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+Project Gutenberg's Essays Before a Sonata, by Charles Ives
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+Title: Essays Before a Sonata
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+Author: Charles Ives
+
+Release Date: January, 2003  [Etext #3673]
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+
+TABLE OF CONTENTS:
+
+BRIEF BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
+INTRODUCTORY FOOTNOTE BY CHARLES IVES
+INTRODUCTION
+I--PROLOGUE
+II--EMERSON
+III--HAWTHORNE
+IV--"THE ALCOTS"
+V--THOREAU
+VI--EPILOGUE
+INFORMATION ABOUT THIS E-TEXT EDITION
+
+
+**********************************************************
+
+
+BRIEF BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
+
+
+Charles Ives (1874-1954) was probably one of the most psycho-
+intellectually brilliant, imaginative and flexible Americans to
+ever "walk the land of freedom."  A graduate of Yale, he became a
+multi-millionaire in the American insurance industry, introducing
+brilliant innovations within that industry.  He also, unlike a
+few composers, found the time and the money (being a shrewd and
+practical businessman) to get married and have children.
+
+His accomplishments for which he is best known, however, are
+those in the field of music.  At the time of its composition,
+Ives' music was probably the most radically modern in history,
+and by itself had enough material to serve as the foundation of
+modern 20th century music.  For example, at the turn of the
+century, this eccentric composer created band works featuring
+multiple melodies of multiple time signatures opposing and
+complimenting each other within the same piece.  Ives was also a
+revolutionary atonal composer, who created, essentially without
+precedent, many atonal works that not only pre-date those of
+Schoenberg, but are just as sophisticated, and arguably even more
+so, than those of the 12-tone serialist.
+
+Among those atonal works was his second, "Concord" piano sonata,
+one of the finest, and some would say the finest, works of
+classical music by an American.  It reflects the musical
+innovations of its creator, featuring revolutionary atmospheric
+effects, unprecedented atonal musical syntax, and surprising
+technical approaches to playing the piano, such as pressing down
+on over 10 notes simultaneously using a flat piece of wood.
+
+What a mischievious creative genius!
+
+And yet, despite the musically innovative nature of these works,
+from a thematic standpoint, they are strictly 19th century.
+Ives, like American band-composer Sousa, consciously infused
+patriotic or "blue-blood" themes into his pieces.  In the
+"Concord," he attempted to project, within the music, the 19th
+century philosophical ideas of the American Transcendentalists,
+who obviously had a great impact on his world-view.
+
+Thus, while other atonal composers such as Schoenberg or Berg
+attempted to infuse their music with "20th century" themes of
+hostility, violence and estrangement within their atonal music,
+the atonal music of Ives is, from a thematic standpoint, really
+quite "tonal."
+
+Ives wrote the following essays as a (very big) set of program
+notes to accompany his second piano sonata.  Here, he puts forth
+his elaborate theory of music and what it represents, and
+discusses Transcendental philosophy and its relation to music.
+The essays explain Ives' own philosophy of and understanding of
+music and art.  They also serve as an analysis of music itself as
+an artform, and provide a critical explanation of the "Concord"
+and the role that the philosophies of Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau
+and the Alcotts play in forming its thematic structure.
+
+
+*************************************************************
+"ESSAYS BEFORE A SONATA," BY CHARLES IVES
+*************************************************************
+
+
+INTRODUCTORY FOOTNOTE BY CHARLES IVES
+
+
+"These prefatory essays were written by the composer for those
+who can't stand his music--and the music for those who can't
+stand his essays; to those who can't stand either, the whole is
+respectfully dedicated."
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+The following pages were written primarily as a preface or reason
+for the [writer's] second Pianoforte Sonata--"Concord, Mass.,
+1845,"--a group of four pieces, called a sonata for want of a
+more exact name, as the form, perhaps substance, does not justify
+it. The music and prefaces were intended to be printed together,
+but as it was found that this would make a cumbersome volume they
+are separate. The whole is an attempt to present [one person's]
+impression of the spirit of transcendentalism that is associated
+in the minds of many with Concord, Mass., of over a half century
+ago. This is undertaken in impressionistic pictures of Emerson
+and Thoreau, a sketch of the Alcotts, and a Scherzo supposed to
+reflect a lighter quality which is often found in the fantastic
+side of Hawthorne. The first and last movements do not aim to
+give any programs of the life or of any particular work of either
+Emerson or Thoreau but rather composite pictures or impressions.
+They are, however, so general in outline that, from some
+viewpoints, they may be as far from accepted impressions (from
+true conceptions, for that matter) as the valuation which they
+purport to be of the influence of the life, thought, and
+character of Emerson and Thoreau is inadequate.
+
+
+I--Prologue
+
+
+How far is anyone justified, be he an authority or a layman, in
+expressing or trying to express in terms of music (in sounds, if
+you like) the value of anything, material, moral, intellectual,
+or spiritual, which is usually expressed in terms other than
+music? How far afield can music go and keep honest as well as
+reasonable or artistic? Is it a matter limited only by the
+composer's power of expressing what lies in his subjective or
+objective consciousness? Or is it limited by any limitations of
+the composer? Can a tune literally represent a stonewall with
+vines on it or with nothing on it, though it (the tune) be made
+by a genius whose power of objective contemplation is in the
+highest state of development? Can it be done by anything short of
+an act of mesmerism on the part of the composer or an act of
+kindness on the part of the listener? Does the extreme
+materializing of music appeal strongly to anyone except to those
+without a sense of humor--or rather with a sense of humor?--or,
+except, possibly to those who might excuse it, as Herbert Spencer
+might by the theory that the sensational element (the sensations
+we hear so much about in experimental psychology) is the true
+pleasurable phenomenon in music and that the mind should not be
+allowed to interfere? Does the success of program music depend
+more upon the program than upon the music? If it does, what is
+the use of the music, if it does not, what is the use of the
+program? Does not its appeal depend to a great extent on the
+listener's willingness to accept the theory that music is the
+language of the emotions and ONLY that? Or inversely does not
+this theory tend to limit music to programs?--a limitation as bad
+for music itself--for its wholesome progress,--as a diet of
+program music is bad for the listener's ability to digest
+anything beyond the sensuous (or physical-emotional). To a great
+extent this depends on what is meant by emotion or on the
+assumption that the word as used above refers more to the
+EXPRESSION, of, rather than to a meaning in a deeper sense--which
+may be a feeling influenced by some experience perhaps of a
+spiritual nature in the expression of which the intellect has
+some part. "The nearer we get to the mere expression of emotion,"
+says Professor Sturt in his "Philosophy of Art and Personality,"
+"as in the antics of boys who have been promised a holiday, the
+further we get away from art."
+
+On the other hand is not all music, program-music,--is not pure
+music, so called, representative in its essence? Is it not
+program-music raised to the nth power or rather reduced to the
+minus nth power? Where is the line to be drawn between the
+expression of subjective and objective emotion? It is easier to
+know what each is than when each becomes what it is. The
+"Separateness of Art" theory--that art is not life but a
+reflection of it--"that art is not vital to life but that life is
+vital to it," does not help us. Nor does Thoreau who says not
+that "life is art," but that "life is an art," which of course is
+a different thing than the foregoing. Tolstoi is even more
+helpless to himself and to us. For he eliminates further. From
+his definition of art we may learn little more than that a kick
+in the back is a work of art, and Beethoven's 9th Symphony is
+not. Experiences are passed on from one man to another. Abel knew
+that. And now we know it. But where is the bridge placed?--at the
+end of the road or only at the end of our vision? Is it all a
+bridge?--or is there no bridge because there is no gulf? Suppose
+that a composer writes a piece of music conscious that he is
+inspired, say, by witnessing an act of great self-sacrifice--
+another piece by the contemplation of a certain trait of nobility
+he perceives in a friend's character--and another by the sight of
+a mountain lake under moonlight. The first two, from an
+inspirational standpoint would naturally seem to come under the
+subjective and the last under the objective, yet the chances are,
+there is something of the quality of both in all. There may have
+been in the first instance physical action so intense or so
+dramatic in character that the remembrance of it aroused a great
+deal more objective emotion than the composer was conscious of
+while writing the music. In the third instance, the music may
+have been influenced strongly though subconsciously by a vague
+remembrance of certain thoughts and feelings, perhaps of a deep
+religious or spiritual nature, which suddenly came to him upon
+realizing the beauty of the scene and which overpowered the first
+sensuous pleasure--perhaps some such feeling as of the conviction
+of immortality, that Thoreau experienced and tells about in
+Walden. "I penetrated to those meadows...when the wild river and
+the woods were bathed in so pure and bright a light as would have
+waked the dead IF they had been slumbering in their graves as
+some suppose. There needs no stronger proof of immortality."
+Enthusiasm must permeate it, but what it is that inspires an art-
+effort is not easily determined much less classified. The word
+"inspire" is used here in the sense of cause rather than effect.
+A critic may say that a certain movement is not inspired. But
+that may be a matter of taste--perhaps the most inspired music
+sounds the least so--to the critic. A true inspiration may lack a
+true expression unless it is assumed that if an inspiration is
+not true enough to produce a true expression--(if there be anyone
+who can definitely determine what a true expression is)--it is
+not an inspiration at all.
+
+Again suppose the same composer at another time writes a piece of
+equal merit to the other three, as estimates go; but holds that
+he is not conscious of what inspired it--that he had nothing
+definite in mind--that he was not aware of any mental image or
+process--that, naturally, the actual work in creating something
+gave him a satisfying feeling of pleasure perhaps of elation.
