may ask "Can the one
true national "this" or "that" be killed by its own
discoverer? "No," the country replies, "but each
discovery is proof of another impossibility." It is a
sad fact that the one true man and the one true art
will never behave as they should except in the mind of
EPILOGUE 107
the partialist whom God has forgotten. But this
matters little to him (the man)—his business is good
for it is easy to sell the future in terms of the past—and
there are always some who will buy anything. The
individual usually ''gains'' if he is willing to but lean
on "manner." The evidence of this is quite widespread,
for if the discoverer happens to be in any other
line of business his sudden discoveries would be just as
important to him. In fact, the theory of substance
and manner in art and its related dualisms, "repose
and truth, genius and talent," &c., may find illustration
in many, perhaps most, of the human activities.
And when examined it (the illustration) is quite likely
to show how "manner " is always discovering partisans.
For example, enthusiastic discoveries of the "paragon"
is common in politics,—an art to some. These
revelations, in this profession are made easy by the
pre-election discovering-leaders of the people. And
the genius who is discovered, forthwith starts his
speeches of "talent"—though they are hardly that
they are hardly more than a string of subplatitudes,
square-looking, well-rigged things that almost everybody
has seen, known, and heard since Rome or man
fell. Nevertheless these signs of perfect manner,
these series of noble sentiments that the "noble " never
get off, are forcibly, clearly, and persuasively handed
out—eloquently, even beautifully expressed, and with
such personal charm, magnetism, and strength, that
their profound messages speed right through the
minds and hearts, without as much as spattering the
walls, and land right square in the middle of the listener's
vanity. For all this is a part of manner and its
io8 EPILOGUE
quality is of splendor—for manner is at times a good
bluff but substance a poor one and knows it. The
discovered one's usual and first great outburst is probably
the greatest truth that he ever utters. Fearlessly
standing, he looks straight into the eyes of the
populace and with a strong ringing voice (for strong
voices and strong statesmanship are inseparable) and
with words far more eloquent than the following, he
sings "This honor is greater than I deserve but duty
calls me—(what, not stated) ... If elected, I shall
be your servant . . . (for, it is told, that he believes
in modesty,—that he has even boasted that he is the
most modest man in the country) . . . Thus he has
the right to shout, *'
First, last and forever I am for the
people. I am against all bosses. I have no sympathy
for politicians. I am for strict economy, liberal
improvements and justice! I am also for the—ten
commandments " (his intuitive political sagacity keeps
him from mentioning any particular one).—But a
sublime height is always reached in his perorations.
Here we learn that he believes in honesty—(repeat
''honesty'')]—we are even allowed to infer that he is
one of the very few who know that there is such a
thing; and we also learn that since he was a little
boy (barefoot) his motto has been "Do Right,"—he
swerves not from the right!—he believes in nothing
but the right ;
(to him—everything is right !
—if it gets
him elected) ;
—but cheers invariably stop this great
final truth (in brackets) from rising to animate
expression. Now all of these translucent axioms are
true (are not axioms always true?), —as far as manner
is concerned. In other words, the manner functions
EPILOGUE 109
perfectly. But where is the divine-substance? This
is not there—why should it be—if it were he might
not be there. "Substance" is not featured in this
discovery. For the truth of substance is sometimes
silence, sometimes ellipses,—and the latter if supplied
might turn some of the declarations above into perfect
truths,—for instance "first and last and forever I am
for the people ('s votes). I'm against all bosses
(against me). I have no sympathy for (rival) politicians,"
etc., etc. But these tedious attempts at
comedy should stop,—they're too serious,—besides
the illustration may be a little hard on a few, the
minority (the non-people) though not on the many,
the majority (the people) ! But even an assumed
parody may help to show what a power manner is for
reaction unless it is counterbalanced and then saturated
by the other part of the duality. Thus it appears
that all there is to this great discovery is that one good
politician has discovered another good politician.
