Act 5 — CLEWS TO EMERSON'S MYSTIC VERSE.

CLEWS TO EMERSON'S MYSTIC VERSE.

(Third Paper.)

"When a man's verses cannot be understood, nor a man's good wit seconded with the forward child understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room."--Touchstone.

The phantasmal lords of life of the poem 'Experience,' which we considered at the close of the last paper, were presumably suggested to Emerson by the following lines from Tennyson's 'Mystic,' published in 1830 (Emerson imported these early volumets of young Tennyson, and never tired of praising them to his friends):--

The "silent congregated hours," "daughters of time, divinely tall," with "severe and youthful brows," in this same poem of Tennyson gave Emerson his "daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days," congregated in procession. Tennyson's mystic, who hears "time flowing in the middle of the night" recalls Emerson's 'Two Rivers,' in which the living All, the Infinite Soul, is figured as a stream flowing through eternity:--

At the close of the poem 'Wealth' there is a bit of scientific nature-ethics which is a little obscure. The greater part of the poem is a series of graphic pictures, detailing the process of world-development through the geologic ages down to the advent of man. Suddenly, at the end,--just as at the end of the prose essay on the same subject,--he remembers his manners and makes his bow to the august Soul, kindles a light in the Geissler tube of nature, sets it aglow interiorly with spiritual law:--

The logical link connecting this part with the rest has dropped out in the poem, but is clear enough in the essay. The lines mean simply this: that, though man may forget to obey the laws of the universe, Nature never forgets her debt of obedience; she bites and stings the transgressor and caresses and soothes him who obeys. In her own submission to law she has that artlessness and quasi-moral sense that affines her to the moral nature of a child. The "awful victors" and "Eternal Rights" of 'Voluntaries' are only "remembering Matter" in another mask: with all their innocent obedience they are themselves terrible executors:--

In the following high pantheistic strain the seer chants the old rune that God is all:--

When the Living Universe builds a house, it builds it out of its own soul substance; while man sleeps and loiters, the Unconscious ceaselessly toils. In the phrase "grows by decays," Emerson embodies, I believe, the law of the conservation of energy. The magazine of divine power is exhaustless; does energy sink out of sight here, it is only to reappear yonder; the tree decays, but out of its fertilizing substance new plants may spring up; the coal under the steam boiler of the locomotive is consumed, but the swart goblin has lost no whit of his might: he just slips darkling up into the steam, makes the driving-rods his swift-shuttling arms, and, grasping with his steel fingers the felloes of the wheel, whirls you half a thousand miles over the green bulge of the earth ere set of sun, The mystic Power grows by decays; and also, by "the famous might that lurks in reaction and recoil," reconciles apparent antinomies and opposites, and is the agent that visits evil upon the head of the evil doer and mercy upon the merciful. If a heavy body be rolled up an inclined plane, it acquires potential and kinetic energy just equal to the force expended in getting it there, and in reaction develops such a famous might that, if massive enough, it will knock you down if you stand in its way. If you lift the big pendulum of the clock in the corner, you also confer latent, or reactionary, energy upon it. Only it is of course hyperbolical for the poet to say that reaction is potent enough to actually freeze flame and make ice boil your kettle. That is only one of Emerson's rhetorical Chinese crackers, his startling thaumaturgic way of illustrating his thesis.

The key-thought of the essay 'Spiritual Laws,' to which the occult lines we are considering were prefixed, is, Be noble; for, if you are not, your face and life will, by the law of reaction and return, publish your lapse. Punishment and reward are fruits that ripen unsuspected in the deeds of men.

The pertinency and application of many of Emerson's titles are not at once apparent.

