Part 3

Nevertheless, in spite of these temporary aberrations of the public mind and heart, it is plain that many of Channing's anticipations and hopes have already been realized, that his influence on three generations of men has been profound and wholly beneficent, and that the world is going his way, though with slow and halting steps.

His life brightened to its close. In its last summer but one he wrote: "This morning I plucked a globe of the dandelion--the seed-vessel--and was struck as never before with the silent, gentle manner in which nature sows her seed.... I saw, too, how nature sows her seed broadcast.... So we must send truth abroad, not forcing it on here and there a mind, and watching its progress anxiously, but trusting that it will light on a kindly soil, and yield its fruit. So nature teaches."

May those who stand here one hundred years hence say,--the twentieth century supplied more of kindly soil for Channing seed than the nineteenth.

EMERSON

Emerson was not a logician or reasoner, and not a rhetorician, in the common sense. He was a poet, who wrote chiefly in prose, but also in verse. His verse was usually rough, but sometimes finished and melodious; it was always extraordinarily concise and expressive. During his engagement to the lady who became his second wife, he wrote thus to her: "I am born a poet,--of a low class without doubt, yet a poet; that is my nature and vocation. My singing, be sure, is very husky, and is, for the most part, in prose. Still, I am a poet in the sense of a perceiver and dear lover of the harmonies that are in the soul and in matter, and specially of the correspondences between these and those."

This husky poet had his living to get. His occupations in life were those of the teacher, minister, lecturer, and author. He was a teacher at various times between 1818 and 1826; but he never liked teaching. He was a preacher at intervals from 1826 to 1847, but a settled minister only from 1829 to 1832. His career as a lecturer began in the autumn of 1833; and his first book, "Nature," was published in 1836, when he was thirty-three years old. His lectures for money were given as a rule during the winter and early spring; and for thirty years the travelling he was obliged to do in search of audiences was often extremely fatiguing, and not without serious hardships and exposures. These occupations usually gave him an income sufficient for his simple wants; but there were times when outgo exceeded income. The little property his first wife left him ($1200 a year) relieved him from serious pecuniary anxiety by 1834; although it did not relieve him from earning by his own labor the livelihood of his family.

In 1834 he went to live in Concord, where his grandfather had been the minister at the time of the Revolution, and in 1835 he bought the house and grounds there which were his home for the rest of his days. Before settling in Concord, he had spent one winter and spring (1826-27) in the Southern states, and seven months of 1833 in Europe. Both of these absences were necessitated by the state of his health, which was precarious during his young manhood. With these exceptions, he had lived in Boston or its immediate neighborhood, until he settled in Concord. His progenitors on both sides were chiefly New England ministers. His formal education was received in the Boston Latin School and Harvard College, and was therefore purely local. How narrow and provincial seems his experience of life! A little city, an isolated society, a country village! Yet through books, and through intercourse with intelligent persons, he was really "set in a large place." The proof of this largeness, and of the keenness of his mental and moral vision, is that, in regard to some of the chief concerns of mankind, he was a seer and a fore-seer. This prophetic quality of his I hope to demonstrate to-night in three great fields of thought--education, social organization, and religion.

Although a prophet and inspirer of reform, Emerson was not a reformer. He was but a halting supporter of the reforms of his day; and the eager experimenters and combatants in actual reforms found him a disappointing sort of sympathizer. His visions were far-reaching, his doctrines often radical, and his exhortations fervid; but when it came to action, particularly to habitual action, he was surprisingly conservative. With an exquisite candor, and a gentle resolution of rarest quality he broke his strong ties to the Second Church of Boston before he was thirty years old, abandoning the profession for which he had been trained, and which, in many of its aspects, he honored and enjoyed; yet he attended church on Sundays all his life with uncommon regularity. He refused to conduct public prayer, and had many things to say against it; but when he was an Overseer of Harvard College, he twice voted to maintain the traditional policy of compelling all the students to attend morning prayers, in spite of the fact that a large majority of the Faculty urgently advocated abandoning that policy. He manifested a good deal of theoretical sympathy with the community experiments at Brook Farm and Fruitlands; but he declined to take part in them himself. He was intimate with many of the leading abolitionists; but no one has described more vividly their grave intellectual and social defects. He laid down principles which, when applied, would inevitably lead to progress and reform; but he took little part in the imperfect step-by-step process of actual reforming. He probably would have been an ineffective worker in any field of reform; and, at any rate, strenuous labor on applications of his philosophy would have prevented him from maintaining the flow of his philosophic and prophetic visions. The work of giving practical effect to his thought was left for other men to do,--indeed for generations of other serviceable men, who, filled with his ideals, will slowly work them out into institutions, customs, and other practical values.