For manner has brought forth its usual talent;—for
manner cannot discover the genius who has discarded
platitudes—the genius who has devised a new and
surpassing order for mankind, simple and intricate
enough, abstract and definite enough, locally impractical
and universally practical enough, to wipe out
the need for further discoveries of "talent" and
incidentally the discoverer's own fortune and political
"manner." Furthermore, he (this genius) never will
be discovered until the majority-spirit, the commonheart,
the human-oversoul, the source of all great
values, converts all talent into genius, all manner into
substance—until the direct expression of the mind
no EPILOGUE
and soul of the majority, the divine right of all consciousness,
social, moral, and spiritual, discloses the
one true art and thus finally discovers the one true
leader—even itself:—then no leaders, no politicians,
no manner, will hold sway—and no more speeches will
be heard.
The intensity to-day, with which techniques and
media are organized and used, tends to throw the
mind away from a "common sense" and towards
"manner" and thus to resultant weak and mental
states—for example, the Byronic fallacy—that one
who is full of turbid feeling about himself is qualified
to be some sort of an artist. In this relation
*
' manner"
also leads some to think that emotional sympathy
for self is as true a part of art as sympathy for others
;
and a prejudice in favor of the good and bad of one
personality against the virtue of many personalities.
It may be that when a poet or a whistler becomes
conscious that he is in the easy path of any particular
idiom,—that he is helplessly prejudiced in favor of any
particular means of expression,—that his manner can
be catalogued as modern or classic,—that he favors a
contrapuntal groove, a sound-coloring one, a sensuous
one, a successful one, or a melodious one (whatever
that means),—that his interests lie in the French
school or the German school, or the school of Saturn,
—that he is involved in this particular "that" or that
particular "this," or in any particular brand of
emotional complexes,—in a word, when he becomes
conscious that his style is "his personal own,"—that
it has monopolized a geographical part of the world's
sensibilities, then it mav be that the value of his sub-
EPILOGUE III
stance is not growing,—that it even may have started
on its way backwards,—it may be that he is trading
an inspiration for a bad habit and finally that he is
reaching fame, permanence, or some other undervalue,
and that he is getting farther and farther from a
perfect truth. But, on the contrary side of the picture,
it is not unreasonable to imagine that if he (this
poet, composer, and laborer) is open to all the overvalues
within his reach,—if he stands unprotected
from all the showers of the absolute which may beat
upon him,—if he is willing to use or learn to use, or at
least if he is not afraid of trying to use, whatever he
can, of any and all lessons of the infinite that humanity
has received and thrown to man,—that nature has
exposed and sacrificed, that life and death have
translated—if he accepts all and sympathizes with
all, is influenced by all, whether consciously or subconsciously,
drastically or humbly, audibly or inaudibly,
whether it be all the virtue of Satan or the only evil
of Heaven—and all, even, at one time, even in one
chord, then it may be that the value of his substance,
and its value to himself, to his art, to all art, even to
the Common Soul is growing and approaching nearer
and nearer to perfect truths—whatever they are and
wherever they may be.
Again, a certain kind of manner-over-insistence may
be caused by a group-disease germ. The over-influence
by, the over-admiration of, and the over-association
with a particular artistic personality or a particular
type or group of personalities tends to produce equally
favorable and unfavorable symptoms, but the unfavorable
ones seem to be more contagious. Perhaps
112 EPILOGUE
the impulsive remark of some famous man (whose
name we forget) that he "loved music but hated
musicians," might be followed (with some good results)
at least part of the time. To see the sun rise,
a man has but to get up early, and he can always have
Bach in his pocket. We hear that Mr. Smith or Mr.
Morgan, etc., et al. design to establish a "course at
Rome," to raise the standard of American music,
(or the standard of American composers—which is it ?)
but possibly the more our composer accepts from his
patrons " et al." the less he will accept from himself.
It may be possible that a day in a "Kansas wheat
field" will do more for him than three years in Rome.