+What will you substitute for the mountain lake, for his friend's
+character, etc.? Will you substitute anything?  If so why? If so
+what? Or is it enough to let the matter rest on the pleasure
+mainly physical, of the tones, their color, succession, and
+relations, formal or informal? Can an inspiration come from a
+blank mind? Well--he tries to explain and says that he was
+conscious of some emotional excitement and of a sense of
+something beautiful, he doesn't know exactly what--a vague
+feeling of exaltation or perhaps of profound sadness.
+
+What is the source of these instinctive feelings, these vague
+intuitions and introspective sensations? The more we try to
+analyze the more vague they become. To pull them apart and
+classify them as "subjective" or "objective" or as this or as
+that, means, that they may be well classified and that is about
+all: it leaves us as far from the origin as ever. What does it
+all mean? What is behind it all? The "voice of God," says the
+artist, "the voice of the devil," says the man in the front row.
+Are we, because we are, human beings, born with the power of
+innate perception of the beautiful in the abstract so that an
+inspiration can arise through no external stimuli of sensation or
+experience,--no association with the outward? Or was there
+present in the above instance, some kind of subconscious,
+instantaneous, composite image, of all the mountain lakes this
+man had ever seen blended as kind of overtones with the various
+traits of nobility of many of his friends embodied in one
+personality? Do all inspirational images, states, conditions, or
+whatever they may be truly called, have for a dominant part, if
+not for a source, some actual experience in life or of the social
+relation? To think that they do not--always at least--would be a
+relief; but as we are trying to consider music made and heard by
+human beings (and not by birds or angels) it seems difficult to
+suppose that even subconscious images can be separated from some
+human experience--there must be something behind subconsciousness
+to produce consciousness, and so on. But whatever the elements
+and origin of these so-called images are, that they DO stir deep
+emotional feelings and encourage their expression is a part of
+the unknowable we know. They do often arouse something that has
+not yet passed the border line between subconsciousness and
+consciousness--an artistic intuition (well named, but)--object
+and cause unknown!--here is a program!--conscious or subconscious
+what does it matter? Why try to trace any stream that flows
+through the garden of consciousness to its source only to be
+confronted by another problem of tracing this source to its
+source? Perhaps Emerson in the _Rhodora_ answers by not trying to
+explain
+
+That if eyes were made for seeing Then beauty is its own excuse
+for being: Why thou wert there, O, rival of the rose! I never
+thought to ask, I never knew; But, in my simple ignorance,
+suppose The self-same Power that brought me there brought you.
+
+Perhaps Sturt answers by substitution: "We cannot explain the
+origin of an artistic intuition any more than the origin of any
+other primary function of our nature. But if as I believe
+civilization is mainly founded on those kinds of unselfish human
+interests which we call knowledge and morality it is easily
+intelligible that we should have a parallel interest which we
+call art closely akin and lending powerful support to the other
+two. It is intelligible too that moral goodness, intellectual
+power, high vitality, and strength should be approved by the
+intuition." This reduces, or rather brings the problem back to a
+tangible basis namely:--the translation of an artistic intuition
+into musical sounds approving and reflecting, or endeavoring to
+approve and reflect, a "moral goodness," a "high vitality," etc.,
+or any other human attribute mental, moral, or spiritual.
+
+Can music do MORE than this? Can it DO this? and if so who and
+what is to determine the degree of its failure or success? The
+composer, the performer (if there be any), or those who have to
+listen? One hearing or a century of hearings?-and if it isn't
+successful or if it doesn't fail what matters it?--the fear of
+failure need keep no one from the attempt for if the composer is
+sensitive he need but launch forth a countercharge of "being
+misunderstood" and hide behind it. A theme that the composer sets
+up as "moral goodness" may sound like "high vitality," to his
+friend and but like an outburst of "nervous weakness" or only a
+"stagnant pool" to those not even his enemies. Expression to a
+great extent is a matter of terms and terms are anyone's. The
+meaning of "God" may have a billion interpretations if there be
+that many souls in the world.
+
+There is a moral in the "Nominalist and Realist" that will prove
+all sums. It runs something like this: No matter how sincere and
+confidential men are in trying to know or assuming that they do
+know each other's mood and habits of thought, the net result
+leaves a feeling that all is left unsaid; for the reason of their
+incapacity to know each other, though they use the same words.
+They go on from one explanation to another but things seem to
+stand about as they did in the beginning "because of that vicious
+assumption." But we would rather believe that music is beyond any
+analogy to word language and that the time is coming, but not in
+our lifetime, when it will develop possibilities unconceivable
+now,--a language, so transcendent, that its heights and depths
+will be common to all mankind.
+
+
+II--Emerson
+
+
+1
+
+
+It has seemed to the writer, that Emerson is greater--his
+identity more complete perhaps--in the realms of revelation--
+natural disclosure--than in those of poetry, philosophy, or
+prophecy. Though a great poet and prophet, he is greater,
+possibly, as an invader of the unknown,--America's deepest
+explorer of the spiritual immensities,--a seer painting his
+discoveries in masses and with any color that may lie at hand--
+cosmic, religious, human, even sensuous; a recorder, freely
+describing the inevitable struggle in the soul's uprise--
+perceiving from this inward source alone, that every "ultimate
+fact is only the first of a new series"; a discoverer, whose
+heart knows, with Voltaire, "that man seriously reflects when
+left alone," and would then discover, if he can, that "wondrous
+chain which links the heavens with earth--the world of beings
+subject to one law." In his reflections Emerson, unlike Plato, is
+not afraid to ride Arion's Dolphin, and to go wherever he is
+carried--to Parnassus or to "Musketaquid."
+
+We see him standing on a summit, at the door of the infinite
+where many men do not care to climb, peering into the mysteries
+of life, contemplating the eternities, hurling back whatever he
+discovers there,--now, thunderbolts for us to grasp, if we can,
+and translate--now placing quietly, even tenderly, in our hands,
+things that we may see without effort--if we won't see them, so
+much the worse for us.
+
+We see him,--a mountain-guide, so intensely on the lookout for
+the trail of his star, that he has no time to stop and retrace
+his footprints, which may often seem indistinct to his followers,
+who find it easier and perhaps safer to keep their eyes on the
+ground. And there is a chance that this guide could not always
+retrace his steps if he tried--and why should he!--he is on the
+road, conscious only that, though his star may not lie within
+walking distance, he must reach it before his wagon can be
+hitched to it--a Prometheus illuminating a privilege of the Gods-
+-lighting a fuse that is laid towards men. Emerson reveals the
+less not by an analysis of itself, but by bringing men towards
+the greater. He does not try to reveal, personally, but leads,
+rather, to a field where revelation is a harvest-part, where it
+is known by the perceptions of the soul towards the absolute law.
+He leads us towards this law, which is a realization of what
+experience has suggested and philosophy hoped for. He leads us,
+conscious that the aspects of truth, as he sees them, may change
+as often as truth remains constant. Revelation perhaps, is but
+prophecy intensified--the intensifying of its mason-work as well
+as its steeple. Simple prophecy, while concerned with the past,
+reveals but the future, while revelation is concerned with all
+time. The power in Emerson's prophecy confuses it with--or at
+least makes it seem to approach--revelation. It is prophecy with
+no time element. Emerson tells, as few bards could, of what will
+happen in the past, for his future is eternity and the past is a
+part of that. And so like all true prophets, he is always modern,
+and will grow modern with the years--for his substance is not
+relative but a measure of eternal truths determined rather by a
+universalist than by a partialist. He measured, as Michel Angelo
+said true artists should, "with the eye and not the hand." But to
+attribute modernism to his substance, though not to his
+expression, is an anachronism--and as futile as calling today's
+sunset modern.
+
+As revelation and prophecy, in their common acceptance are
+resolved by man, from the absolute and universal, to the relative
+and personal, and as Emerson's tendency is fundamentally the
+opposite, it is easier, safer and so apparently clearer, to think
+of him as a poet of natural and revealed philosophy. And as such,
+a prophet--but not one to be confused with those singing
+soothsayers, whose pockets are filled, as are the pockets of
+conservative-reaction and radical demagoguery in pulpit, street-
+corner, bank and columns, with dogmatic fortune-tellings.
+Emerson, as a prophet in these lower heights, was a conservative,
+in that he seldom lost his head, and a radical, in that he seldom
+cared whether he lost it or not. He was a born radical as are all
+true conservatives. He was too much "absorbed by the absolute,"
+too much of the universal to be either--though he could be both
+at once. To Cotton Mather, he would have been a demagogue, to a
+real demagogue he would not be understood, as it was with no self
+interest that he laid his hand on reality. The nearer any subject
+or an attribute of it, approaches to the perfect truth at its
+base, the more does qualification become necessary. Radicalism
+must always qualify itself. Emerson clarifies as he qualifies, by
+plunging into, rather than "emerging from Carlyle's
+soul-confusing labyrinths of speculative radicalism." The
+radicalism that we hear much about today, is not Emerson's kind--
+but of thinner fiber--it qualifies itself by going to _A_ "root"
+and often cutting other roots in the process; it is usually
+impotent as dynamite in its cause and sometimes as harmful to the
+wholesome progress of all causes; it is qualified by its failure.
+But the Radicalism of Emerson plunges to all roots, it becomes
+greater than itself--greater than all its formal or informal
+doctrines--too advanced and too conservative for any specific
+result--too catholic for all the churches--for the nearer it is
+to truth, the farther it is from a truth, and the more it is
+qualified by its future possibilities.