In 'Merops' the bard affirms that in his high philosophical soarings he cares not whether he can at once ticket his intuitions and perceptions with names or not. Merops was changed into an eagle, says Ovid, and placed among the constellations,--hence, I suppose, is selected by Emerson as a good type of the kind of soaring thinker he is describing. That he also has in mind that Merops was the putative father of Phaëthon is shown perhaps by the allusion (in the last stanza) to Phaëthon's mishap:--

'Alphonso of Castile' is a dramatic monologue containing a whimsical suggestion for compounding a Man out of ordinary weak-timbered manikins by killing nine in ten of them and "stuffing nine brains in one hat." It is put into the mouth of Alphonso, King of Castile, born in 1221, called El Sabio, "The Wise." He was a man who suffered much in his life. He wrote a famous code of laws, and first made the Castilian a national language by causing the Bible to be translated into it. Emerson chooses him as the vehicle of his own whimsey about the condensed homunculus chiefly on account of one famous sentence attributed to him: "Had I been present at the creation, I could have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe." Emerson, in his rhymed soliloquy, put into Alphonso's mouth, sarcastically twits Nature with her depleted stocks, her run-out strains of lemons, figs, roses, and men. The remedy proposed in the case of man, and outlined above, has the true Emerson-Swift bouquet, is colored and veined with a right Shakespearian scorn of the mob.

'Mithridates' is a monologue put into the mouth of Mithridates the Great, King of Pontus, who is said to have discovered an antidote for poisons which made him poison-proof against his many enemies:--

As late as 1787 "mithridate" was the name for an antidote against poison included in the London pharmacopœia. In Jonson's 'Every Man in his Humour,' Kitely, thinking he is poisoned, calls for mithridate and oil. It was composed of many ingredients and given in the form of electuaries. In our modern pharmacopoeias we have plenty of antidotes against virulent poisons; e. g., atropine for the deadly amanita mushroom. And counter-poisons are often used, as the tincture of foxglove for aconite, atropine for morphia, or morphia for belladonna. According to the tradition, Mithridates gradually inured his system to counter-poisons, and became poison-proof. At any rate, Emerson uses him for his metaphor, which, in untropical speech, is this: "lam tired of the nambypamby and goody-goody; give me things strong and rank; give me evil for a change and a spur.

In brief, "I have run the gauntlet of experience, sounded all the depths of passion, joy, woe, evil. I am dipped in Styx, more invulnerable than Siegfried, and strong now to use the world and be used by it." The mood of the poem is the wild longing that sometimes comes over the good man to break loose and have his fling, come what may, cry, Vive la bagatelle! or run amuck and tilt at all he meets. It is needless to say that the staid Emerson never carried this mood farther than to smoke a cigar now and then, or take an Adirondack outing. His contemporary, the untrammelled Whitman, could both preach and practise (within the bounds of reason) the Mithridatic doctrine; and he was a more many-sided and symmetrical man in consequence.

The last two lines of 'Mithridates,' as printed from the autograph copy, were,--

These lines Emerson wisely dropped.

'Forerunners' ("Long I followed happy guides)" mean one's brave hopes and ideals of good to come, our dreams and aspirations. The lines

Thoreau evidently utilized as text for his well-known fable in 'Walden' of the lost hound, bay horse, and turtle-dove.

The portrait of Hermione, the patient-sweet wife of Leontes in 'The Winter's Tale' of Shakespeare, serves Emerson, in his poem 'Hermione,' as the model of a perfect wife, and a more acceptable one to this age than Chaucer's abject Griselda. Such a lady as Shakespeare's Hermione, beautiful in person and of rare self-control and virtue, is an adumbration or epitome of the universal beauty. Looking at nature, the American poet finds the features of his Hermione there: "mountains and the misty plains, Her colossal portraiture." I suppose that this sketch, tender and delicately toned as if with a silver point, is autobiographical, and is a shadowing forth of the character of Emerson's first wife, the ethereal souled Ellen Tucker, who died of consumption after only a year and a half of married life. When her "meteor glances came," he says, he was "hermit vowed to books and gloom," and dwelling alone. In the lines

he anticipates (does he not?) the telepathy of our days,--kindred minds seeking similar places and thinking like thoughts, although in this case, to be sure, the kindred soul is thought of as merged with the inorganic world,--the winds and waterfalls and twilight nooks.