It may be, that many men—perhaps some of genius
—(if you won't admit that all are geniuses) have
been started on the downward path of subsidy by
trying to write a thousand dollar prize poem or a ten
thousand dollar prize opera. How many masterpieces
have been prevented from blossoming in this
way? A cocktail will make a man eat more, but will
not give him a healthy, normal appetite (if he had
not that already). If a bishop should offer a "prize
living" to the curate who will love God the hardest
for fifteen days, whoever gets the prize would love
God the least. Such stimulants, it strikes us, tend
to industrialize art, rather than develop a spiritual
sturdiness—a sturdiness which Mr. Sedgwick says^
"shows itself in a close union between spiritual life
and the ordinary business of life," against spiritual
feebleness which "shows itself in the separation of the
'H.D.Sedgwick. The New American Type. Riverside Press.
EPILOGUE 113
two." If one's spiritual sturdiness is congenital
and somewhat perfect he is not only conscious that
this separation has no part in his own soul, but he
does not feel its existence in others. He does not
believe there is such a thing. But perfection in this
respect is rare. And for the most of us, we believe,
this sturdiness would be encouraged by anything that
will keep or help us keep a normal balance between
the spiritual life and the ordinary life. If for every
thousand dollar prize a potato field be substituted,
so that these candidates of "Clio" can dig a little
in real life, perhaps dig up a natural inspiration, artsair
might be a Httle clearer—a little freer from certain
traditional delusions, for instance, that free thought
and free love always go to the same cafe—that atmosphere
and diligence are synonymous. To quote
Thoreau incorrectly: "When half-Gods talk, the Gods
walk!" Everyone should have the opportunity of
not being over-influenced.
Again, this over-influence by and over-insistence
upon "manner" may finally lead some to believe
"that manner for manner's sake is a basis of music."
Someone is quoted as saying that "ragtime is the
true American music." Anyone will admit that it
is one of the many true, natural, and, nowadays,
conventional means of expression. It is an idiom,
perhaps a "set or series of colloquialisms," similar
to those that have added through centuries and
through natural means, some beauty to all languages.
Every language is but the evolution of slang, and
possibly the broad "A" in Harvard may have come
down from the
*
' butcher of Southwark.
'
' To examine
8
114 EPILOGUE
ragtime rhythms and the syncopations of Schumann
or of Brahms seems to the writer to show how much
alike they are not. Ragtime, as we hear it, is, of
course, more (but not much more) than a natural
dogma of shifted accents, or a mixture of shifted and
minus accents. It is something like wearing a derby
hat on the back of the head, a shuffling lilt of a happy
soul just let out of a Baptist Church in old Alabama.
Ragtime has its possibilities. But it does not "represent
the American nation" any more than some
fine old senators represent it. Perhaps we know it
now as an ore before it has been refined into a product.
It may be one of nature's ways of giving art raw
material. Time will throw its vices away and weld its
virtues into the fabric of our music. It has its uses as
the cruet on the boarding-house table has, but to make
a meal of tomato ketchup and horse-radish, to plant a
whole farm with sunflowers, even to put a sunflower
into every bouquet, would be calling nature something
worse than a politician. Mr. Daniel Gregory Mason,
whose wholesome influence, by the way, is doing as
much perhaps for music in America as American
music is, amusingly says: "If indeed the land of
Lincoln and Emerson has degenerated until nothing
remains of it but a 'jerk and rattle, ' then we, at least,
are free to repudiate this false patriotism of '
my Country
right or wrong, ' to insist that better than bad
music is no music, and to let our beloved art subside
finally under the clangor of the subway gongs and
automobile horns, dead, but not dishonored." And
so may we ask: Is it better to sing inadequately of the
"leaf on Walden floating," and die "dead but not dis-
EPILOGUE 115
honored," or to sing adequately of the "cherry on the
cocktail," and live forever?
VI
If anyone has been strong enough to escape these
rocks—this "Scylla and Charybdis,"—has survived
these wrong choices, these under-values with their
prizes, Bohemias and heroes, is not such a one in
a better position, is he not abler and freer to "declare
himself and so to love his cause so singly that
he will cleave to it, and forsake all else? What is
this cause for the American composer but the utmost
musical beauty that he, as an individual man, with
his own qualities and defects, is capable of understanding
and striving towards?—forsaking all else except
those types of musical beauty that come home to
him,"^ and that his spiritual conscience intuitively
approves.
