was Emerson’s chosen retreat,—brought those literary men here. Thoreau, the most original and peculiar genius of the whole group, was born here, and never had much inclination to leave Concord, although in youth he talked of adventuring to the wild West,—Kentucky and Illinois at that time,—whither his friend, Ellery Channing, afterward did in fact go. Around Emerson, this circle, with many who only lived here temporarily (like Margaret Fuller and George William Curtis), or not at all, gathered as friends and brothers, or else as disciples,—and thus the name of Concord became associated, and justly, with a special and remarkable school of thought and literature. Thousands now visit the graves of these worthies, to which, and to their haunts in life—their walks and seats and sylvan places of resort,—an increasing host of pilgrims come year by year.
The Arabs have a proverb,—“Though a hundred deserts separate the heart of the Faithful from the Kaaba of Mecca, yet there opens a window from its sanctuary into thy soul.” For those who have the true inward illumination, therefore, pilgrimage is not needful; yet to all it is agreeable, and it has been the practice of mankind for ages, and will be, so long as we remain ourselves but pilgrims and wayfarers on this earth. Nasar, the son of Khosrou, who wrote in the time of Haroun Al-Rashid, and called his book The Traveller’s Wallet, was not the first, nor Bunyan, with his Pilgrims Progress, the last, to look on life as a journey; but let us hear what that Persian says of it:
“Man, endowed with intellect, must search into the origin of his existence,—whence he came, and whither he shall go,—reflecting that in this world he is making a toilsome journey, without stop or stay,—not even for the twinkling of an eye,—until he has traversed the measure of that line which marks the time allotted for his existence. For that we are but pilgrims here on earth, God has mysteriously declared.”
The attraction of Emerson and the rest of the Concord authors, whose homes or tombs so many pilgrims visit, comes chiefly from the recognition by them of this search by mankind after the Infinite,—their insight into the nature and worth of this pilgrimage of life which all are making. Man loves and seeks amusement to beguile his toilsome or monotonous journey,—and hence the pleasure so many take in the lighter and more graceful or laughable forms of literature. But sooner or later, and in many persons at all times, what Tennyson calls “the riddle of the painful earth” is before us all for consideration, if not for solution. We see that the universe is moral,—even if we cannot read the moral aright,—and we seek those who can give us “the word of the enigma,” as the French say. Emerson gave it in his manner, Hawthorne in his, Thoreau in still another way; and these three Concord authors not only had much vogue in their lifetime, but are yet more widely read since their death. Others, like Ellery Channing, found little audience in youth, and time has not yet essentially enlarged the circle of their readers. With the same moral view of life which his more successful friends took, Channing, the poet (who must always be distinguished from Dr. Channing, the divine, his uncle), had in his style something of that distraction which Montaigne declares is needful to poets.
“The precepts of the masters,” says this eccentric Gascon, “and still more their example, tell us that we must have a little insanity, if we would avoid even more stupidity. A thousand poets drawl and languish in prose; but the best ancient prose (and ’tis the same with verse) glows throughout with the vigor and daring of poesy, and takes on an air of inspiration. The poet, says Plato” (and here Montaigne gives his own quaint form to the familiar passage in Plato’s Laws), “sitting on the Muses’ tripod, pours out like mad all that comes into his mouth, as if it were the spout of a fountain; without digesting or weighing it. So things escape him of various colors, of opposite natures, and with intermittent flow. Plato himself is wholly poetic; the old theology, say the scholars, is all poetry; and the First Philosophy is the original language of the gods.”
To this wild rule more than one of the Concord philosophers conforms; there is a perceptible lack of method, even when their meaning is fairly clear. Hawthorne incurs less of this censure than the rest; but he confessed that he did not always comprehend his own allegories, nor know exactly the moral he would insinuate. Emerson goes more directly to his mark; a Frenchman (Chantavoine) has said of him, “In his Essays he is first of all a philosophic moralist, never quite forgetting that he was once a preacher.” But, in contrasting him with French writers, Chantavoine admits that Emerson has something which the light and brilliant Parisian essayists lack:
“We are afraid, I suppose, of losing touch with things, if we rise much above them; we do not soar high, content to skim the surface; we distrust those generalities, however eloquent or edifying, which might lead us too far aside. Yet, should we borrow something of Emerson’s manner, French criticism, both historical and literary, would gain by it; there might possibly be less ease, less lightness of touch, less glancing wit in our essays; but in return there would be more earnestness and depth in our judgments on men and affairs.”