EMERSON AND THE EMERSONITES.
(FROM “MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.”)
HERE were circumstances around me which made it difficult to view the world precisely as it exists; for severe and sober as was the Old Manse, it was necessary to go but a little way beyond its threshold before meeting with stranger moral shapes of men than might have been encountered elsewhere in a circuit of a thousand miles. These hobgoblins of flesh and blood were attracted thither by the wide spreading influence of a great original thinker who had his earthly abode at the opposite extremity of our village. His mind acted upon other minds of a certain constitution with wonderful magnetism, and drew many men upon long pilgrimages to speak with him face to face.
Young visionaries, to whom just so much of insight had been imparted as to make life all a labyrinth around them, came to seek the clew which should guide them out of their self-involved bewilderment. Gray-headed theorists, whose systems—at first air—had finally imprisoned them in a fiery framework, traveled painfully to his door, not to ask deliverance, but to invite the free spirit into their own thralldom. People that had lighted upon a new thought—or thought they had fancied new—came to Emerson as a finder of a glittering gem hastens to a lapidary to ascertain its quality and value. Uncertain, troubled, earnest wanderers through the midnight of the moral world beheld his intellectual fire as a beacon burning upon a hill-top, and climbing the difficult ascent, looked forth into the surrounding obscurity more hopefully than hitherto. The light revealed objects unseen before:—mountains, gleaming lakes, glimpses of creation among the chaos: but also, as was unavoidable, it attracted bats and owls and the whole host of night-birds, which flapped their dusty wings against the gazer’s eyes, and sometimes were mistaken for fowls of angelic feather. Such delusions always hover nigh whenever a beacon-fire of truth is kindled.
For myself there had been epochs of my life when I too might have asked of this prophet the master-word that should solve me the riddle of the universe; but now, being happy, I felt as if there were no question to be put; and therefore admired Emerson as a poet of deep beauty and austere tenderness, but sought nothing from him as a philosopher. It was good, nevertheless, to meet him in the wood-paths, or sometimes in our avenue, with that pure intellectual gleam diffused about his presence, like the garment of a shining one; and he so quiet, so simple, so without pretension, encountering each man alive as if expecting to receive more than he could impart. And in truth, the heart of many a man had, perchance, inscriptions which he could not read. But it was impossible to dwell in his vicinity without inhaling more or less the mountain atmosphere of his lofty thought, which in the brains of some people wrought a singular giddiness—new truth being as heady as new wine.
Never was a poor country village infected with such a variety of queer, strangely-dressed, oddly-behaved mortals, most of whom took upon themselves to be important agents of this world’s destiny, yet were simply bores of the first water. Such, I imagine, is the invariable character of persons who crowd so closely about an original thinker as to draw in his unuttered breath, and thus become imbued with a false originality. This triteness of noveltry is enough to make any man of common sense blaspheme at all ideas of less than a century’s standing, and pray that the world may be petrified and rendered immovable in precisely the worst moral and physical state that it ever yet arrived at, rather than be benefitted by such schemes of such philosophers.
PEARL.
(THE SCARLET LETTER. A ROMANCE. 1850.)