"It matters not one jot, provided this course of
personal loyalty to a cause be steadfastly pursued,
what the special characteristics of the style of the
music may be to which one gives one's devotion."*
This, if over-translated, may be made to mean, what
we have been trying to say—that if your interest,
enthusiasm, and devotion on the side of substance
and truth, are of the stuff to make you so sincere that
you sweat—to hell with manner and repose! Mr.
Mason is responsible for too many young minds, in
their planting season to talk like this, to be as rough,
^ Contemporary Composers, D. G. Mason, Macmillan Co.,
N. Y.
ii6 EPILOGUE
or to go as far, but he would probably admit that,
broadly speaking—some such way, i. e., constantly
recognizing this ideal duality in art, though not the
most profitable road for art to travel, is almost its
only way out to eventual freedom and salvation.
Sidney Lanier, in a letter to Bayard Taylor writes:
*
' I have so many fair dreams and hopes about music
in these days (1875). It is gospel whereof the people
are in great need. As Christ gathered up the Ten
Commandments and redistilled them into the clear
liquid of the wondrous eleventh—love God utterly
and thy neighbor as thyself—so I think the time will
come when music rightly developed to its now little
foreseen grandeur will be found to be a late revelation
of all gospels in one." Could the art of music, or
the art of anything have a more profound reason for
being than this? A conception unlimited by the
narrow names of Christian, Pagan, Jew, or Angel!
A vision higher and deeper than art itself
!
VII
The humblest composer will not find true humility
in aiming low—he must never be timid or afraid of
trying to express that which he feels is far above his
power to express, any more than he should be afraid
of breaking away, when necessary, from easy first
sounds, or afraid of admitting that those half truths
that come to him at rare intervals, are half true,
for instance, that all art galleries contain masterpieces,
which are nothing more than a history of art's
beautiful mistakes. He should never fear of being
EPILOGUE 117
called a high-brow—but not the kind in Prof. Brander
Matthews' definition. John L. Sullivan was a
"high-brow" in his art. A high-brow can always whip
a low-brow.
If he "truly seeks," he "will surely find" many
things to sustain him. He can go to a part of Alcott's
philosophy
—"that all occupations of man's body
and soul in their diversity come from but one mind
and soul!" If he feels that to subscribe to all of the
foregoing and then submit, though not as evidence,
the work of his own hands is presumptuous, let him
remember that a man is not always responsible for
the wart on his face, or a girl for the bloom on her
cheek, and as they walk out of a Sunday for an airing,
people will see them—but they must have the air.
He can remember with Plotinus, "that in every human
soul there is the ray of the celestial beauty," and
therefore every human outburst may contain a partial
ray. And he can believe that it is better to go to
the plate and strike out than to hold the bench down,
for by facing the pitcher, he may then know the
umpire better, and possibly see a new parabola. His
presumption, if it be that, may be but a kind of
courage Juvenal sings about, and no harm can then
be done either side. '' Cantahit vacuus coram latrone
viator.'''
VIII
To divide by an arbitrary line something that
cannot be divided is a process that is disturbing to
some. Perhaps our deductions are not as inevitable
as they are logical, which suggests that they are not
ii8 EPILOGUE
"logic." An arbitrary assumption is never fair to
all any of the time, or to anyone all the time. Many
will resent the abrupt separation that a theory of
duality in music suggests and say that these general
subdivisions are too closely inter-related to be labeled
decisively
—"this or that." There is justice in this
criticism, but our answer is that it is better to be
short on the long than long on the short. In such an
abstruse art as music it is easy for one to point to
this as substance and to that as manner. Some will
hold and it is undeniable—in fact quite obvious
—
that manner has a great deal to do with the beauty
of substance, and that to make a too arbitrary division,
or distinction between them, is to interfere, to
some extent, with an art's beauty and unity. There
is a great deal of truth in this too. But on the other
hand, beauty in music is too often confused with
something that lets the ears lie back in an easy chair.
Many sounds that we are used to, do not bother us,
and for that reason, we are inclined to call them beautiful.
