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.

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.