+
+Hence comes the difficulty--the futility of attempting to fasten
+on Emerson any particular doctrine, philosophic, or religious
+theory. Emerson wrings the neck of any law, that would become
+exclusive and arrogant, whether a definite one of metaphysics or
+an indefinite one of mechanics. He hacks his way up and down, as
+near as he can to the absolute, the oneness of all nature both
+human and spiritual, and to God's benevolence. To him the
+ultimate of a conception is its vastness, and it is probably
+this, rather than the "blind-spots" in his expression that makes
+us incline to go with him but half-way; and then stand and build
+dogmas. But if we can not follow all the way--if we do not always
+clearly perceive the whole picture, we are at least free to
+imagine it--he makes us feel that we are free to do so; perhaps
+that is the most he asks. For he is but reaching out through and
+beyond mankind, trying to see what he can of the infinite and its
+immensities--throwing back to us whatever he can--but ever
+conscious that he but occasionally catches a glimpse; conscious
+that if he would contemplate the greater, he must wrestle with
+the lesser, even though it dims an outline; that he must struggle
+if he would hurl back anything--even a broken fragment for men to
+examine and perchance in it find a germ of some part of truth;
+conscious at times, of the futility of his effort and its
+message, conscious of its vagueness, but ever hopeful for it, and
+confident that its foundation, if not its medium is somewhere
+near the eventual and "absolute good" the divine truth underlying
+all life. If Emerson must be dubbed an optimist--then an optimist
+fighting pessimism, but not wallowing in it; an optimist, who
+does not study pessimism by learning to enjoy it, whose
+imagination is greater than his curiosity, who seeing the sign-
+post to Erebus, is strong enough to go the other way. This
+strength of optimism, indeed the strength we find always
+underlying his tolerance, his radicalism, his searches,
+prophecies, and revelations, is heightened and made efficient by
+"imagination-penetrative," a thing concerned not with the
+combining but the apprehending of things. A possession, akin to
+the power, Ruskin says, all great pictures have, which "depends
+on the penetration of the imagination into the true nature of the
+thing represented, and on the scorn of the imagination for all
+shackles and fetters of mere external fact that stand in the way
+of its suggestiveness"--a possession which gives the strength of
+distance to his eyes, and the strength of muscle to his soul.
+With this he slashes down through the loam--nor would he have us
+rest there. If we would dig deep enough only to plant a doctrine,
+from one part of him, he would show us the quick-silver in that
+furrow. If we would creed his Compensation, there is hardly a
+sentence that could not wreck it, or could not show that the idea
+is no tenet of a philosophy, but a clear (though perhaps not
+clearly hurled on the canvas) illustration of universal justice--
+of God's perfect balances; a story of the analogy or better the
+identity of polarity and duality in Nature with that in morality.
+The essay is no more a doctrine than the law of gravitation is.
+If we would stop and attribute too much to genius, he shows us
+that "what is best written or done by genius in the world, was no
+one man's work, but came by wide social labor, when a thousand
+wrought like one, sharing the same impulse." If we would find in
+his essay on Montaigne, a biography, we are shown a biography of
+scepticism--and in reducing this to relation between "sensation
+and the morals" we are shown a true Montaigne--we know the man
+better perhaps by this less presentation. If we would stop and
+trust heavily on the harvest of originality, he shows us that
+this plant--this part of the garden--is but a relative thing. It
+is dependent also on the richness that ages have put into the
+soil. "Every thinker is retrospective."
+
+Thus is Emerson always beating down through the crust towards the
+first fire of life, of death and of eternity. Read where you
+will, each sentence seems not to point to the next but to the
+undercurrent of all. If you would label his a religion of ethics
+or of morals, he shames you at the outset, "for ethics is but a
+reflection of a divine personality." All the religions this world
+has ever known, have been but the aftermath of the ethics of one
+or another holy person; "as soon as character appears be sure
+love will"; "the intuition of the moral sentiment is but the
+insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul"; but these
+laws cannot be catalogued.
+
+If a versatilist, a modern Goethe, for instance, could put all of
+Emerson's admonitions into practice, a constant permanence would
+result,--an eternal short-circuit--a focus of equal X-rays. Even
+the value or success of but one precept is dependent, like that
+of a ball-game as much on the batting-eye as on the pitching-arm.
+The inactivity of permanence is what Emerson will not permit. He
+will not accept repose against the activity of truth. But this
+almost constant resolution of every insight towards the absolute
+may get a little on one's nerves, if one is at all partial-wise
+to the specific; one begins to ask what is the absolute anyway,
+and why try to look clear through the eternities and the
+unknowable even out of the other end. Emerson's fondness for
+flying to definite heights on indefinite wings, and the tendency
+to over-resolve, becomes unsatisfying to the impatient, who want
+results to come as they walk. Probably this is a reason that it
+is occasionally said that Emerson has no vital message for the
+rank and file. He has no definite message perhaps for the
+literal, but messages are all vital, as much, by reason of his
+indefiniteness, as in spite of it.
+
+There is a suggestion of irony in the thought that the power of
+his vague but compelling vitality, which ever sweeps us on in
+spite of ourselves, might not have been his, if it had not been
+for those definite religious doctrines of the old New England
+theologians. For almost two centuries, Emerson's mental and
+spiritual muscles had been in training for him in the moral and
+intellectual contentions, a part of the religious exercise of his
+forebears. A kind of higher sensitiveness seems to culminate in
+him. It gives him a power of searching for a wider freedom of
+soul than theirs. The religion of Puritanism was based to a great
+extent, on a search for the unknowable, limited only by the dogma
+of its theology--a search for a path, so that the soul could
+better be conducted to the next world, while Emerson's
+transcendentalism was based on the wider search for the
+unknowable, unlimited in any way or by anything except the vast
+bounds of innate goodness, as it might be revealed to him in any
+phenomena of man, Nature, or God. This distinction, tenuous, in
+spite of the definite-sounding words, we like to believe has
+something peculiar to Emerson in it. We like to feel that it
+superimposes the one that makes all transcendentalism but an
+intellectual state, based on the theory of innate ideas, the
+reality of thought and the necessity of its freedom. For the
+philosophy of the religion, or whatever you will call it, of the
+Concord Transcendentalists is at least, more than an intellectual
+state--it has even some of the functions of the Puritan church--
+it is a spiritual state in which both soul and mind can better
+conduct themselves in this world, and also in the next--when the
+time comes. The search of the Puritan was rather along the path
+of logic, spiritualized, and the transcendentalist of reason,
+spiritualized--a difference in a broad sense between objective
+and subjective contemplation.
+
+The dislike of inactivity, repose and barter, drives one to the
+indefinite subjective. Emerson's lack of interest in permanence
+may cause him to present a subjectivity harsher on the outside
+than is essential. His very universalism occasionally seems a
+limitation. Somewhere here may lie a weakness--real to some,
+apparent to others--a weakness in so far as his relation becomes
+less vivid--to the many; insofar as he over-disregards the
+personal unit in the universal. If Genius is the most indebted,
+how much does it owe to those who would, but do not easily ride
+with it? If there is a weakness here is it the fault of substance
+or only of manner? If of the former, there is organic error
+somewhere, and Emerson will become less and less valuable to man.
+But this seems impossible, at least to us. Without considering
+his manner or expression here (it forms the general subject of
+the second section of this paper), let us ask if Emerson's
+substance needs an affinity, a supplement or even a complement or
+a gangplank? And if so, of what will it be composed?
+
+Perhaps Emerson could not have risen to his own, if it had not
+been for his Unitarian training and association with the
+churchmen emancipators. "Christianity is founded on, and supposes
+the authority of, reason, and cannot therefore oppose it, without
+subverting itself."..."Its office is to discern universal truths,
+great and eternal principles...the highest power of the soul."
+Thus preached Channing. Who knows but this pulpit aroused the
+younger Emerson to the possibilities of intuitive reasoning in
+spiritual realms? The influence of men like Channing in his fight
+for the dignity of human nature, against the arbitrary
+revelations that Calvinism had strapped on the church, and for
+the belief in the divine in human reason, doubtless encouraged
+Emerson in his unshackled search for the infinite, and gave him
+premises which he later took for granted instead of carrying them
+around with him. An over-interest, not an under-interest in
+Christian ideal aims, may have caused him to feel that the
+definite paths were well established and doing their share, and
+that for some to reach the same infinite ends, more paths might
+be opened--paths which would in themselves, and in a more
+transcendent way, partake of the spiritual nature of the land in
+quest,--another expression of God's Kingdom in Man. Would you
+have the indefinite paths ALWAYS supplemented by the shadow of
+the definite one of a first influence?
+
+A characteristic of rebellion, is that its results are often
+deepest, when the rebel breaks not from the worst to the
+greatest, but from the great to the greater. The youth of the
+rebel increases this characteristic. The innate rebellious spirit
+in young men is active and buoyant. They could rebel against and
+improve the millennium. This excess of enthusiasm at the
+inception of a movement, causes loss of perspective; a natural
+tendency to undervalue the great in that which is being taken as
+a base of departure. A "youthful sedition" of Emerson was his
+withdrawal from the communion, perhaps, the most socialistic
+doctrine (or rather symbol) of the church--a "commune" above
+property or class.
+
+Picking up an essay on religion of a rather remarkable-minded
+boy--perhaps with a touch of genius--written when he was still in
+college, and so serving as a good illustration in point--we
+read--"Every thinking man knows that the church is dead." But
+every thinking man knows that the church-part of the church
+always has been dead--that part seen by candle-light, not Christ-
+light. Enthusiasm is restless and hasn't time to see that if the
+church holds itself as nothing but the symbol of the greater
+light it is life itself--as a symbol of a symbol it is dead. Many
+of the sincerest followers of Christ never heard of Him. It is
+the better influence of an institution that arouses in the deep
+and earnest souls a feeling of rebellion to make its aims more
+certain. It is their very sincerity that causes these seekers for
+a freer vision to strike down for more fundamental, universal,
+and perfect truths, but with such feverish enthusiasm, that they
+appear to overthink themselves--a subconscious way of going
+Godward perhaps. The rebel of the twentieth century says: "Let us
+discard God, immortality, miracle--but be not untrue to
+ourselves." Here he, no doubt, in a sincere and exalted moment,
+confuses God with a name. He apparently feels that there is a
+separable difference between natural and revealed religion. He
+mistakes the powers behind them, to be fundamentally separate. In
+the excessive keenness of his search, he forgets that "being true
+to ourselves" IS God, that the faintest thought of immortality IS
+God, and that God is "miracle." Over-enthusiasm keeps one from
+letting a common experience of a day translate what is stirring
+the soul. The same inspiring force that arouses the young rebel,
+brings later in life a kind of "experience-afterglow," a
+realization that the soul cannot discard or limit anything. Would
+you have the youthful enthusiasm of rebellion, which Emerson
+carried beyond his youth always supplemented by the shadow of
+experience?
