Part 48

Neither buzzing bluebottles nor the fall of dynasties disturbed them. "The soul is everything," said Plato. "The soul knows all things," says Emerson.

In every century a few men have lived who knew the value of plain living and high thinking, and very often the men who reversed the maxim have passed them the hemlock.

All those sects known as Primitive Christians represent variations of the idea--Quakers, Mennonites, Communists, Shakers and Dunkards!

A Transcendentalist is a Dukhobortsi with a college education. A Quaker with an artistic bias becomes a Preraphaelite, and lo! we have News from Nowhere, a Dream of John Ball, Merton Abbey, Kelmscott, and half a world is touched and tinted by the simplicity, sterling honesty and genuineness of one man.

George Ripley, Bronson Alcott, and Ralph Waldo Emerson evolved New England Transcendentalism, and very early Henry Thoreau added a few bars of harmonious discords to the symphony. Horace Greeley once contended in a "Tribune" editorial that Sam Staples, the bum bailiff who locked Thoreau behind the bars, was an important factor in the New England renaissance, and as such should be immortalized by a statue made of punk, set up on Boston Common for the delectation of bean-eaters. I fear me Horace was a joker.

California quail are quite different from the quail of New York State, and naturalists tell us that this is caused by a difference in environment--quail being a product of soil and climate.

And man is a product of soil and climate--for only in a certain soil can you produce a certain type of man. As a whole, this world is better adapted for the production of fish than genius--most of the really good climate falls on the sea. Christian Scientists are Transcendentalists whose distinguishing point is that they secrete millinery--California quail with rainbow tints and topknots, Balboaic instincts well defined.

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Let this fact stand: it was Emerson who made Concord. He saw it first--he was on the ground, and the place was his by right of discovery, the title strengthened by the fact that four of his ancestors had been Concord clergymen, and the most excellent and venerable Doctor Ripley, a near kinsman.

Concord and Emerson, as early as Eighteen Hundred Forty, when Emerson was thirty-seven years old, were synonymous. He had defied the traditions of Harvard, been excommunicated by his Alma Mater, published his pantheistic Essay on Nature, and his thin little books and sermons had been placed on the Boston Theological Index Expurgatorius.

Through it all he had remained gentle, smiling, sympathetic, unresentful.

The world can never spare the man who does his work and holds his peace. Emerson was being lifted up, and souls were being drawn unto him.

In Eighteen Hundred Forty, Bronson Alcott, the American Socrates, with his interesting family, moved to Concord, drawn thither by the magnet of Emerson's personality. Louisa wore short dresses, and used to pick wild blackberries and sell them to the Emersons and get goodly reward in silver, and kindly smiles, and pats on her brown head by the hand that wrote "Compensation."

Alcott was a great, honest, sincere soul, and a true anarch, for he took his own wherever he saw it. He used to run his wheelbarrow into Emerson's garden and load it up with potatoes, cabbages or turnips, and once in response to a hint that the vegetables were private property, the old man somewhat petulantly exclaimed, "I need them!--I need them!"

And that was all: anything that any man needed was his by divine right. And the consistency of Alcott's philosophy was shown in that he never took anything or any more than he needed, and if he had something that you needed, you were certainly welcome to it. If Alcott helped himself to the thrifty Emerson's vegetables, both Emerson and Thoreau helped themselves to Alcott's ideas.

Once a wagonload of wood broke down in front of Alcott's house, and the farmer unhitched his horses and went on to the village to procure a new wheel. Before he got back, Alcott had carried every stick of the combustibles into his own wood-shed. "Providence remembers us!" he said. His faith was sublime.

When all the world reaches the Alcott stage, there will be no need of soldiers, policemen, night-watchmen, or bolts, bars and locks.

In Eighteen Hundred Forty, Nathaniel Hawthorne came to Concord from Salem, where he had resigned his clerkship in the custom-house, that he might devote all his time to literature. He moved into the Old Manse, which had just been vacated by Doctor Ripley, who had gone a-Brook-Farming--the Old Manse where Emerson himself once lived. Elizabeth Peabody, the talented sister of Hawthorne's wife, lived at a convenient distance, and to her Hawthorne read most of his manuscript, for I need not explain that literature is not literature until it is read aloud and reflected back by a sympathetic, discerning mind. Literature is a collaboration between the reader and the listener.

Margaret Fuller, with her tragic life-story still unwound, lived hard by, and Hawthorne had already worked her up into copy as "Zenobia." Margaret's sister Ellen had married Ellery Channing, the closest, warmest friend that Henry Thoreau ever knew. The gossips arranged a doublewedding, with Henry and Margaret as the other principals; but when interviewed on the theme, Henry had merely shaken his head and said, "In the first place, Margaret Fuller is not fool enough to marry me; and second, I am not fool enough to marry her."

An Irishman who saw Thoreau in the field making a minute in his notebook took it for granted that he was casting up his wages, and inquired what they came to. It was a peculiar farmhand who cared more for ideas than for wages.

George William Curtis was also a farmhand out on the Lowell Road, but came into town Saturday evenings--taking a swim in the river on the way--to attend the philosophical conferences at Emerson's house, and then went off and made gentle fun of them.

Little Doctor Holmes occasionally drove out from Boston to Concord in a one-horse chaise; James Russell Lowell had walked over from Cambridge; and Longfellow had invited all hands to a birthday fete on his lawn at Cambridge, but Thoreau had declined for himself, saying he had to look after his pond-lilies and the field-mice on Bedford flats.

Thoreau, at this time, was a member of Emerson's household, and in a letter Emerson says, "He has his board for what labor he chooses to do; he is a great benefactor and physician to me, for he is an indefatigable and skilful laborer, besides being a scholar and a poet, and as full of promise as a young apple-tree."

And again, in a letter to Carlyle: "One reader and friend of yours dwells in my household, Henry Thoreau, a poet whom you may one day be proud of--a noble, manly youth, full of melodies and invention. We work together day by day in my garden, and I grow well and strong."

To work and talk is the true way to acquire an education. All of our best things are done incidentally--not in cold blood. Hawthorne says in his Journal that most of Emerson's and Thoreau's farming was done leaning on the hoe-handles, while Alcott sat on the fence and explained the Whyness of the Wherefore.

But we must remember that in Hawthorne's ink-bottle there was a goodly dash of tincture of iron. In his Journal of September First, Eighteen Hundred Forty-two, he writes: "Mr. Thoreau dined with us yesterday. He is a singular character--a young man with much of wild, original nature still remaining in him; and so far as he is sophisticated, it is in a way and method of his own. He is as ugly as sin, long-nosed, queer-mouthed, and with uncouth and somewhat rustic ways, though his courteous manner corresponds very well with such an exterior. But his ugliness is of an honest character and really becomes him better than beauty." Little did Hawthorne's guests imagine they were being basted, roasted, or fricasseed for the edification of posterity.

Prosperity at this time had just begun to smile on Hawthorne, and among other extravagances in which he indulged was a boat, bought from Thoreau--made by the hands of this expert Yankee whittler. Hawthorne quotes a little transcendental advice given to him by the maker of the boat: "In paddling a canoe, all you have to do is to will that your boat shall go in any particular direction, and she will immediately take the course, as if imbued with the spirit of the steersman." Hawthorne then adds this sober postscript: "It may be so with you, but it is certainly not so with me."

Admiration for Thoreau gradually grew very strong with Hawthorne, and he quotes Emerson, who called Thoreau "the young god Pan." And this lends much semblance to the statement that Thoreau served Hawthorne as a model for Donatello, the mysterious wood-sprite in the "Marble Faun."