When we think of Emerson as a prophet, we at once become interested in the dates at which he uttered certain doctrines, or wrote certain pregnant sentences; but just here the inquirer meets a serious difficulty. He can sometimes ascertain that a given doctrine or sentence was published at a given date; but he may be quite unable to ascertain how much earlier the doctrine was really formulated, or the sentence written. Emerson has been dead twenty-one years, and it is thirty years since he wrote anything new; but his whole philosophy of life was developed by the time he was forty years old, and it may be doubted if he wrote anything after 1843, the germinal expression of which may not be found in his journals, sermons, or lectures written before that date. If, therefore, we find in the accepted thought, or established institutions, of to-day recent developments of principles and maxims laid down by Emerson, we may fairly say that his thought outran his times certainly by one, and probably by two generations of men.

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I take up now the prophetic teachings of Emerson with regard to education. In the first place, he saw, with a clearness to which very few people have yet attained, the fundamental necessity of the school as the best civilizing agency, next to steady labor, and the only sure means of permanent and progressive reform. He says outright: "We shall one day learn to supersede politics by education. What we call our root-and-branch reforms, of slavery, war, gambling, intemperance, is only medicating the symptoms. We must begin higher up--namely, in education." He taught that if we hope to reform mankind, we must begin not with adults, but with children: we must begin in the school. There are some signs that this doctrine has now at last entered the minds of the so-called practical men. The Cubans are to be raised in the scale of civilization and public happiness; so both they and we think they must have more and better schools. The Filipinos, too, are to be developed after the American fashion; so we send them a thousand teachers of English. The Southern states are to be rescued from the persistent poison of slavery; and, after forty years of failure with political methods, we at last accept Emerson's doctrine, and say: We must begin earlier,--at school. The city slums are to be redeemed; and the scientific charity workers find the best way is to get the children into kindergartens and manual training schools.

Since the Civil War, a whole generation of educational administrators has been steadily at work developing what is called the elective system in the institutions of education which deal with the ages above twelve. It has been a slow, step-by-step process, carried on against much active opposition and more sluggish obstruction. The system is a method of educational organization which recognizes the immense expansion of knowledge during the nineteenth century, and takes account of the needs and capacities of the individual child and youth. Now, Emerson laid down in plain terms the fundamental doctrines on which this elective system rests. He taught that the one prudence in life is concentration; the one evil, dissipation. He said: "You must elect your work: you shall take what your brain can, and drop all the rest." To this exhortation he added the educational reason for it,--only by concentration can the youth arrive at the stage of doing something with his knowledge, or get beyond the stage of absorbing, and arrive at the capacity for producing. As Emerson puts it, "Only so can that amount of vital force accumulate which can make the step from knowing to doing." The educational institutions of to-day have not yet fully appreciated this all-important step from knowing to doing. They are only beginning to perceive that, all along the course of education, the child and the youth should be doing something as well as learning something; should be stimulated and trained by achievement; should be constantly encouraged to take the step beyond seeing and memorizing to doing,--the step, as Emerson says, "out of a chalk circle of imbecility into fruitfulness." Emerson carried this doctrine right on into mature life. He taught that nature arms each man with some faculty, large or small, which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other, and thus makes him necessary to society; and that this faculty should determine the man's career. The advocates of the elective system have insisted that its results were advantageous for society as a whole, as well as for the individual. Emerson put this argument in a nutshell at least fifty years ago: "Society can never prosper, but must always be bankrupt, until every man does that which he was created to do."