Search the whole world through, you shall find no predecessor of Emerson the poet. The only verse resembling his in general style is that of the enigmatic 'Phoenix and the Turtle,' attributed to Shakespeare, and much admired by Emerson:--

Emerson's verses have also a slight Persian tinge now and then, caught from his studies of Saadi and Hafiz. In his fine lyric cry 'Bacchus,' in which he calls for a wine of life, a cup of divine soma or amrita, that shall sinew his brain and exalt all his powers of thought and action to a godlike pitch,--

he unconsciously gave his lines, I think, the outward form of some verses by Hafiz, in which that singer intimates that, give him the right kind of wine, and he can perform wonders as if with Solomon's ring or Jemschid's wine-cup mirror. Emerson himself in one of his early editions gives a spirited verse translation of Hafiz's poem. Mr. William R. Alger ('Specimens of Oriental Poetry,' Boston, 1856) translates Hafiz thus:--

'Etienne de la Boéce' gets its title (with Emersonian variations) from the name of one of Montaigne's most intimate friends,--Estienne de la Boëtie. Montaigne tells us about him in Chapter xxvii of his Essays, affirming that he would have accomplished miracles, had he lived. He died when only thirty-three at Bordeaux (1563). His scholarship was solid, his translations from the Greek excellent. He was so eager to read Greek that he copied whole volumes with his own hand. A French critic says, "Les qualités qui brillaient en lui imprimaient à toute sa personne un cachet distingué et un charme sévère." Yet he seems to have been something of an imitator of his great friend; and it is in this aspect of his life that Emerson regards him, using him, perhaps somewhat unjustly to his powers and developing genius, as the type of a too imitative disciple:--

Probably most Americans, if asked to explain the relevancy of the title of Emerson's poem 'Guy,' would be unable to answer offhand. The verses celebrate the lucky man:--

The reference, of course, is to a man well known in England,--Thomas Guy (d. 1724), founder of Guy's Hospital in London. He was the George Peabody of his day. Beginning life as a bookseller, he made a good deal of money in printing Bibles, but acquired most of his enormous fortune by financial speculations. He was extremely economical; for example, always ate his dinner on his shop counter, first spreading out a newspaper to catch the crumbs. His charities were boundless. To his hospital he gave $1,000,000; and at his death his will was found to contain an enormous number of special benefactions, including bequests to over ninety cousins. Emerson in his poem compares Guy to Polycrates, who was King of Samos some five hundred years before Christ. He says that Polycrates "chained the sunshine and the breeze"; that is, the very elements seemed to be in his pay. This run of luck was without a break up to his death; his fleet of a hundred ships was the largest then known; he conquered all his enemies, and amassed great treasure. His ally, Amasis, King of Egypt, was so alarmed at his prosperity, fearing the envy of the gods, that he advised him to make some noteworthy sacrifice. The story goes that Polycrates accordingly threw his emerald signet-ring into the sea, but it came back to his kitchens in the belly of a large fish, as in the Arabian Nights story. The fears of Amasis were finally justified; for the Persian satrap Orœtes enticed Polycrates to the mainland, and crucified him.

'Xenophanes' embodies poetically the doctrine of the earnest old Greek agnostic and monist of that name, that God, or the All, is uncreated, immovable, and one,--not immovable in its parts, but as a whole, and just because it is all. Xenophanes saw the grandeur and incomprehensibility of the universe, he violently opposed what seemed to him the disgraceful polytheism of Homer, and anticipated the modern atomic theory and the doctrine of the unity of life as revealed by the spectroscope and the discovery of the conservation and mutual convertibility of forces. Or, as Emerson puts it in his haunting numbers,--