+
+Perhaps it is not the narrow minded alone that have no interest
+in anything, but in its relation to their personality. Is the
+Christian Religion, to which Emerson owes embryo-ideals, anything
+but the revelation of God in a personality--a revelation so that
+the narrow mind could become opened? But the tendency to over-
+personalize personality may also have suggested to Emerson the
+necessity for more universal, and impersonal paths, though they
+be indefinite of outline and vague of ascent. Could you journey,
+with equal benefit, if they were less so? Would you have the
+universal always supplemented by the shadow of the personal? If
+this view is accepted, and we doubt that it can be by the
+majority, Emerson's substance could well bear a supplement,
+perhaps an affinity. Something that will support that which some
+conceive he does not offer. Something that will help answer Alton
+Locke's question: "What has Emerson for the working-man?" and
+questions of others who look for the gang-plank before the ship
+comes in sight. Something that will supply the definite banister
+to the infinite, which it is said he keeps invisible. Something
+that will point a crossroad from "his personal" to "his nature."
+Something that may be in Thoreau or Wordsworth, or in another
+poet whose songs "breathe of a new morning of a higher life
+though a definite beauty in Nature"--or something that will show
+the birth of his ideal and hold out a background of revealed
+religion, as a perspective to his transcendent religion--a
+counterpoise in his rebellion--which we feel Channing or Dr.
+Bushnell, or other saints known and unknown might supply.
+
+If the arc must be completed--if there are those who would have
+the great, dim outlines of Emerson fulfilled, it is fortunate
+that there are Bushnells, and Wordsworths, to whom they may
+appeal--to say nothing of the Vedas, the Bible, or their own
+souls. But such possibilities and conceptions, the deeper they
+are received, the more they seem to reduce their need. Emerson's
+Circle may be a better whole, without its complement. Perhaps his
+"unsatiable demand for unity, the need to recognize one nature in
+all variety of objects," would have been impaired, if something
+should make it simpler for men to find the identity they at first
+want in his substance. "Draw if thou canst the mystic line
+severing rightly his from thine, which is human, which divine."
+Whatever means one would use to personalize Emerson's natural
+revelation, whether by a vision or a board walk, the vastness of
+his aims and the dignity of his tolerance would doubtless cause
+him to accept or at least try to accept, and use "magically as a
+part of his fortune." He would modestly say, perhaps, "that the
+world is enlarged for him, not by finding new objects, but by
+more affinities, and potencies than those he already has." But,
+indeed, is not enough manifestation already there? Is not the
+asking that it be made more manifest forgetting that "we are not
+strong by our power to penetrate, but by our relatedness?" Will
+more signs create a greater sympathy? Is not our weak suggestion
+needed only for those content with their own hopelessness?
+
+Others may lead others to him, but he finds his problem in making
+"gladness hope and fortitude flow from his page," rather than in
+arranging that our hearts be there to receive it. The first is
+his duty--the last ours!
+
+
+2
+
+
+A devotion to an end tends to undervalue the means. A power of
+revelation may make one more concerned about his perceptions of
+the soul's nature than the way of their disclosure. Emerson is
+more interested in what he perceives than in his expression of
+it. He is a creator whose intensity is consumed more with the
+substance of his creation than with the manner by which he shows
+it to others. Like Petrarch he seems more a discoverer of Beauty
+than an imparter of it. But these discoveries, these devotions to
+aims, these struggles toward the absolute, do not these in
+themselves, impart something, if not all, of their own unity and
+coherence--which is not received, as such, at first, nor is
+foremost in their expression. It must be remembered that "truth"
+was what Emerson was after--not strength of outline, or even
+beauty except in so far as they might reveal themselves,
+naturally, in his explorations towards the infinite. To think
+hard and deeply and to say what is thought, regardless of
+consequences, may produce a first impression, either of great
+translucence, or of great muddiness, but in the latter there may
+be hidden possibilities. Some accuse Brahms' orchestration of
+being muddy. This may be a good name for a first impression of
+it. But if it should seem less so, he might not be saying what he
+thought. The mud may be a form of sincerity which demands that
+the heart be translated, rather than handed around through the
+pit. A clearer scoring might have lowered the thought. Carlyle
+told Emerson that some of his paragraphs didn't cohere. Emerson
+wrote by sentences or phrases, rather than by logical sequence.
+His underlying plan of work seems based on the large unity of a
+series of particular aspects of a subject, rather than on the
+continuity of its expression. As thoughts surge to his mind, he
+fills the heavens with them, crowds them in, if necessary, but
+seldom arranges them, along the ground first. Among class-room
+excuses for Emerson's imperfect coherence and lack of unity, is
+one that remembers that his essays were made from lecture notes.
+His habit, often in lecturing, was to compile his ideas as they
+came to him on a general subject, in scattered notes, and when on
+the platform, to trust to the mood of the occasion, to assemble
+them. This seems a specious explanation, though true to fact.
+Vagueness, is at times, an indication of nearness to a perfect
+truth. The definite glory of Bernard of Cluny's Celestial City,
+is more beautiful than true--probably. Orderly reason does not
+always have to be a visible part of all great things. Logic may
+possibly require that unity means something ascending in self-
+evident relation to the parts and to the whole, with no ellipsis
+in the ascent. But reason may permit, even demand an ellipsis,
+and genius may not need the self-evident part. In fact, these
+parts may be the "blind-spots" in the progress of unity. They may
+be filled with little but repetition. "Nature loves analogy and
+hates repetition." Botany reveals evolution not permanence. An
+apparent confusion if lived with long enough may become orderly.
+Emerson was not writing for lazy minds, though one of the keenest
+of his academic friends said that, he (Emerson) could not explain
+many of his own pages. But why should he!--he explained them when
+he discovered them--the moment before he spoke or wrote them. A
+rare experience of a moment at daybreak, when something in nature
+seems to reveal all consciousness, cannot be explained at noon.
+Yet it is a part of the day's unity. At evening, nature is
+absorbed by another experience. She dislikes to explain as much
+as to repeat. It is conceivable, that what is unified form to the
+author, or composer, may of necessity be formless to his
+audience. A home-run will cause more unity in the grand stand
+than in the season's batting average. If a composer once starts
+to compromise, his work will begin to drag on HIM. Before the end
+is reached, his inspiration has all gone up in sounds pleasing to
+his audience, ugly to him--sacrificed for the first acoustic--an
+opaque clarity, a picture painted for its hanging. Easy unity,
+like easy virtue, is easier to describe, when judged from its
+lapses than from its constancy. When the infidel admits God is
+great, he means only: "I am lazy--it is easier to talk than
+live." Ruskin also says: "Suppose I like the finite curves best,
+who shall say I'm right or wrong? No one. It is simply a question
+of experience." You may not be able to experience a symphony,
+even after twenty performances. Initial coherence today may be
+dullness tomorrow probably because formal or outward unity
+depends so much on repetition, sequences, antitheses, paragraphs
+with inductions and summaries. Macaulay had that kind of unity.
+Can you read him today? Emerson rather goes out and shouts: "I'm
+thinking of the sun's glory today and I'll let his light shine
+through me. I'll say any damn thing that this inspires me with."
+Perhaps there are flashes of light, still in cipher, kept there
+by unity, the code of which the world has not yet discovered. The
+unity of one sentence inspires the unity of the whole--though its
+physique is as ragged as the Dolomites.
+
+Intense lights--vague shadows--great pillars in a horizon are
+difficult things to nail signboards to. Emerson's outward-inward
+qualities make him hard to classify, but easy for some. There are
+many who like to say that he--even all the Concord men--are
+intellectuals. Perhaps--but intellectuals who wear their brains
+nearer the heart than some of their critics. It is as dangerous
+to determine a characteristic by manner as by mood. Emerson is a
+pure intellectual to those who prefer to take him as literally as
+they can. There are reformers, and in "the form" lies their
+interest, who prefer to stand on the plain, and then insist they
+see from the summit. Indolent legs supply the strength of eye for
+their inspiration. The intellect is never a whole. It is where
+the soul finds things. It is often the only track to the over-
+values. It appears a whole--but never becomes one even in the
+stock exchange, or the convent, or the laboratory. In the
+cleverest criminal, it is but a way to a low ideal. It can never
+discard the other part of its duality--the soul or the void where
+the soul ought to be. So why classify a quality always so
+relative that it is more an agency than substance; a quality that
+disappears when classified. "The life of the All must stream
+through us to make the man and the moment great." A sailor with a
+precious cargo doesn't analyze the water. Because Emerson had
+generations of Calvinistic sermons in his blood, some
+cataloguers, would localize or provincialize him, with the
+sternness of the old Puritan mind. They make him THAT, hold him
+THERE. They lean heavily on what they find of the above influence
+in him. They won't follow the rivers in his thought and the play
+of his soul. And their cousin cataloguers put him in another
+pigeon-hole. They label him "ascetic." They translate his outward
+serenity into an impression of severity. But truth keeps one from
+being hysterical. Is a demagogue a friend of the people because
+he will lie to them to make them cry and raise false hopes? A
+search for perfect truths throws out a beauty more spiritual than
+sensuous. A sombre dignity of style is often confused by under-
+imagination and by surface-sentiment, with austerity. If
+Emerson's manner is not always beautiful in accordance with
+accepted standards, why not accept a few other standards? He is
+an ascetic, in that he refuses to compromise content with manner.