Education used to be given almost exclusively through books. In recent years there has come in another sort of education through tools, machines, gardens, drawings, casts, and pictures. Manual training, shop-work, sloyd, and gardening have come into use for the school ages; the teaching of trades has been admitted to some public school systems; and, in general, the use of the hands and eyes in productive labor has been recognized as having good educational effects. The education of men by manual labor was a favorite doctrine with Emerson. He had fully developed it as early as 1837, and he frequently recurred to it afterwards. In December of that year, in a course of lectures on Human Culture, he devoted one lecture to The Hands. He saw clearly that manual labor might be made to develop not only good mental qualities, but good moral qualities. To-day, it is frequently necessary for practical teachers, who are urging measures of improvement, to point this out, and to say, just as Emerson said two generations ago, that any falseness in mechanical work immediately appears; that a teacher can judge of the moral quality of each boy in the class before him better and sooner from manual work than from book-work. Emerson taught that manual labor is the study of the external world; that the use of manual labor never grows obsolete, and is inapplicable to no person. He said explicitly that "a man should have a farm or a mechanical craft for his culture"; that there is not only health, but education in garden work; that when a man gets sugar, hominy, cotton, buckets, crockery ware, and letter paper by simply signing his name to a cheque, it is the producers and carriers of these articles that have got the education they yield, he only the commodity; and that labor is God's education. This was Emerson's doctrine more than sixty years ago. It is only ten years since the Mechanic Arts High School was opened in Boston.

We are all of us aware that within the last twenty years there has been a determined movement of the American people toward the cultivation of art, and toward the public provision of objects which open the sense of beauty and increase public enjoyment. It is curious to see how literally Emerson prophesied the actual direction of these efforts:--

"On the city's paved street Plant gardens lined with lilac sweet; Let spouting fountains cool the air, Singing in the sun-baked square; Let statue, picture, park, and hall, Ballad, flag, and festival The past restore, the day adorn, And make to-morrow a new morn!"

We have introduced into our schools, of late years, lessons in drawing, modelling, and designing,--not sufficiently, but in a promising and hopeful way. Emerson taught that it is the office of art to educate the perception of beauty; and he precisely describes one of the most recent of the new tendencies in American education and social life, when he says: "Beauty must come back to the useful arts, and the distinction between the fine and the useful arts be forgotten." That sentence is the inspiration of one of the most recent of the efforts to improve the arts and crafts, and to restore to society the artistic craftsman. But how slow is the institutional realization of this ideal of art education! We are still struggling in our elementary and secondary schools to get a reasonable amount of instruction in drawing and music, and to transfer from other subjects a fair allotment of time to these invaluable elements of true culture, which speak a universal language. Yet the ultimate object of art in education is to teach men to see nature to be beautiful and at the same time useful, beautiful because alive and reproductive, useful while symmetrical and fair. Take up to-day the last essays on education, the last book on landscape architecture, or the freshest teachings of the principles of design, and you will find them penetrated with Emerson's doctrine of art as teacher of mankind. Emerson insists again and again that true culture must open the sense of beauty; that "a man is a beggar who only lives to the useful." It will probably require several generations yet to induce the American people to accept his doctrine that all moments and objects can be embellished, and that cheerfulness, serenity, and repose in energy are the "end of culture and success enough."

It has been clearly perceived of late that a leading object in education is the cultivation of fine manners. On this point the teachings of Emerson are fundamental; but the American institutions of education are only beginning to appreciate their significance. He teaches that genius or love invents fine manners, "which the baron and the baroness copy very fast, and by the advantage of a palace better the instruction. They stereotype the lesson they have learned into a mode." There is much in that phrase, "by the advantage of a palace." For generations, American institutions of education were content with the humblest sort of shelters, with plain wooden huts and brick barracks, and unkempt grounds about the buildings. They are only lately beginning to acquire fine buildings with pleasing surroundings; that is, they are just beginning to carry into practice Emerson's wisdom of sixty years ago. The American cities are beginning to build handsome houses for their High Schools. Columbia University builds a noble temple for its library. The graduates and friends of Harvard like to provide her with a handsome fence round the Yard, with a fair array of shrubs within the fence, with a handsome stadium instead of shabby, wooden seats round the football gridiron, and to take steps for securing in the future broad connections between the grounds of the University and the Cambridge parks by the river. They are just now carrying into practice Emerson's teaching; by the advantage of a palace they mean to better Harvard's instruction in manners. They are accepting his doctrine that "manners make the fortune of the ambitious youth; that for the most part his manners marry him, and, for the most part, he marries manners. When we think what keys they are, and to what secrets; what high lessons, and inspiring tokens of character they convey, and what divination is required in us for the reading of this fine telegraph,--we see what range the subject has, and what relations to convenience, power, and beauty."

