The complete works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Representative men [Vol. 4]

USES OF GREAT MEN

Page 3, note 1. Mr. Emerson tells in his Poems how, when the west wind was making music in the AEolian harp in his study windows,—

Not long ago at eventide, It seemed, so listening, at my side A window rose, and, to say sooth, I looked forth on the fields of youth: I saw fair boys bestriding steeds, I knew their forms in fancy weeds, Long, long concealed by sundering fates, Mates of my youth,—yet not my mates, Stronger and bolder far than I, With grace, with genius, well attired And then as now from far admired, Followed with love They knew not of, With passion cold and shy. "The Harp."

Again, perhaps recalling the good and wise women who had fostered his childhood and early youth, he tells that it is revealed to the poet,—

That blessed gods in servile masks Plied for thee thy household tasks. "Saadi."

Page 4, note 1. With Mr. Emerson the benefits and pleasures of travel were incidental. He used the opportunities by the way, but when invited to travel for pleasure, inclined to say like the young Jesus, "Wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business?" Men interested him more than places: his New England village was enough for him. His journal of travel in 1833, the substance of which appears in the first chapter of English Traits, shows this. The verses, "Written at Rome, 1833," in the Poems, end with a longing to find the true man, whom a few weeks later he sought out among the Scottish moors.

Page 4, note 2. To the same purpose is a passage about "the masses" early in "Considerations by the Way," in Conduct of Life, and in a more human and sympathetic tone in the last pages of the present essay.

Page 4, note 3.

"We find in our dull road their shining track." Lowell's Commemoration Ode.

Page 5, note 1. As elsewhere this idealist concedes—"Treat men and women well. Treat them as if they were real. Perhaps they are."

Page 7, note 1. It is not easy for the generation who remember only the end of the nineteenth century to believe that the persons thus described abounded in New England at the time when this book was written. When the period of unrest is again followed by one of eager aspiration, the like may occur.

Page 8, note 1. When young people brought their problems to Mr. Emerson, they may at first have experienced disappointment at not receiving the easy answers for which they hoped. His answer was a large one, more serviceable later, if they considered it. Their individualities were different from his, and scope must be left for these. He wrote in his journal, "If we could speak the direct solving words, it would solve us too." Compare the last part of the "Celestial Love" in the Poems.

Page 8, note 2. Jacob Behmen, or Boehme, a Silesian of humble birth in the sixteenth century, a mystic whose writings later attracted much attention. Mr. Emerson was early interested in his works and often mentions them.

Page 9, note 1. He welcomed each discovery for its use

and beauty, and more for its significance, which it was his delight to find. He said of Nature,—

Day by day for her darlings to her much she added more; In her hundred-gated Thebes every chamber was a door, A door to something grander,—loftier walls and vaster floor.

And Nature says,—

He lives not who can refuse me; All my force saith, Come and use me.

Page 9, note 2. Among other sentences in the original lecture which were pruned out of the essay because their substance occurs later, was this strong one: "Man is a piece of the Universe made alive."

Page 10, note 1. William Gilbert, the greatest man of science of Queen Elizabeth's reign, especially noted for his discovery that the earth is a great magnet.

Hans Christian Oersted of Denmark, who in 1820 announced his discovery of the identity of electricity and magnetism.

Page 10, note 2. Journal, 1885 (compare passage, varied, in Nature, p. 27). "Natural History by itself has no value: it is like a single sex, but marry it to human history and it is poetry. Whole floras, all Linnaeus's or Buffon's volumes, contain not one line of poetry; but the meanest natural fact, the habit of a plant, the organs, or work, or noise of an insect, applied to a fact in human nature, is beauty, is poetry, is truth at once."

Page 11, note 1.

I am the doubter and the doubt. "Brahma," Poems.

Page 11, note 2. Compare the motto of "Wealth" in Conduct of Life.

Page 13, note 1. But not forgetting, in the material gain, its main use—the spiritual.

Page 14, note 1. This idea is found in the poems "Destiny" and "Fate."

Page 15, note 1.

Me too thy nobleness has taught To master my despair; The fountains of my hidden life Are through thy friendship fair. "Friendship," Poems.

Page 15, note 2. In his afternoon walks through the Walden woods while he was writing this book, Mr. Emerson saw with respect the unprecedented day's work of the newly imported Irishmen on the Fitchburg Railroad, then in process of construction.

Page 15, note 3. This introductory chapter to the Representative Men may be compared with Carlyle's Heroes and Hero-worship, published ten years earlier. In Mr. Emerson's essay on Aristocracy, called Natural Aristocracy when read as a lecture in England, are several passages similar to the one on this page, sympathizing with the admiration for "men who are incomparably superior to the populace in ways agreeable to the populace, showing them the way they shall go, doing for them what they wish done and cannot do;"—"the steel hid under gauze and lace under flowers and spangles."