+But a real ascetic is an extremist who has but one height. Thus
+may come the confusion, of one who says that Emerson carries him
+high, but then leaves him always at THAT height--no higher--a
+confusion, mistaking a latent exultation for an ascetic reserve.
+The rules of Thorough Bass can be applied to his scale of flight
+no more than they can to the planetary system. Jadassohn, if
+Emerson were literally a composer, could no more analyze his
+harmony than a guide-to-Boston could. A microscope might show
+that he uses chords of the 9th, 1lth, or the 99th, but a lens far
+different tells us they are used with different aims from those
+of Debussy. Emerson is definite in that his art is based on
+something stronger than the amusing or at its best the beguiling
+of a few mortals. If he uses a sensuous chord, it is not for
+sensual ears. His harmonies may float, if the wind blows in that
+direction, through a voluptuous atmosphere, but he has not
+Debussy's fondness for trying to blow a sensuous atmosphere from
+his own voluptuous cheeks. And so he is an ascetic! There is a
+distance between jowl and soul--and it is not measured by the
+fraction of an inch between Concord and Paris. On the other hand,
+if one thinks that his harmony contains no dramatic chords,
+because no theatrical sound is heard, let him listen to the
+finale of "Success," or of "Spiritual Laws," or to some of the
+poems, "Brahma" or "Sursum Corda," for example. Of a truth his
+Codas often seem to crystallize in a dramatic, though serene and
+sustained way, the truths of his subject--they become more active
+and intense, but quieter and deeper.
+
+Then there comes along another set of cataloguers. They put him
+down as a "classicist," or a romanticist, or an eclectic. Because
+a prophet is a child of romanticism--because revelation is
+classic, because eclecticism quotes from eclectic Hindu
+Philosophy, a more sympathetic cataloguer may say, that Emerson
+inspires courage of the quieter kind and delight of the higher
+kind.
+
+The same well-bound school teacher who told the boys that Thoreau
+was a naturalist because he didn't like to work, puts down
+Emerson as a "classic," and Hawthorne as a "romantic." A loud
+voice made this doubly TRUE and SURE to be on the examination
+paper. But this teacher of "truth AND dogma" apparently forgot
+that there is no such thing as "classicism or romanticism." One
+has but to go to the various definitions of these to know that.
+If you go to a classic definition you know what a true classic
+is, and similarly a "true romantic." But if you go to both, you
+have an algebraic formula, x = x, a cancellation, an apercu, and
+hence satisfying; if you go to all definitions you have another
+formula x > x, a destruction, another apercu, and hence
+satisfying. Professor Beers goes to the dictionary (you wouldn't
+think a college professor would be as reckless as that). And so
+he can say that "romantic" is "pertaining to the style of the
+Christian and popular literature of the Middle Ages," a Roman
+Catholic mode of salvation (not this definition but having a
+definition). And so Prof. B. can say that Walter Scott is a
+romanticist (and Billy Phelps a classic--sometimes). But for our
+part Dick Croker is a classic and job a romanticist. Another
+professor, Babbitt by name, links up Romanticism with Rousseau,
+and charges against it many of man's troubles. He somehow likes
+to mix it up with sin. He throws saucers at it, but in a
+scholarly, interesting, sincere, and accurate way. He uncovers a
+deformed foot, gives it a name, from which we are allowed to
+infer that the covered foot is healthy and named classicism. But
+no Christian Scientist can prove that Christ never had a stomach-
+ache. The Architecture of Humanism [Footnote: Geoffrey Scott
+(Constable & Co.)] tells us that "romanticism consists of...a
+poetic sensibility towards the remote, as such." But is Plato a
+classic or towards the remote? Is Classicism a poor relation of
+time--not of man? Is a thing classic or romantic because it is or
+is not passed by that biologic--that indescribable stream-of-
+change going on in all life? Let us settle the point for "good,"
+and say that a thing is classic if it is thought of in terms of
+the past and romantic if thought of in terms of the future--and a
+thing thought of in terms of the present is--well, that is
+impossible! Hence, we allow ourselves to say, that Emerson is
+neither a classic or romantic but both--and both not only at
+different times in one essay, but at the same time in one
+sentence--in one word. And must we admit it, so is everyone. If
+you don't believe it, there must be some true definition you
+haven't seen. Chopin shows a few things that Bach forgot--but he
+is not eclectic, they say. Brahms shows many things that Bach did
+remember, so he is an eclectic, they say. Leoncavallo writes
+pretty verses and Palestrina is a priest, and Confucius inspires
+Scriabin. A choice is freedom. Natural selection is but one of
+Nature's tunes. "All melodious poets shall be hoarse as street
+ballads, when once the penetrating keynote of nature and spirit
+is sounded--the earth-beat, sea-beat, heart-beat, which make the
+tune to which the sun rolls, and the globule of blood and the sap
+of the trees."
+
+An intuitive sense of values, tends to make Emerson use social,
+political, and even economic phenomena, as means of expression,
+as the accidental notes in his scale--rather than as ends, even
+lesser ends. In the realization that they are essential parts of
+the greater values, he does not confuse them with each other. He
+remains undisturbed except in rare instances, when the lower
+parts invade and seek to displace the higher. He was not afraid
+to say that "there are laws which should not be too well obeyed."
+To him, slavery was not a social or a political or an economic
+question, nor even one of morals or of ethics, but one of
+universal spiritual freedom only. It mattered little what party,
+or what platform, or what law of commerce governed men. Was man
+governing himself? Social error and virtue were but relative.
+This habit of not being hindered by using, but still going beyond
+the great truths of living, to the greater truths of life gave
+force to his influence over the materialists. Thus he seems to us
+more a regenerator than a reformer--more an interpreter of life's
+reflexes than of life's facts, perhaps. Here he appears greater
+than Voltaire or Rousseau and helped, perhaps, by the centrality
+of his conceptions, he could arouse the deeper spiritual and
+moral emotions, without causing his listeners to distort their
+physical ones. To prove that mind is over matter, he doesn't
+place matter over mind. He is not like the man who, because he
+couldn't afford both, gave up metaphysics for an automobile, and
+when he ran over a man blamed metaphysics. He would not have us
+get over-excited about physical disturbance but have it accepted
+as a part of any progress in culture, moral, spiritual or
+aesthetic. If a poet retires to the mountain-side, to avoid the
+vulgar unculture of men, and their physical disturbance, so that
+he may better catch a nobler theme for his symphony, Emerson
+tells him that "man's culture can spare nothing, wants all
+material, converts all impediments into instruments, all enemies
+into power." The latest product of man's culture--the aeroplane,
+then sails o'er the mountain and instead of an inspiration--a
+spray of tobacco-juice falls on the poet. "Calm yourself, Poet!"
+says Emerson, "culture will convert furies into muses and hells
+into benefit. This wouldn't have befallen you if it hadn't been
+for the latest transcendent product of the genius of culture" (we
+won't say what kind), a consummation of the dreams of poets, from
+David to Tennyson. Material progress is but a means of
+expression. Realize that man's coarseness has its future and will
+also be refined in the gradual uprise. Turning the world upside
+down may be one of its lesser incidents. It is the cause, seldom
+the effect that interests Emerson. He can help the cause--the
+effect must help itself. He might have said to those who talk
+knowingly about the cause of war--or of the last war, and who
+would trace it down through long vistas of cosmic, political,
+moral evolution and what not--he might say that the cause of it
+was as simple as that of any dogfight--the "hog-mind" of the
+minority against the universal mind, the majority. The un-courage
+of the former fears to believe in the innate goodness of mankind.
+The cause is always the same, the effect different by chance; it
+is as easy for a hog, even a stupid one, to step on a box of
+matches under a tenement with a thousand souls, as under an empty
+bird-house. The many kindly burn up for the few; for the minority
+is selfish and the majority generous. The minority has ruled the
+world for physical reasons. The physical reasons are being
+removed by this "converting culture." Webster will not much
+longer have to grope for the mind of his constituency. The
+majority--the people--will need no intermediary. Governments will
+pass from the representative to the direct. The hog-mind is the
+principal thing that is making this transition slow. The biggest
+prop to the hog-mind is pride--pride in property and the power
+property gives. Ruskin backs this up--"it is at the bottom of all
+great mistakes; other passions do occasional good, but whenever
+pride puts in its word...it is all over with the artist." The
+hog-mind and its handmaidens in disorder, superficial brightness,
+fundamental dullness, then cowardice and suspicion--all a part of
+the minority (the non-people) the antithesis of everything called
+soul, spirit, Christianity, truth, freedom--will give way more
+and more to the great primal truths--that there is more good than
+evil, that God is on the side of the majority (the people)--that
+he is not enthusiastic about the minority (the non-people)--that
+he has made men greater than man, that he has made the universal
+mind and the over-soul greater and a part of the individual mind
+and soul--that he has made the Divine a part of all.
+
+Again, if a picture in economics is before him, Emerson plunges
+down to the things that ARE because they are BETTER than they
+are. If there is a row, which there usually is, between the ebb
+and flood tide, in the material ocean--for example, between the
+theory of the present order of competition, and of attractive and
+associated labor, he would sympathize with Ricardo, perhaps, that
+labor is the measure of value, but "embrace, as do generous
+minds, the proposition of labor shared by all." He would go
+deeper than political economics, strain out the self-factor from
+both theories, and make the measure of each pretty much the same,
+so that the natural (the majority) would win, but not to the
+disadvantage of the minority (the artificial) because this has
+disappeared--it is of the majority. John Stuart Mill's political
+economy is losing value because it was written by a mind more "a
+banker's" than a "poet's." The poet knows that there is no such
+thing as the perpetual law of supply and demand, perhaps not of
+demand and supply--or of the wage-fund, or price-level, or
+increments earned or unearned; and that the existence of personal
+or public property may not prove the existence of God.