The title of the poem 'Hamatreya' seemed at first to baffle a perfect and indubitable explanation. The word can be found in no English or foreign dictionary that the largest libraries afford. We are indebted, however, to Col. T. W. Higginson (The Critic, Feb. 18, 1888) for not only giving us a clew to the title, but for pointing out the portion of the Vishnu Purana (Wilson's translation, 1840) on which Emerson based his 'Earth Song' in 'Hamatreya,' and, in fact, got the hint for the whole poem; namely, at the close of Book IV. Maitreya is a disciple of Parasara, who relates to Maitreya the Vishnu Purana. Among other things he tells Maitreya of a chant of the Earth, who said, "When I hear a king sending word to another by his ambassador, 'This earth is mine: immediately resign your pretensions to it,' I am moved to violent laughter at first; but it soon subsides in pity for the infatuated fool." Again, the Purana says, "Earth laughs, as if smiling with autumnal flowers, to behold her kings unable to effect the subjugation of themselves"; which is Emerson's

And again: "These were the verses, Maitreya, which Earth recited, and by listening to which ambition fades away, like snow before the sun." Here are Emerson's lines:--

Colonel Higginson suggests that Emerson may also have had in mind, in writing 'Hamatreya,' Psalm, xlix. 11. As he rightly says, the title evidently is meant to give a hint of the Hindoo source of the argument of the poem. It is in line with the uniform custom of Emerson in giving historical catch-words, especially proper names, as his titles. After an exhaustive search through all the Hindoo scriptures, I have reached a conviction which approaches absolute certainty that Hamatreya is Emerson's imperfect recollection of Maitreya or that he purposely coined the word. Emerson, it is nearly certain, read the Vishnu Purana, translated by H. H. Wilson (a large and costly work), by the copy then in the Harvard Library or the Boston Athenaeum, perhaps taking brief notes, but omitting to write down "Maitreya." In his exhaustive index of proper names, appended to the Vishnu Purana, Wilson has no such word as Hamatreya, nor does it occur anywhere in the book. To clinch the argument, Prof. Charles R. Lanman, the well-known Sanskrit scholar of Harvard University, writes me that "Hamatreya is not a Sanskrit word." "The Atreyas," he says, "were the descendants of Atri." "It is an easy mistake to make Hamatreya out of Maitreya. I really think you will have to assume a simple slip here."

Emerson is not wilfully obscure. But he comes dangerously near to being so in the demand he often makes upon his readers for out-of-the-way knowledge. 'Casella' is the title of an Emersonian quatrain,--

The reference is to Dante's friend Casella ("Casella mio"), whom he meets in Purgatory, and who sweetly sings (as of yore on earth he was wont) a canzone by Dante himself,--"Amor, che nella mente mi ragiona." Emerson's favorite poet, Milton, in his sonnet to Henry Lawes, alludes, as Mr. Norton points out, to this friendship:--

The title ἀδάκρυν νεμόνται αἰῶνα [Transliteration: adakrun nemontai aiona] is from Pindar, I believe. Emerson took it from The Dial, where (July, '43) it appears as the motto to a poem by Charles A. Dana on 'Manhood.' It means, literally, "They pass a tearless life"; or, very freely rendered, "They live a life of smiles,"--a sentiment explained by the first lines,--

Even in so slight a matter as choosing a name for his verses 'To Rhea,' Emerson's philosophical belief is glimpsed; for Rhea was the mother of gods, and such he believed all women to be. The thought of this remarkable poem, which its author feigns to have received from the thousand chattering tongues of the poplar-tree, is extremely subtle and somewhat difficult to formulate. The analysis is this. If you, a wife, have lost your supremacy in your husband's affections, take a strange and noble revenge, not by hating, but, in a kind of calm altruistic despair, endowing him with all the gifts and blessings at your command. The poem is headed 'To Rhea' (Rhea being the wife of the cruel Saturn, who devoured his own children) as to a wife whose husband had merely "drank of Cupid's nectar cup," married her from sex-instinct alone, and then, the "bandages of purple light" fallen from "his eyes," treated her with indifference. But she continues to love him; and more the poet gives her the advice just noted, illustrating by the supposed case of a god loving a mortal maid, and warily knowing that she, with her inferior ideals, can never adequately requite his love, yet nobly endowing her with all gifts and graces, which are the hostages he pawns for freedom from "his thrall." He does this in an altruistic spirit, in order by her to "model newer races" and "carry man to new degrees of power and comeliness." But what thrall? We must walk warily here. In order not to seem to give his verses an autobiographical cast (although the god, the "wise Immortal," of them is really such a type as the seer Emerson himself), he withdraws into dim recesses and speaks in subtlest metaphors. The thrall, I think, is the bondage a lover or husband is in to his beloved, in whom the solecisms and disenchantments of possession have supplanted the poetic illusions of romantic love. The man of supreme wisdom, by the magic of self-sacrifice and boundless profusion of gifts turns the trap or prison in which nature has caught him into a bower of Eden. By the road of generosity he escapes. He cunningly builds up in her mind gratitude and friendship in place of the lost romanticism. There is in this treatment of love a touch of the coldblooded philosophy of the Emersonian critique of friendship. But if it is not a marriage of ideal kind, such as that of the Brownings, which he celebrates, he at least embodies in his verse the shrewd love-philosophy of the practical-poetical Englishman, united to the average woman for the furtherance of the ends of the species.