Frequently,—possibly almost invariably,—
analytical and impersonal tests will show, we believe,
that when a new or unfamiliar work is accepted as
beautiful on its first hearing, its fundamental quality
is one that tends to put the mind to sleep. A narcotic
is not always unnecessary, but it is seldom a basis of
progress,—that is, wholesome evolution in any creative
experience. This kind of progress has a great
deal to do with beauty—at least in its deeper emotional
interests, if not in its moral values. (The
above is only a personal impression, but it is based on
carefully remembered instances, during a period of
EPILOGUE 119
about fifteen or twenty years.) Possibly the fondness
for individual utterance may throw out a skin-deep
arrangement, which is readily accepted as beautiful
—formulae that weaken rather than toughen up the
musical-muscles. If the composer's sincere conception
of his art and of its functions and ideals, coincide
to such an extent with these groove-colored permutations
of tried out progressions inexpediency, that he
can arrange them over and over again to his transcendent
delight—has he or has he not been drugged
with an overdose of habit-forming sounds? And as
a result do not the muscles of his clientele become
flabbier and flabbier until they give way altogether
and find refuge only in a seasoned opera box—where
they can see without thinking? And unity is too generally
conceived of, or too easily accepted as analogous
to form, and form (as analogous) to custom, and custom
to habit, and habit may be one of the parents of
custom and form, and there are all kinds of parents.
Perhaps all unity in art, at its inception, is half-natural
and half-artificial but time insists, or at least makes us,
or inclines to make us feel that it is all natural. It is
easy for us to accept it as such. The "unity of dress
for a man at a ball requires a collar, yet he could dance
better without it. Coherence, to a certain extent, must
bear some relation to the listener's subconscious perspective.
For example, a critic has to listen to a
thousand concerts a year, in which there is much
repetition, not only of the same pieces, but the same
formal relations of tones, cadences, progessions, etc.
There is present a certain routine series of imagenecessity-stimulants,
which he doesn't seem to need
120 EPILOGUE
until they disappear. Instead of listening to music,
he listens around it. And from this subconscious
viewpoint, he inclines perhaps more to the thinking
about than thinking in music. If he could go into
some other line of business for a year or so perhaps
his perspective would be more naturally normal.
The unity of a sonata movement has long been associated
with its form, and to a greater extent than is
necessary. A first theme, a development, a second
in a related key and its development, the free fantasia,
the recapitulation, and so on, and over again. Mr.
Richter or Mr. Parker may tell us that all this is
natural, for it is based on the classic-song form, but
in spite of your teachers a vague feeling sometimes
creeps over you that the form-nature of the song has
been stretched out into deformity. Some claim for
Tchaikowsky that his clarity and coherence of design
is unparalleled (or some such word) in works for the
orchestra. That depends, it seems to us, on how far
repetition is an essential part of clarity and coherence.
We know that butter comes from cream—but how
long must we watch the "churning arm!" If nature
is not enthusiastic about explanation, why should
Tschaikowsky be ? Beethoven had to churn, to
some extent, to make his message carry. He had to
pull the ear, hard and in the same place and several
times, for the 1790 ear was tougher than the 1890
one. But the "great Russian weeper" might have
spared us. To Emerson, "unity and the over-soul,
or the common-heart, are synonymous." Unity is
at least nearer to these than to solid geometry, though
geometry may be all unity.
EPILOGUE 121
But to whatever unpleasantness the holding to
this theory of duality brings us, we feel that there is
a natural law underneath it all, and like all laws of
nature, a liberal interpretation is the one nearest the
truth. What part of these supplements are opposites ?
What part of substance is manner? What part of
this duality is polarity? These questions though not
immaterial may be disregarded, if there be a sincere
appreciation (intuition is always sincere) of the
** divine" spirit of the thing. Enthusiasm for, and
recognition of these higher over these lower values
will transform a destructive iconoclasm into creation,
and a mere devotion into consecration—a consecration
which, like Amphion's music, will raise the Walls
of Thebes.