+
+Emerson seems to use the great definite interests of humanity to
+express the greater, indefinite, spiritual values--to fulfill
+what he can in his realms of revelation. Thus, it seems that so
+close a relation exists between his content and expression, his
+substance and manner, that if he were more definite in the latter
+he would lose power in the former,--perhaps some of those
+occasional flashes would have been unexpressed--flashes that have
+gone down through the world and will flame on through the ages--
+flashes that approach as near the Divine as Beethoven in his most
+inspired moments--flashes of transcendent beauty, of such
+universal import, that they may bring, of a sudden, some intimate
+personal experience, and produce the same indescribable effect
+that comes in rare instances, to men, from some common sensation.
+In the early morning of a Memorial Day, a boy is awakened by
+martial music--a village band is marching down the street, and as
+the strains of Reeves' majestic Seventh Regiment March come
+nearer and nearer, he seems of a sudden translated--a moment of
+vivid power comes, a consciousness of material nobility, an
+exultant something gleaming with the possibilities of this life,
+an assurance that nothing is impossible, and that the whole world
+lies at his feet. But as the band turns the corner, at the
+soldiers' monument, and the march steps of the Grand Army become
+fainter and fainter, the boy's vision slowly vanishes--his
+"world" becomes less and less probable--but the experience ever
+lies within him in its reality. Later in life, the same boy hears
+the Sabbath morning bell ringing out from the white steeple at
+the "Center," and as it draws him to it, through the autumn
+fields of sumac and asters, a Gospel hymn of simple devotion
+comes out to him--"There's a wideness in God's mercy"--an instant
+suggestion of that Memorial Day morning comes--but the moment is
+of deeper import--there is no personal exultation--no intimate
+world vision--no magnified personal hope--and in their place a
+profound sense of a spiritual truth,--a sin within reach of
+forgiveness--and as the hymn voices die away, there lies at his
+feet--not the world, but the figure of the Saviour--he sees an
+unfathomable courage, an immortality for the lowest, the vastness
+in humility, the kindness of the human heart, man's noblest
+strength, and he knows that God is nothing--nothing but love!
+Whence cometh the wonder of a moment? From sources we know not.
+But we do know that from obscurity, and from this higher Orpheus
+come measures of sphere melodies [note: Paraphrased from a
+passage in Sartor Resartus.] flowing in wild, native tones,
+ravaging the souls of men, flowing now with thousand-fold
+accompaniments and rich symphonies through all our hearts;
+modulating and divinely leading them.
+
+
+3
+
+
+What is character? In how far does it sustain the soul or the
+soul it? Is it a part of the soul? And then--what is the soul?
+Plato knows but cannot tell us. Every new-born man knows, but no
+one tells us. "Nature will not be disposed of easily. No power of
+genius has ever yet had the smallest success in explaining
+existence. The perfect enigma remains." As every blind man sees
+the sun, so character may be the part of the soul we, the blind,
+can see, and then have the right to imagine that the soul is each
+man's share of God, and character the muscle which tries to
+reveal its mysteries--a kind of its first visible radiance--the
+right to know that it is the voice which is always calling the
+pragmatist a fool.
+
+At any rate, it can be said that Emerson's character has much to
+do with his power upon us. Men who have known nothing of his
+life, have borne witness to this. It is directly at the root of
+his substance, and affects his manner only indirectly. It gives
+the sincerity to the constant spiritual hopefulness we are always
+conscious of, and which carries with it often, even when the
+expression is somber, a note of exultation in the victories of
+"the innate virtues" of man. And it is this, perhaps, that makes
+us feel his courage--not a self-courage, but a sympathetic one--
+courageous even to tenderness. It is the open courage of a kind
+heart, of not forcing opinions--a thing much needed when the
+cowardly, underhanded courage of the fanatic would FORCE opinion.
+It is the courage of believing in freedom, per se, rather than of
+trying to force everyone to SEE that you believe in it--the
+courage of the willingness to be reformed, rather than of
+reforming--the courage teaching that sacrifice is bravery, and
+force, fear. The courage of righteous indignation, of stammering
+eloquence, of spiritual insight, a courage ever contracting or
+unfolding a philosophy as it grows--a courage that would make the
+impossible possible. Oliver Wendell Holmes says that Emerson
+attempted the impossible in the Over-Soul--"an overflow of
+spiritual imagination." But he (Emerson) accomplished the
+impossible in attempting it, and still leaving it impossible. A
+courageous struggle to satisfy, as Thoreau says, "Hunger rather
+than the palate"--the hunger of a lifetime sometimes by one meal.
+His essay on the Pre-Soul (which he did not write) treats of that
+part of the over-soul's influence on unborn ages, and attempts
+the impossible only when it stops attempting it.
+
+Like all courageous souls, the higher Emerson soars, the more
+lowly he becomes. "Do you think the porter and the cook have no
+experiences, no wonders for you? Everyone knows as much as the
+Savant." To some, the way to be humble is to admonish the humble,
+not learn from them. Carlyle would have Emerson teach by more
+definite signs, rather than interpret his revelations, or shall
+we say preach? Admitting all the inspiration and help that Sartor
+Resartus has given in spite of its vaudeville and tragic stages,
+to many young men getting under way in the life of tailor or
+king, we believe it can be said (but very broadly said) that
+Emerson, either in the first or second series of essays, taken as
+a whole, gives, it seems to us, greater inspiration, partly
+because his manner is less didactic, less personally suggestive,
+perhaps less clearly or obviously human than Carlyle's. How
+direct this inspiration is is a matter of personal viewpoint,
+temperament, perhaps inheritance. Augustine Birrell says he does
+not feel it--and he seems not to even indirectly. Apparently "a
+non-sequacious author" can't inspire him, for Emerson seems to
+him a "little thin and vague." Is Emerson or the English climate
+to blame for this? He, Birrell, says a really great author
+dissipates all fears as to his staying power. (Though fears for
+our staying-power, not Emerson's, is what we would like
+dissipated.) Besides, around a really great author, there are no
+fears to dissipate. "A wise author never allows his reader's mind
+to be at large," but Emerson is not a wise author. His essay on
+Prudence has nothing to do with prudence, for to be wise and
+prudent he must put explanation first, and let his substance
+dissolve because of it. "How carefully," says Birrell again, "a
+really great author like Dr. Newman, or M. Renan, explains to you
+what he is going to do, and how he is going to do it." Personally
+we like the chance of having a hand in the "explaining." We
+prefer to look at flowers, but not through a botany, for it seems
+that if we look at them alone, we see a beauty of Nature's
+poetry, a direct gift from the Divine, and if we look at botany
+alone, we see the beauty of Nature's intellect, a direct gift of
+the Divine--if we look at both together, we see nothing.
+
+Thus it seems that Carlyle and Birrell would have it that courage
+and humility have something to do with "explanation"--and that it
+is not "a respect for all"--a faith in the power of "innate
+virtue" to perceive by "relativeness rather than penetration"--
+that causes Emerson to withhold explanation to a greater degree
+than many writers. Carlyle asks for more utility, and Birrell for
+more inspiration. But we like to believe that it is the height of
+Emerson's character, evidenced especially in his courage and
+humility that shades its quality, rather than that its virtue is
+less--that it is his height that will make him more and more
+valuable and more and more within the reach of all--whether it be
+by utility, inspiration, or other needs of the human soul.
+
+Cannot some of the most valuable kinds of utility and inspiration
+come from humility in its highest and purest forms? For is not
+the truest kind of humility a kind of glorified or transcendent
+democracy--the practicing it rather than the talking it--the not-
+wanting to level all finite things, but the being willing to be
+leveled towards the infinite? Until humility produces that frame
+of mind and spirit in the artist can his audience gain the
+greatest kind of utility and inspiration, which might be quite
+invisible at first? Emerson realizes the value of "the many,"--
+that the law of averages has a divine source. He recognizes the
+various life-values in reality--not by reason of their closeness
+or remoteness, but because he sympathizes with men who live them,
+and the majority do. "The private store of reason is not great--
+would that there were a public store for man," cries Pascal, but
+there is, says Emerson, it is the universal mind, an institution
+congenital with the common or over-soul. Pascal is discouraged,
+for he lets himself be influenced by surface political and
+religious history which shows the struggle of the group, led by
+an individual, rather than that of the individual led by himself
+--a struggle as much privately caused as privately led. The main-
+path of all social progress has been spiritual rather than
+intellectual in character, but the many bypaths of individual-
+materialism, though never obliterating the highway, have dimmed
+its outlines and caused travelers to confuse the colors along the
+road. A more natural way of freeing the congestion in the
+benefits of material progress will make it less difficult for the
+majority to recognize the true relation between the important
+spiritual and religious values and the less important
+intellectual and economic values. As the action of the intellect
+and universal mind becomes more and more identical, the clearer
+will the relation of all values become. But for physical reasons,
+the group has had to depend upon the individual as leaders, and
+the leaders with few exceptions restrained the universal mind--
+they trusted to the "private store," but now, thanks to the
+lessons of evolution, which Nature has been teaching men since
+and before the days of Socrates, the public store of reason is
+gradually taking the place of the once-needed leader. From the
+Chaldean tablet to the wireless message this public store has
+been wonderfully opened. The results of these lessons, the
+possibilities they are offering for ever coordinating the mind of
+humanity, the culmination of this age-instruction, are seen today
+in many ways. Labor Federation, Suffrage Extension, are two
+instances that come to mind among the many. In these
+manifestations, by reason of tradition, or the bad-habit part of
+tradition, the hog-mind of the few (the minority), comes in play.
