What hinders that now, everywhere, in pulpits, in lecture-rooms, in houses, in fields, wherever the invitation of men or your own occasions lead you, you speak the very truth, as your life and conscience teach it, and cheer the waiting, fainting hearts of men with new hope and revelation?
Although the Harvard authorities might have foreseen that he would speak as frankly as this, they were shocked when he presumed to advocate independence in religion. Two hundred years earlier he would have been banished from Massachusetts for saying less. As it was, however, Harvard closed its lecture rooms to him for nearly thirty years, and the conservative clergy expressed their outraged feelings in speech and print. Emerson was undisturbed. To one of them, his friend the Reverend Henry Ware, he wrote a seldom-quoted letter that completely represents him. It deserves careful study.
Concord, October 8, 1838.
My dear Sir:—
I ought sooner to have acknowledged your kind letter of last week, and the Sermon it accompanied. The latter was right manly and noble. The Sermon, too, I have read with great attention. If it assails any doctrines of mine—perhaps I am not so quick to see it as writers generally—certainly I did not feel any disposition to depart from my habitual contentment, that you should say your thought, whilst I say mine.
I believe I must tell you what I think of my new position. It strikes me very oddly, that good and wise men at Cambridge and Boston should think of raising me into an object of criticism. I have always been—from my very incapacity of methodical writing—“a chartered libertine” free to worship and free to rail,—lucky when I could make myself understood, but never esteemed near enough to the institution and mind of society to deserve the notice of the masters of literature and religion. I have appreciated fully the advantages of my position; for I well know, that there is no scholar less willing or less able to be a polemic. I could not give account of myself, if challenged. I could not possibly give you one of the “arguments” you cruelly hint at, on which any doctrine of mine stands. For I do not know what arguments mean, in reference to any expression of thought. I delight in telling what I think; but if you ask me how I dare say so, or, why it is so, I am the most helpless of mortal men. I do not even see, that either of these questions admits of an answer. So that, in the present droll posture of my affairs, when I see myself suddenly raised into the importance of a heretic, I am very uneasy when I advert to the supposed duties of such a personage, who is to make good his thesis against all comers.
I certainly shall do no such thing. I shall read what you and other good men write, as I have always done,—glad when you speak my thoughts, and skipping the page that has nothing for me. I shall go on, just as before, seeing whatever I can, and telling what I see; and, I suppose, with the same fortune that has hitherto attended me; the joy of finding, that my abler and better brothers, who work with the sympathy of society, loving and beloved, do now and then unexpectedly confirm my perceptions, and find my nonsense is only their own thought in motley.
And so I am,
Your affectionate servant,
Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Thus far it is clear that Emerson’s message to the world was almost unqualifiedly personal: an attempt to shake men out of their lazy ways of drifting with the current into active swimming—with the current if they thought best, but usually against it. The whole problem was summarized in his single defiant essay on “Self-Reliance,”[14]—defiant because in this protest he was almost entirely concerned with telling men what they should not do. They should not pray, not be consistent, not travel, not imitate, not conform to society; but should be Godlike, independent, searching their own hearts, and behaving in accord with the truth they found there. It is an anarchy he was preaching, an elevated lawlessness. And the first reaction to such teaching is to ask with shocked disapproval, “What would happen to the world if all men followed his advice?” There are two very simple answers. The first is that if all men followed Emerson’s advice, completely as he gave it, the world would be peopled with saints, for what he asked was that men should disregard the laws of society only that they might better observe the laws of God. And the second answer is that such a query sets an impossible condition, for the pressure of custom is so strong and the human inclination to do as others do is so prevailing that counsel like Emerson’s will never be adopted, at the most, by more than a very small and courageous minority.
One fact to keep in mind in reading all Emerson is that he regularly expresses himself in emphatic terms. In consequence, what he says in one mood he is likely in another to gainsay, and in a third, though without any deliberate intention to defend himself, he may reconcile the apparent contradiction. He simply follows out his own ideas on consistency.