The complete works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Nature addresses and lectures [Vol. 1]

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

In 1834 Mr. Emerson had been chosen to give the Poem at the annual meeting of the Phi Beta Kappa Society in Cambridge. Three years later he was invited to give the Address. A month before the meeting he wrote in his Journal:—

29 JULY, 1837.

If the All-wise would give me light, I should write for the Cambridge men a theory of the Scholar's office. It is not all books which it behooves him to know, least of all to be a book-worshipper, but he must be able to read in all books that which alone gives value to books—in all to read one, the one incorruptible text of Truth. That alone of their style is intelligible, acceptable to him.

In his Memoir of Emerson Mr. Cabot speaks of this address as "a much needed monition to the cultivated class of persons

in New England to think for themselves instead of taking their opinions from Europe or from books."

Mr. Lowell, speaking of this epoch of "the Newness," as the spiritual awakening of New England was sometimes called, said, "The Puritan revolt had made us ecclesiastically, and the Revolution politically independent, but we were still socially and intellectually moored to English thought, till Emerson cut the cable and gave us a chance at the dangers and the glories of blue water. … His oration before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, some thirty years ago, was an event without any former parallel in our literary annals, a scene to be always treasured in the memory for its picturesqueness and its inspiration. What crowded and breathless aisles, what windows clustering with eager heads, what enthusiasm of approval, what grim silence of foregone dissent!"1

Dr. Holmes records in his Life of Emerson that rarely has any one of the annual addresses before the Phi Beta Kappa Society been listened to with such profound attention and interest. He spoke of it as "Our intellectual Declaration of Independence."

"Nothing like it had been heard in the halls of Harvard since Samuel Adams supported the affirmative of the question, 'Whether it be lawful to trust the chief magistrate, if the commonwealth cannot otherwise be preserved.' It was easy to find fault with an expression here and there. The dignity, not to say the formality of an academic assembly, was startled by the realism that looked for the infinite in 'the meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan.' They could understand the deep thoughts suggested by 'the meanest flower that blows,' but these domestic illustrations had a kind of nursery homeliness

about them which the grave professors and sedate clergymen were unused to expect on so stately an occasion. But the young men went out from it as if a prophet had been proclaiming to them, 'Thus saith the Lord.' No listener ever forgot that address, and among all the noble utterances of the speaker it may be questioned if one ever contained more truth in language more like that of immediate inspiration."

Carlyle wrote to Emerson about the oration: "My friend! you know not what you have done for me there. … Lo, out of the West comes a clear utterance, clearly recognizable as a man's voice, and I have a kinsman and brother: God be thanked for it. I could have wept to read that speech; the clear high melody of it went tingling through my heart. … Miss Martineau tells me, 'Some say it is inspired, some say it is mad.' Exactly so; no say could be suitabler. But for you, my dear friend, I say and pray heartily: May God grant you strength; for you have a fearful work to do! Fearful I call it; and yet it is great, and the greatest."

Page 81, note 1." In the opening passages of an editorial paper in the Dial (April, 1843), "Europe and European Books," Mr. Emerson speaks of these as still dominant here, but prophesies thus: "This powerful star, it is thought, will soon culminate and descend, and the impending reduction of the Transatlantic excess of influence … is already a matter of easy and frequent computation. Our eyes will be turned westward and a new and stronger tone of literature will result. The Kentucky stump-oratory, the exploits of Boone and David Crockett, the journals of western pioneers, agriculturalists, and socialists, and the letters of Jack Downing, are genuine growths which are sought with avidity in Europe, where our European-like books are of no value." He further says that the moving

centre of population and property of the English race will in time "certainly fall within the American coast, so that the writers of the English tongue shall write to the American and not to the island public, and then shall the great Yankee be born."

In editing this paper for Natural History of Intellect Mr. Cabot omitted the first three pages.