+The possessors of this are called leaders, but even these "thick-
+skins" are beginning to see that the MOVEMENT is the leader, and
+that they are only clerks. Broadly speaking, the effects
+evidenced in the political side of history have so much of the
+physical because the causes have been so much of the physical. As
+a result the leaders for the most part have been under-average
+men, with skins thick, wits slick, and hands quick with under-
+values, otherwise they would not have become leaders. But the day
+of leaders, as such, is gradually closing--the people are
+beginning to lead themselves--the public store of reason is
+slowly being opened--the common universal mind and the common
+over-soul is slowly but inevitably coming into its own. "Let a
+man believe in God, not in names and places and persons. Let the
+great soul incarnated in some poor...sad and simple Joan, go out
+to service and sweep chimneys and scrub floors...its effulgent
+day beams cannot be muffled..." and then "to sweep and scrub will
+instantly appear supreme and beautiful actions...and all people
+will get brooms and mops." Perhaps, if all of Emerson--his works
+and his life--were to be swept away, and nothing of him but the
+record of the following incident remained to men--the influence
+of his soul would still be great. A working woman after coming
+from one of his lectures said: "I love to go to hear Emerson, not
+because I understand him, but because he looks as though he
+thought everybody was as good as he was." Is it not the courage--
+the spiritual hopefulness in his humility that makes this story
+possible and true? Is it not this trait in his character that
+sets him above all creeds--that gives him inspired belief in the
+common mind and soul? Is it not this courageous universalism that
+gives conviction to his prophecy and that makes his symphonies of
+revelation begin and end with nothing but the strength and beauty
+of innate goodness in man, in Nature and in God, the greatest and
+most inspiring theme of Concord Transcendental Philosophy, as we
+hear it.
+
+And it is from such a world-compelling theme and from such
+vantage ground, that Emerson rises to almost perfect freedom of
+action, of thought and of soul, in any direction and to any
+height. A vantage ground, somewhat vaster than Schelling's
+conception of transcendental philosophy--"a philosophy of Nature
+become subjective." In Concord it includes the objective and
+becomes subjective to nothing but freedom and the absolute law.
+It is this underlying courage of the purest humility that gives
+Emerson that outward aspect of serenity which is felt to so great
+an extent in much of his work, especially in his codas and
+perorations. And within this poised strength, we are conscious of
+that "original authentic fire" which Emerson missed in Shelley--
+we are conscious of something that is not dispassionate,
+something that is at times almost turbulent--a kind of furious
+calm lying deeply in the conviction of the eventual triumph of
+the soul and its union with God!
+
+Let us place the transcendent Emerson where he, himself, places
+Milton, in Wordsworth's apostrophe: "Pure as the naked heavens,
+majestic, free, so didst thou travel on life's common way in
+cheerful Godliness."
+
+The Godliness of spiritual courage and hopefulness--these fathers
+of faith rise to a glorified peace in the depth of his greater
+perorations. There is an "oracle" at the beginning of the Fifth
+Symphony--in those four notes lies one of Beethoven's greatest
+messages. We would place its translation above the relentlessness
+of fate knocking at the door, above the greater human-message of
+destiny, and strive to bring it towards the spiritual message of
+Emerson's revelations--even to the "common heart" of Concord--the
+Soul of humanity knocking at the door of the Divine mysteries,
+radiant in the faith that it will be opened--and the human become
+the Divine!
+
+
+III--Hawthorne
+
+
+The substance of Hawthorne is so dripping wet with the
+supernatural, the phantasmal, the mystical--so surcharged with
+adventures, from the deeper picturesque to the illusive
+fantastic, one unconsciously finds oneself thinking of him as a
+poet of greater imaginative impulse than Emerson or Thoreau. He
+was not a greater poet possibly than they--but a greater artist.
+Not only the character of his substance, but the care in his
+manner throws his workmanship, in contrast to theirs, into a kind
+of bas-relief. Like Poe he quite naturally and unconsciously
+reaches out over his subject to his reader. His mesmerism seeks
+to mesmerize us--beyond Zenobia's sister. But he s too great an
+artist to show his hand "in getting his audience," as Poe and
+Tschaikowsky occasionally do. His intellectual muscles are too
+strong to let him become over-influenced, as Ravel and Stravinsky
+seem to be by the morbidly fascinating--a kind of false beauty
+obtained by artistic monotony. However, we cannot but feel that
+he would weave his spell over us--as would the Grimms and Aesop.
+We feel as much under magic as the "Enchanted Frog." This is part
+of the artist's business. The effect is a part of his art-effort
+in its inception. Emerson's substance and even his manner has
+little to do with a designed effect--his thunderbolts or delicate
+fragments are flashed out regardless--they may knock us down or
+just spatter us--it matters little to him--but Hawthorne is more
+considerate; that is, he is more artistic, as men say.
+
+Hawthorne may be more noticeably indigenous or may have more
+local color, perhaps more national color than his Concord
+contemporaries. But the work of anyone who is somewhat more
+interested in psychology than in transcendental philosophy, will
+weave itself around individuals and their personalities. If the
+same anyone happens to live in Salem, his work is likely to be
+colored by the Salem wharves and Salem witches. If the same
+anyone happens to live in the "Old Manse" near the Concord Battle
+Bridge, he is likely "of a rainy day to betake himself to the
+huge garret," the secrets of which he wonders at, "but is too
+reverent of their dust and cobwebs to disturb." He is likely to
+"bow below the shriveled canvas of an old (Puritan) clergyman in
+wig and gown--the parish priest of a century ago--a friend of
+Whitefield." He is likely to come under the spell of this
+reverend Ghost who haunts the "Manse" and as it rains and darkens
+and the sky glooms through the dusty attic windows, he is likely
+"to muse deeply and wonderingly upon the humiliating fact that
+the works of man's intellect decay like those of his hands"...
+"that thought grows moldy," and as the garret is in
+Massachusetts, the "thought" and the "mold" are likely to be
+quite native. When the same anyone puts his poetry into novels
+rather than essays, he is likely to have more to say about the
+life around him--about the inherited mystery of the town--than a
+poet of philosophy is.
+
+In Hawthorne's usual vicinity, the atmosphere was charged with
+the somber errors and romance of eighteenth century New England,-
+-ascetic or noble New England as you like. A novel, of necessity,
+nails an art-effort down to some definite part or parts of the
+earth's surface--the novelist's wagon can't always be hitched to
+a star. To say that Hawthorne was more deeply interested than
+some of the other Concord writers--Emerson, for example--in the
+idealism peculiar to his native land (in so far as such idealism
+of a country can be conceived of as separate from the political)
+would be as unreasoning as to hold that he was more interested in
+social progress than Thoreau, because he was in the consular
+service and Thoreau was in no one's service--or that the War
+Governor of Massachusetts was a greater patriot than Wendell
+Phillips, who was ashamed of all political parties. Hawthorne's
+art was true and typically American--as is the art of all men
+living in America who believe in freedom of thought and who live
+wholesome lives to prove it, whatever their means of expression.
+
+Any comprehensive conception of Hawthorne, either in words or
+music, must have for its basic theme something that has to do
+with the influence of sin upon the conscience--something more
+than the Puritan conscience, but something which is permeated by
+it. In this relation he is wont to use what Hazlitt calls the
+"moral power of imagination." Hawthorne would try to spiritualize
+a guilty conscience. He would sing of the relentlessness of
+guilt, the inheritance of guilt, the shadow of guilt darkening
+innocent posterity. All of its sins and morbid horrors, its
+specters, its phantasmas, and even its hellish hopelessness play
+around his pages, and vanishing between the lines are the less
+guilty Elves of the Concord Elms, which Thoreau and Old Man
+Alcott may have felt, but knew not as intimately as Hawthorne.
+There is often a pervading melancholy about Hawthorne, as Faguet
+says of de Musset "without posture, without noise but
+penetrating." There is at times the mysticism and serenity of the
+ocean, which Jules Michelet sees in "its horizon rather than in
+its waters." There is a sensitiveness to supernatural sound
+waves. Hawthorne feels the mysteries and tries to paint them
+rather than explain them--and here, some may say that he is wiser
+in a more practical way and so more artistic than Emerson.
+Perhaps so, but no greater in the deeper ranges and profound
+mysteries of the interrelated worlds of human and spiritual life.
+
+This fundamental part of Hawthorne is not attempted in our music
+(the 2nd movement of the series) which is but an "extended
+fragment" trying to suggest some of his wilder, fantastical
+adventures into the half-childlike, half-fairylike phantasmal
+realms. It may have something to do with the children's
+excitement on that "frosty Berkshire morning, and the frost
+imagery on the enchanted hall window" or something to do with
+"Feathertop," the "Scarecrow," and his "Looking Glass" and the
+little demons dancing around his pipe bowl; or something to do
+with the old hymn tune that haunts the church and sings only to
+those in the churchyard, to protect them from secular noises, as
+when the circus parade comes down Main Street; or something to do
+with the concert at the Stamford camp meeting, or the "Slave's
+Shuffle"; or something to do with the Concord he-nymph, or the
+"Seven Vagabonds," or "Circe's Palace," or something else in the
+wonderbook--not something that happens, but the way something
+happens; or something to do with the "Celestial Railroad," or
+"Phoebe's Garden," or something personal, which tries to be
+"national" suddenly at twilight, and universal suddenly at
+midnight; or something about the ghost of a man who never lived,
+or about something that never will happen, or something else that
+is not.