Page 16, note 1. This was his own rule—never to "talk down" to others. When in 1834 he made his home in Concord, and began his new life as lecturer and writer, he entered in his journal this resolve:—

"Henceforth I design not to utter any speech, poem or

book that is not entirely and peculiarly my work. I will say at public lectures and the like those things which I have meditated for their own sake, and not for the first time with a view to that occasion." And again, "Do not cease to utter them and make them as pure of all dross as if thou wert to speak to sages and demigods, and be no whit ashamed if not one, yea, not one in the assembly should give sign of intelligence. Is it not pleasant to you—unexpected wisdom? depth of sentiment in middle life, persons that in the thick of the crowd are true kings and gentlemen without the harness and envy of the throne?"

Page 17, note 1. Mr. Emerson, in the lecture on Shakspeare in this volume, tells of such an experience while seeing Hamlet performed.

Page 18, note 1. He did not believe that men could be forced or pledged to reform. When the way was made beautiful to them, they could not choose but take it. He wished no disciples. "The poet," he said, "is the liberator."

Page 19, note 1. The Over-Soul doctrine.

Page 20, note 1. That is, the ideal, instead of the outward shows of things.

Page 21, note 1. From a noble poem by John Sterling, entitled "Daedalus," in honor of Greek sculpture and lamenting the lost art. This poem by his friend is included in Emerson's collection Parnassus.

Page 21, note 2. Out-of these losses he redeemed "Days," which he once said he thought perhaps his best poem.

Page 21, note 3. Probably suggested by Balzac's Peau de Chagrin.

Page 23, note 1. Journal, April, 1839. "Yesterday I read Beaumont and Fletcher's tragedy 'The False One,' which, instead of taking its name from Septimius, ought to have been

'Cleopatra.' A singular fortune is that of the man Caesar, to have given name as he has to all that is heroic ambition in the imaginations of painters and poets. Caesar must still be the speaking-trumpet through which this large wild commanding spirit must always be poured. The Poet would be a great man. His power is intellectual. Instantly he seizes these hollow puppets of Caesar, of Tamerlane, of Boadicea, of Belisarius, and inflates them with his own vital air. If he can verily ascend to grandeur,—if his soul is grand, behold his puppets attest his weight, they are no more puppets but instant vehicles of the wine of God: they shine and overflow with the streams of that universal energy that beamed from Caesar's eye, poised itself in Hector's spear, purer sat with Epaminondas, with Socrates, purest with thee, thou holy child Jesus."

Page 23, note 2.

Who bides at home, nor looks abroad, Carries the eagles and masters the sword. "Destiny," Poems.

Page 24, note 1. Mr. Emerson gives in a journal an instance of the humble compensations—a case of a poor feeble-minded girl who went about the house bragging that she was not dead.

Page 25, note 1. He told Mr. John Albee, who, still a boy in Andover Academy, visited him, that it was a great day in a man's life when he first read the Symposium.

Page 25, note 2. Mr. Emerson had great skill in lifting the conversation from a low and gossiping level, without apparent reproof or incivility.

Page 27, note 1. "Au nom de Dieu, ne me parlez plus de cet homme là!"

Page 27, note 2.

If love his moment over-stay, Hatred's swift repulsions play. "The Visit," Poems.

Page 28, note 1. The Oriental doctrine, alluded to in his poem "Uriel":—

Doomed to long gyration In the sea of generation.

Page 30, note 1.

In vain: the stars are glowing wheels, Giddy with motion Nature reels, Sun, moon, man, undulate and stream, The mountains flow, the solids seem, Change acts, reacts; back, forward hurled, And pause were palsy to the world. "The Poet," Poems, Appendix.

Page 33, note 1. Mr. Emerson's frequent use of his classical education, not pedantically, but to secure the attention of the reader and make the expression exact and picturesque, is well shown in the choice of the word flagrant as if the human world were traced out in the general dimness by its blazing beacon lights. "Federal errors," a few pages earlier, for mistakes sanctioned by custom is another example.

Page 33, note 2. Immortality in some form seems taken for granted by this expression.

Page 34, note 1.

The word unto the prophet spoken Was writ on tables still unbroken. "The Problem," Poems.

Page 35, note 1. The constant security of Mr. Emerson's

belief in Evolution in its highest sense appears here as everywhere in his prose and verse, and also his belief in the genius of mankind, which is another word for the Universal Mind. He wrote thus of the Poet in his journal of 1838:—

"Morning and evening he blessed the world. Where he went the trees knew him, and the earth felt him to the roots of the grass. Yet a few things sufficed. One tree was to him as a grove; the eyes of one maiden taught him all charms; and by a single wise man he knew Jesus and Plato and Shakspeare and the angels."