Page 82, note 1. In the "Symposium" of Plato is a version of this fable, but in his Introduction to Professor Goodwin's edition of Plutarch's Morals, Mr. Emerson says,—"What noble words we owe to him! 'God divided man into men that they might help each other.'" This idea, differently expressed, is found in the chapter "Of Brotherly Love" in the Morals, vol. iii. p. 37.

Page 84, note 1.

The horseman serves the horse, etc. "Ode inscribed to W. H. Channing," Poems.

Page 85, note 1.

Line in nature is not found; Unit and universe are round; In vain produced, all rays return, etc. "Uriel," Poems.

Page 86, note 1. In this address, and throughout the Essays, and equally the Poems, are evidences of Mr. Emerson's reading in the works of the Masters of Science,—Newton, Laplace, Hunter, Linnaeus, Lamarck, Herschel, Owen, Lyell, Faraday,—and his use of their facts on another plane.

Page 86, note 2. In one of the Journals, Mr. Emerson

quotes a French author's mot: "Whether or no there be a God, it is certain that there will be."

Page 88, note 1. This recalls the definition of Art as "Nature passed through the alembic of man," in Nature, chapter iii.

Page 89, note 1. Emerson, Thoreau, and Lowell, three young men at that epoch, who set an example to American scholars of independence in thought and originality in expression, spent much of their time during their college terms exploring and reading in the Library at the expense of the prescribed curriculum, thereby incurring censure at the time.

Page 91, note 1. All the influence Mr. Emerson hoped to exert on others was to show them the right of the spirit and the intellect to the same freedom as was claimed for the body. In his Journal for 1856 he writes: "I have been writing and speaking what were once called novelties for twenty-five or thirty years, and have not now one disciple." The would-be disciple must go to the fountain of truth open in himself to every man, and might well get a more generous draught than he.

Compare his poem "Étienne de la Boéce."

Page 93, note 1. Mr. Emerson followed his counsel to the scholar to "read a little proudly." He soon found in a book the passages written for him and lightly passed over the others.

Page 95, note 1. In the addresses called "The Man of Letters" and "The Scholar," which are included in Lectures and Biographical Sketches, as well as in this speech, Mr. Emerson steadily holds up to the scholar the duty of active and brave manhood especially imposed upon him by his privileged lot.

Page 95, note 2. The "other me" implies a quite different view from the "Non Ego" of the metaphysician.

Page 98, note 1.

What prizes the town and tower? Only what the pine-tree yields, etc. "Woodnotes," II., Poems.

Page 103, note 1.

Who telleth one of my secrets Is master of all I am. "The Sphinx," Poems.

Page 106, note 1. In an address delivered before the Anti-slavery Society in New York, March 7, 1854, Mr. Emerson said that one comes at last to learn "that self-reliance, the height and perfection of man, is reliance on God." This sentence is the reconciliation of the essays on "Self-Reliance" and "The Over-Soul."

Page 108, note 1. Mr. Emerson wrote in his Journal after this oration: "It was the happiest turn to my old thrum which Charles Henry Warren gave as a toast at the Phi Beta Kappa dinner: 'Mr. President,' he said, 'I suppose all know where the orator comes from; and I suppose all know what he has said. I give you—the Spirit of Concord—it makes us all of one mind.'"

Page 112, note 1. Mr. Emerson devotes a chapter to Swedenborg, the Mystic, in Representative Men.

Page 113, note 1. The writings of Pestalozzi, the earnest Swiss reformer, whose teachings have wrought so much in the improvement in education in Europe and America, had begun to be read in America. Pestalozzi's beneficent course was dogged through life by apparent failures, partly due to lack of

administrative ability in himself, largely to the condition of Switzerland during the Napoleonic wars. Mr. Emerson's friend, Mr. Alcott, in 1825, when he knew little of Pestalozzi, independently introduced a very similar system into his village school at Cheshire, and later in Boston.

Page 115, note I. This sentence might well stand as a prophecy of much of Mr. Emerson's own history.

Notes

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  Essay on Thoreau, My Study Windows.