V

THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHER

OME

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

SOM years ago, I asked a Japanese student who

had just entered Yale, what motive had impelled him to leave his native land and come hither to study. He replied that in Tokyo he had come across a book by Ralph Waldo Emerson which had been translated into Japanese, and the contents had made such an impression upon his mind that he had immediately vowed to see for himself the country that produced such a man. Here is an instance out of many thousands where the living word of our great Practical Mystic has awakened and transformed an individual of another time and clime. For our foremost American individualist always spoke to individuals, never to men in the mass; thus every one who reads him receptively feels that the stimulating word is addressed to him alone.

In the year 1803 Emerson was born on Summer Street, Boston, near what is now the South Terminal Station. Can you think of three men of genius more unlike than Benjamin Franklin, Edgar Allan Poe, and Ralph Waldo Emerson? All three were born in Boston, though only the last is really identified with it. Emerson always loved Boston, and in one of his worst poems, he exclaims

This darling town of ours.

Emerson is the only one of the three who ought to have been born in Boston. Franklin never felt at home there and Poe never felt at home anywhere. But the atmosphere of the Athens of America suited Emerson. Smile as much as you like, but Boston is different. The street-cars show it in three striking peculiarities: the strap-hangers read bound books, not newspapers and grotesque magazines; the signs proclaim that this is a Prepayment Car, which would not be understood in many other towns; the conductors say Madam, instead of Lady. I was once having my boots blacked, or my shoes shinedaccording as you prefer the British or American alliteration and the tiny Boston polisher, who had thus far served a life sentence of not less than five nor more than ten years suddenly asked me what I thought of the Philippines; "for my part," said he, "they seem more of a liability than an asset."

On his father's side, Emerson came of eight successive generations of ministers, giving him a sufficient supply of ethics and religion; on his mother's side, his grandfather was a whiskey distiller, who had "no ancestry" but left forty-six grandchildren. The high percentage of practical wisdom in Emerson may possibly be partly owing to this eminently practical man.

Emerson was a rather abnormal boy who lived at home, had no intimate playmates, no Indian warwhoops, no picnics, and no adventures. Neither in school nor college did he take part in any sports

or athletic contests, nor did he ever pretend to care for such things. Emerson reading the sporting page of a newspaper is unthinkable. is unthinkable. He studied

and meditated incessantly.

He was graduated from Harvard in the class of 1821. In the long roll of illustrious sons of Harvard, Emerson is perhaps the most illustrious and certainly the most influential. But his undergraduate days were not happy. He was "President's Freshman"-a hired messenger. This provided him with a free room in Wadsworth House, thus saving the expense of lodging. He did private tutoring, taught school in vacation and waited on table in term-time. The last three years he roomed in Hollis, but lived as much by himself as was possible in a college dormitory. He made little impression on either students or faculty, was never prominent and not thought to be a young man of any particular promise. His health was not rugged, and he never looked back to his undergraduate days with much pleasure, or rated his "education" very highly, the almost invariable attitude of a super-individualist.

Years later, when Emerson was an Overseer of Harvard College, he voted in favor of compulsory chapel. His latest biographer, the learned and ingenious Professor Firkins, rebukes Emerson for this vote, saying that while it may not be a blot on his record it is certainly a blur. I cannot subscribe to this opinion. Emerson was certainly an individualist, and a believer in personal freedom; but he also believed that Religion was the most important part

of any one's education and the chief element in life. Thus his vote seems to me consistent with his general mental attitude, though I should not care if it Consistency was never a jewel with Em

were not.

erson.

We are now fortunate enough to possess the num erous volumes of his Journal, published not long ago, which illumine his inner life, and are full of good anecdotes. As Dr. Johnson wrote disparagingly of New Jersey, so Emerson gave a delightful opinion of Connecticut. In 1862 he met Mrs. John C. Frémont at Washington.

"She showed me two letters of her son who had once been designed for our Concord School, but when she came to find how much his reading, spelling, and writing had been neglected in his camp education . . . she was afraid to send him among cultivated boys, and had sent him into Connecticut."

Emerson could upon occasion hand down an opinion from the seat of the scornful, as when he followed the advice of political economists:

"I took such pains not to keep my money in the house, but put it out of the reach of burglars by buying stock, and had no guess that I was putting it into the hands of those very burglars now grown wiser and standing dressed as Railway Directors."

When he was eighteen, he wrote,

"Why has my motley diary no jokes? Because it is a soliloquy and every man is grave alone."

Perhaps true of some men, but not of all. I feel sure that the author of the Anatomy of Melancholy was often enormously amused by his solitary reflections on human nature.

When he was eighteen, he indulged himself in the following lament:

"In twelve days I shall be nineteen years old: which I count a miserable thing. Has any other educated person lived so many years and lost so many days?"

It is forever characteristic of humanity that the more serious and ambitious a person is, the more he is given to self-reproach. Consider Milton's Sonnet on his twenty-third birthday. It is the energetic who condemn themselves for laziness, the saints who suffer remorse for their sins. The real loafer and the genuine criminal are self-complacent, and leave the art of worrying to their betters.

As everyone knows, Emerson was a Unitarian minister, and he might have continued in that profession if it had not been for three things: he disliked all confessions of faith, he disliked preaching in the pulpit, and he particularly disliked pastoral work. It was once necessary for him to make a call on an old parishioner who was engaged in the serious business of dying. The young pastor sat by the