In Emerson's early days there was nothing in our schools and colleges which at all corresponded to what we now know too much about under the name of athletic sports. The elaborate organization of these sports is a development of the last thirty years in our schools and colleges; but I find in Emerson the true reason for the athletic cult, given a generation before it existed among us. Your boy "hates the grammar and Gradus, and loves guns, fishing-rods, horses, and boats. Well, the boy is right, and you are not fit to direct his bringing-up, if your theory leaves out his gymnastic training.... Football, cricket, archery, swimming, skating, climbing, fencing, riding are lessons in the art of power, which it is his main business to learn.... Besides, the gun, fishing-rod, boat, and horse constitute, among all who use them, secret free-masonries." We shall never find a completer justification of athletic sports than that.

In his memorable address on The American Scholar, which was given at Cambridge in 1837, Emerson pointed out that the function of the scholar should include creative action, or, as we call it in these days, research, or the search for new truth. He says: "The soul active ... utters truth, or creates.... In its essence it is progressive. The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius.... They look backward and not forward. But genius looks forward. Man hopes: genius creates. Whatever talents may be, if the man create not, the pure efflux of the Deity is not his;--cinders and smoke there may be, but not yet flame." And more explicitly still, he says: "Colleges have their indispensable office,--to teach elements. But they can only highly serve us when they aim not to drill, but to create." When Emerson wrote this passage, the spirit of research, or discovery, or creation had not yet breathed life into the higher institutions of learning in our country; and to-day they have much to do and to acquire before they will conform to Emerson's ideal.

There are innumerable details in which Emerson anticipated the educational experiences of later generations. I can cite but two of them. He taught that each age must write its own books; "or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this." How true that is in our own day when eighty thousand new books come from the press of the civilized world in a single year! Witness the incessant remaking or re-casting of the books of the preceding generation! Emerson himself has gone into thousands of books in which his name is never mentioned. Even history has to be re-written every few years, the long-surviving histories being rather monuments of style and method than accepted treasuries of facts. Again, contrary to the prevailing impression that the press has, in large measure, stripped eloquence of its former influence, Emerson taught that "if there ever was a country where eloquence was a power, it is the United States." He included under eloquence the useful speech, all sorts of political persuasion in the great arena of the Republic, and the lessons of science, art, and religion which should be "brought home to the instant practice of thirty millions of people," now become eighty. The colleges and universities have now answered in the affirmative Emerson's question, "Is it not worth the ambition of every generous youth to train and arm his mind with all the resources of knowledge, of method, of grace, and of character to serve such a constituency?" But then Emerson's definition of eloquence is simple, and foretells the practice of to-day rather than describes the practice of Webster, Everett, Choate, and Winthrop, his contemporaries: "Know your fact; hug your fact. For the essential thing is heat, and heat comes of sincerity.... Eloquence is the power to translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak."

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I turn next to some examples of Emerson's anticipation of social conditions, visible to him as seer in his own day, and since become plain to the sight of the ordinary millions. When he accumulated in his journals the original materials of his essay on Worship, there were no large cities in the United States in the present sense of that term. The great experiment of democracy was not far advanced, and had not developed many of its sins and dangers; yet how justly he presented them in the following description: "In our large cities, the population is godless, materialized,--no bond, no fellow-feeling, no enthusiasm. These are not men, but hungers, thirsts, fevers, and appetites walking. How is it people manage to live on, so aimless as they are? ... There is faith in chemistry, in meat and wine, in wealth, in machinery, in the steam-engine, galvanic battery, turbine wheels, sewing-machines, and in public opinion, but not in divine causes."

In Emerson's day, luxury in the present sense had hardly been developed in our country; but he foresaw its coming, and its insidious destructiveness. "We spend our incomes for paint and paper, for a hundred trifles, I know not what, and not for the things of a man. Our expense is almost all for conformity. It is for cake that we run in debt; it is not the intellect, not the heart, not beauty, not worship, that costs us so much. Why needs any man be rich? Why must he have horses, fine garments, handsome apartments, access to public houses and places of amusement? Only for want of thought.... We are first thoughtless, and then find that we are moneyless. We are first sensual and then must be rich." He foresaw the young man's state of mind to-day about marriage--I must have money before I can marry; and deals with it thus: "Give us wealth and the home shall exist. But that is a very imperfect and inglorious solution of the problem, and therefore no solution. Give us wealth! You ask too much. Few have wealth; but all must have a home. Men are not born rich; in getting wealth the man is generally sacrificed, and often is sacrificed without acquiring wealth at last."