Mr. George Brown, in his Emerson primer, thinks that the key-thought of 'Rhea' is in these lines from 'The World-Soul' about the gods:--

But the parallelism somewhat halts. For mark: In the one case Napoleon's maxim is embodied, that God is on the side of the strongest battalions. The one who scorns the favoritisms and alms of Heaven, and yet, will he nill he, receives its aid, is really the strong God himself in mask, the noble and resolute man executing his will in time and space. But in the case supposed in 'Rhea,' of husband and wife, the ones who scorn love are those not deserving of gifts at all (although Nature finds her account in them), but persons who receive gifts in charity from one altruistically nobler than themselves. It is just this idea of sublime self-sacrifice that gives to 'Rhea' its strange subtlety and its uniqueness among poems on love. There is a consolatory under-thought in the palimpsest, too. By his illustration of the god and the mortal maid the poet wishes Rhea to divine that, if wives make moan over husbands' lost love, husbands no less often have reason to lament the cooled affection of wives.

The central idea in 'Uriel' is that there is no such thing as evil. This thesis is put into the mouth of Uriel, one of the seven archangels, because he was the "interpreter" of God's will. So Milton says, in the locus classicus on Uriel in Book III of 'Paradise Lost.' He also says he was

"The sharpest-sighted spirit of all in heav'n."

His station was in the all-viewing sun. Uriel, in Milton, tells how, when the universe was yet chaos,

he saw the worlds a-forming,--earth, sun, and stars. Emerson (or "Sayd") takes Milton at his word, and leads us back into that dark backward and abysm of time, and lets us overhear a conversation between Uriel and the other seraphs. At his speech "the gods shook," because if there is no sin, if all comes round to good, even a lie, then good-bye gods, hells and heavens, and their punishments. But note that, though the All turns your wrong to good in the end, yet you, an individual, suffer for your wrongdoing.

In a genial paper in the Andover Review for March, 1887, Dr. C. C. Everett says that Dr. Hedge suggested to him that 'Uriel' probably took its origin in the discussions of the Boston Association of Ministers on the theme (then rife), "There is no line in nature": all is circular, and by the law of reaction every deed returns upon the doer. At any rate, it was written in 1838, soon after his Divinity School Address. ('Emerson in Concord,' by Edward Emerson.)

The god of boundaries in ancient Rome--Terminus--gives his name to the cheeriest of monodies or anchoring songs sung by the gayest of old sailors on the sea of eternity, and at last approaching port. Terminus, like Hermes, the Greek god of bounds, was shown in his statues without hands or feet, to indicate that he never moved. Was Emerson a little rusty in his classical lore, or did he boldly and knowingly defy classical verities when he says the divinity came to him "in his fatal rounds"? He seems to have attributed to Terminus patrolling functions like those of his own New England village fence-viewers. Or, rather, speaking in noble and more adequate terms, has he not added to the world's mythologies a new and poetical deity,--the god of the bounds of human life, a kind of avant-courier or Death's dragoman to announce to men their approaching end? 'Terminus' was written about 1866, when Emerson was in or near his sixty-third year, and sixteen years before his death. William Sloane Kennedy.