IX
Assuming, and then granting, that art-activity
can be transformed or led towards an eventual
consecration, by recognizing and using in their true
relation, as much as one can, these higher and lower
dual values—and that the doing so is a part, if not the
whole of our old problem of paralleling or approving
in art the highest attributes, moral and spiritual, one
sees in life—if you will grant all this, let us offer a
practical suggestion—a thing that one who has imposed
the foregoing should try to do just out of common
decency, though it be but an attempt, perhaps,
to make his speculations less speculative, and to
beat off metaphysics.
All, men-bards with a divine spark, and bards
without, feel the need at times of an inspiration from
122 EPILOGUE
without, "the breath of another soul to stir our inner
flame," especially when we are in pursuit of a part
of that "utmost musical beauty," that we are capable
of understanding—when we are breathlessly running
to catch a glimpse of that unforeseen grandeur of
Mr. Lanier's dream. In this beauty and grandeur
perhaps marionettes and their souls have a part
—
though how great their part is, we hear, is still undetermined;
but it is morally certain that, at times, a
part with itself must be some of those greater contemplations
that have been caught in the "World's
Soul," as it were, and nourished for us there in the
soil of its literature.
If an interest in, and a sympathy for, the thoughtvisions
of men like Charles Kingsley, Marcus Aurelius,
Whittier, Montaigne, Paul of Tarsus, Robert Browning,
Pythagoras, Channing, Milton, Sophocles, Swedenborg,
Thoreau, Francis of Assisi, Wordsworth,
Voltaire, Garrison, Plutarch, Ruskin, Ariosto, and
all kindred spirits and souls of great measure, from
David down to Rupert Brooke,—if a study of the
thought of such men creates a sympathy, even a love
for them and their ideal-part, it is certain that this,
however inadequately expressed, is nearer to what
music was given man for, than a devotion to "Tristan's
sensual love of Isolde," to the "Tragic Murder of a
Drunken Duke," or to the sad thoughts of a bathtub
when the water is being let out. It matters little
here whether a man who paints a picture of a useless
beautiful landscape imperfectly is a greater genius
than the man who paints a useful bad smell perfectly.
It is not intended in this suggestion that inspira-
EPILOGUE 123
tions coming from the higher planes should be limited
to any particular thought or work, as the mind receives
it. The plan rather embraces all that should
go with an expression of the composite-value. It is
of the underlying spirit, the direct unrestricted imprint
of one soul on another, a portrait, not a photograph
of the personality—it is the ideal part that would
be caught in this canvas. It is a sympathy for
"substance"—the over-value together with a consciousness
that there must be a lower value—the
"Demosthenic part of the Philippics"—the "Ciceronic
part of the Catiline," the sublimity, against the vileness
of Rousseau's Confessions. It is something akin to,
but something more than these predominant partial
tones of Hawthorne—"the grand old countenance of
Homer; the decrepit form, but vivid face of ^sop;
the dark presence of Dante; the wild Ariosto; Rabelais'
smile of deep-wrought mirth; the profound,
pathetic humor of Cervantes ; the all-glorious Shakespeare;
Spenser, meet guest for allegoric structure;
the severe divinity of Milton; and Bunyon, molded
of humblest clay, but instinct with celestial fire."
There are communities now, partly vanished, but
cherished and sacred, scattered throughout this
world of ours, in which freedom of thought and soul,
and even of body, have been fought for. And we
believe that there ever lives in that part of the oversoul,
native to them, the thoughts which these freedom-struggles
have inspired. America is not too
young to have its divinities, and its place legends.
Many of those "Transcendent Thoughts" and
"Visions" which had their birth beneath our Concord
124 EPILOGUE
elms—messages that have brought salvation to many
listening souls throughout the world—are still growing,
day by day, to greater and greater beauty—are still
showing clearer and clearer man's way to God!
No true composer will take his substance from another
finite being—but there are times, when he feels
that his self-expression needs some liberation from
at least a part of his own soul. At such times, shall
he not better turn to those greater souls, rather than
to the external, the immediate, and the "Garish
Day"?
The strains of one man may fall far below the
course of those Phaetons of Concord, or of the JEgean
Sea, or of Westmoreland—but the greater the distance
his music falls away, the more reason that some
greater man shall bring his nearer those higher spheres.
•f.,.
mmmmmm
mymmmw0
iMlii