We have come to understand by experience that the opinion of masses of men is a formidable power which can be made safe and useful. In earlier days this massed opinion was either despised or dreaded; and it is dreadful, if either confined or misdirected. Emerson compares it to steam. Studied, economized, and directed, steam has become the power by which all great labors are done. Like steam is the opinion of political masses! If crushed by castles, armies, and police, dangerously explosive; but if furnished with schools and the ballot, developing "the most harmless and energetic form of a state." His eyes were wide open to some of the evil intellectual effects of democracy. The individual is too apt to wear the time-worn yoke of the multitude's opinions. No multiplying of contemptible units can produce an admirable mass. "If I see nothing to admire in a unit, shall I admire a million units?" The habit of submitting to majority rule cultivates individual subserviency. He pointed out two generations ago that the action of violent political parties in a democracy might provide for the individual citizen a systematic training in moral cowardice.

It is interesting, at the stage of industrial warfare which the world has now reached, to observe how Emerson, sixty years ago, discerned clearly the absurdity of paying all sorts of service at one rate, now a favorite notion with some labor unions. He points out that even when all labor is temporarily paid at one rate, differences in possessions will instantly arise: "In one hand the dime became an eagle as it fell, and in another hand a copper cent. For the whole value of the dime is in knowing what to do with it." Emerson was never deceived by a specious philanthropy, or by claims of equality which find no support in the nature of things. He was a true democrat, but still could say: "I think I see place and duties for a nobleman in every society; but it is not to drink wine and ride in a fine coach, but to guide and adorn life for the multitude by forethought, by elegant studies, by perseverance, self-devotion, and the remembrance of the humble old friend,--by making his life secretly beautiful." How fine a picture of the democratic nobility is that!

In his lecture on Man the Reformer, which was read before the Mechanics' Apprentices' Association in Boston in January, 1841, Emerson described in the clearest manner the approaching strife between laborers and employers, between poor and rich, and pointed out the cause of this strife in the selfishness, unkindness, and mutual distrust which ran through the community. He also described, with perfect precision, the only ultimate remedy,--namely, the sentiment of love. "Love would put a new face on this weary old world in which we dwell as pagans and enemies too long.... The virtue of this principle in human society in application to great interests is obsolete and forgotten. But one day all men will be lovers; and every calamity will be dissolved in the universal sunshine." It is more than sixty years since those words were uttered, and in those years society has had large experience of industrial and social strife, of its causes and consequences, and of many attempts to remedy or soften it; but all this experience only goes to show that there is but one remedy for these ills. It is to be found in kindness, good fellowship, and the affections. In Emerson's words, "We must be lovers, and at once the impossible becomes possible." The world will wait long for this remedy, but there is no other.

Like every real seer and prophet whose testimony is recorded, Emerson had intense sympathy with the poor, laborious, dumb masses of mankind, and being a wide reader in history and biography, he early arrived at the conviction that history needed to be written in a new manner. It was long before Green's History of the English People that Emerson wrote: "Hence it happens that the whole interest of history lies in the fortunes of the poor." In recent years this view of history has come to prevail, and we are given the stories of institutions, industries, commerce, crafts, arts, and beliefs, instead of the stories of dynasties and wars. For Emerson it is always feats of liberty and wit which make epochs of history. Commerce is civilizing because "the power which the sea requires in the sailor makes a man of him very fast." The invention of a house, safe against wild animals, frost, and heat, gives play to the finer faculties, and introduces art, manners, and social delights. The discovery of the post office is a fine metre of civilization. The sea-going steamer marks an epoch; the subjection of electricity to take messages and turn wheels marks another. But, after all, the vital stages of human progress are marked by steps toward personal, individual freedom. The love of liberty was Emerson's fundamental passion:--

"For He that ruleth high and wise, Nor pauseth in His plan, Will take the sun out of the skies Ere freedom out of man."