+
+
+IV--"The Alcotts"
+
+
+If the dictagraph had been perfected in Bronson Alcott's time, he
+might now be a great writer. As it is, he goes down as Concord's
+greatest talker. "Great expecter," says Thoreau; "great feller,"
+says Sam Staples, "for talkin' big...but his daughters is the
+gals though--always DOIN' somethin'." Old Man Alcott, however,
+was usually "doin' somethin'" within. An internal grandiloquence
+made him melodious without; an exuberant, irrepressible,
+visionary absorbed with philosophy AS such; to him it was a kind
+of transcendental business, the profits of which supported his
+inner man rather than his family. Apparently his deep interest in
+spiritual physics, rather than metaphysics, gave a kind of
+hypnotic mellifluous effect to his voice when he sang his
+oracles; a manner something of a cross between an inside pompous
+self-assertion and an outside serious benevolence. But he was
+sincere and kindly intentioned in his eagerness to extend what he
+could of the better influence of the philosophic world as he saw
+it. In fact, there is a strong didactic streak in both father and
+daughter. Louisa May seldom misses a chance to bring out the
+moral of a homely virtue. The power of repetition was to them a
+natural means of illustration. It is said that the elder Alcott,
+while teaching school, would frequently whip himself when the
+scholars misbehaved, to show that the Divine Teacher-God-was
+pained when his children of the earth were bad. Quite often the
+boy next to the bad boy was punished, to show how sin involved
+the guiltless. And Miss Alcott is fond of working her story
+around, so that she can better rub in a moral precept--and the
+moral sometimes browbeats the story. But with all the elder
+Alcott's vehement, impracticable, visionary qualities, there was
+a sturdiness and a courage--at least, we like to think so. A
+Yankee boy who would cheerfully travel in those days, when
+distances were long and unmotored, as far from Connecticut as the
+Carolinas, earning his way by peddling, laying down his pack to
+teach school when opportunity offered, must possess a basic
+sturdiness. This was apparently not very evident when he got to
+preaching his idealism. An incident in Alcott's life helps
+confirm a theory--not a popular one--that men accustomed to
+wander around in the visionary unknown are the quickest and
+strongest when occasion requires ready action of the lower
+virtues. It often appears that a contemplative mind is more
+capable of action than an actively objective one. Dr. Emerson
+says: "It is good to know that it has been recorded of Alcott,
+the benign idealist, that when the Rev. Thomas Wentworth
+Higginson, heading the rush on the U.S. Court House in Boston, to
+rescue a fugitive slave, looked back for his following at the
+court-room door, only the apostolic philosopher was there cane in
+hand." So it seems that his idealism had some substantial
+virtues, even if he couldn't make a living.
+
+The daughter does not accept the father as a prototype--she seems
+to have but few of her father's qualities "in female." She
+supported the family and at the same time enriched the lives of a
+large part of young America, starting off many little minds with
+wholesome thoughts and many little hearts with wholesome
+emotions. She leaves memory-word-pictures of healthy, New England
+childhood days,--pictures which are turned to with affection by
+middle-aged children,--pictures, that bear a sentiment, a leaven,
+that middle-aged America needs nowadays more than we care to
+admit.
+
+Concord village, itself, reminds one of that common virtue lying
+at the height and root of all the Concord divinities. As one
+walks down the broad-arched street, passing the white house of
+Emerson--ascetic guard of a former prophetic beauty--he comes
+presently beneath the old elms overspreading the Alcott house. It
+seems to stand as a kind of homely but beautiful witness of
+Concord's common virtue--it seems to bear a consciousness that
+its past is LIVING, that the "mosses of the Old Manse" and the
+hickories of Walden are not far away. Here is the home of the
+"Marches"--all pervaded with the trials and happiness of the
+family and telling, in a simple way, the story of "the richness
+of not having." Within the house, on every side, lie remembrances
+of what imagination can do for the better amusement of fortunate
+children who have to do for themselves-much-needed lessons in
+these days of automatic, ready-made, easy entertainment which
+deaden rather than stimulate the creative faculty. And there sits
+the little old spinet-piano Sophia Thoreau gave to the Alcott
+children, on which Beth played the old Scotch airs, and played at
+the Fifth Symphony.
+
+There is a commonplace beauty about "Orchard House"--a kind of
+spiritual sturdiness underlying its quaint picturesqueness--a
+kind of common triad of the New England homestead, whose
+overtones tell us that there must have been something aesthetic
+fibered in the Puritan severity--the self-sacrificing part of the
+ideal--a value that seems to stir a deeper feeling, a stronger
+sense of being nearer some perfect truth than a Gothic cathedral
+or an Etruscan villa. All around you, under the Concord sky,
+there still floats the influence of that human faith melody,
+transcendent and sentimental enough for the enthusiast or the
+cynic respectively, reflecting an innate hope--a common interest
+in common things and common men--a tune the Concord bards are
+ever playing, while they pound away at the immensities with a
+Beethovenlike sublimity, and with, may we say, a vehemence and
+perseverance--for that part of greatness is not so difficult to
+emulate.
+
+We dare not attempt to follow the philosophic raptures of Bronson
+Alcott--unless you will assume that his apotheosis will show how
+"practical" his vision in this world would be in the next. And so
+we won't try to reconcile the music sketch of the Alcotts with
+much besides the memory of that home under the elms--the Scotch
+songs and the family hymns that were sung at the end of each
+day--though there may be an attempt to catch something of that
+common sentiment (which we have tried to suggest above)-a
+strength of hope that never gives way to despair--a conviction in
+the power of the common soul which, when all is said and done,
+may be as typical as any theme of Concord and its
+transcendentalists.
+
+
+V--Thoreau
+
+
+Thoreau was a great musician, not because he played the flute but
+because he did not have to go to Boston to hear "the Symphony."
+The rhythm of his prose, were there nothing else, would determine
+his value as a composer. He was divinely conscious of the
+enthusiasm of Nature, the emotion of her rhythms and the harmony
+of her solitude. In this consciousness he sang of the submission
+to Nature, the religion of contemplation, and the freedom of
+simplicity--a philosophy distinguishing between the complexity of
+Nature which teaches freedom, and the complexity of materialism
+which teaches slavery. In music, in poetry, in all art, the truth
+as one sees it must be given in terms which bear some proportion
+to the inspiration. In their greatest moments the inspiration of
+both Beethoven and Thoreau express profound truths and deep
+sentiment, but the intimate passion of it, the storm and stress
+of it, affected Beethoven in such a way that he could not but be
+ever showing it and Thoreau that he could not easily expose it.
+They were equally imbued with it, but with different results. A
+difference in temperament had something to do with this, together
+with a difference in the quality of expression between the two
+arts. "Who that has heard a strain of music feared lest he would
+speak extravagantly forever," says Thoreau. Perhaps music is the
+art of speaking extravagantly. Herbert Spencer says that some
+men, as for instance Mozart, are so peculiarly sensitive to
+emotion...that music is to them but a continuation not only of
+the expression but of the actual emotion, though the theory of
+some more modern thinkers in the philosophy of art doesn't always
+bear this out. However, there is no doubt that in its nature
+music is predominantly subjective and tends to subjective
+expression, and poetry more objective tending to objective
+expression. Hence the poet when his muse calls for a deeper
+feeling must invert this order, and he may be reluctant to do so
+as these depths often call for an intimate expression which the
+physical looks of the words may repel. They tend to reveal the
+nakedness of his soul rather than its warmth. It is not a matter
+of the relative value of the aspiration, or a difference between
+subconsciousness and consciousness but a difference in the arts
+themselves; for example, a composer may not shrink from having
+the public hear his "love letter in tones," while a poet may feel
+sensitive about having everyone read his "letter in words." When
+the object of the love is mankind the sensitiveness is changed
+only in degree.
+
+But the message of Thoreau, though his fervency may be inconstant
+and his human appeal not always direct, is, both in thought and
+spirit, as universal as that of any man who ever wrote or sang--
+as universal as it is nontemporaneous--as universal as it is free
+from the measure of history, as "solitude is free from the
+measure of the miles of space that intervene between man and his
+fellows." In spite of the fact that Henry James (who knows almost
+everything) says that "Thoreau is more than provincial--that he
+is parochial," let us repeat that Henry Thoreau, in respect to
+thought, sentiment, imagination, and soul, in respect to every
+element except that of place of physical being--a thing that
+means so much to some--is as universal as any personality in
+literature. That he said upon being shown a specimen grass from
+Iceland that the same species could be found in Concord is
+evidence of his universality, not of his parochialism. He was so
+universal that he did not need to travel around the world to
+PROVE it. "I have more of God, they more of the road." "It is not
+worth while to go around the world to count the cats in
+Zanzibar." With Marcus Aurelius, if he had seen the present he
+had seen all, from eternity and all time forever.
+
+Thoreau's susceptibility to natural sounds was probably greater
+than that of many practical musicians. True, this appeal is
+mainly through the sensational element which Herbert Spencer
+thinks the predominant beauty of music. Thoreau seems able to
+weave from this source some perfect transcendental symphonies.
+Strains from the Orient get the best of some of the modern French
+music but not of Thoreau. He seems more interested in than
+influenced by Oriental philosophy. He admires its ways of
+resignation and self-contemplation but he doesn't contemplate
+himself in the same way. He often quotes from the Eastern
+scriptures passages which were they his own he would probably
+omit, i.e., the Vedas say "all intelligences awake with the
+morning." This seems unworthy of "accompanying the undulations of
+celestial music" found on this same page, in which an "ode to
+morning" is sung--"the awakening to newly acquired forces and
+aspirations from within to a higher life than we fell asleep
+from...for all memorable events transpire in the morning time and
+in the morning atmosphere." Thus it is not the whole tone scale
+of the Orient but the scale of a Walden morning--"music in single
+strains," as Emerson says, which inspired many of the polyphonies
+and harmonies that come to us through his poetry. Who can be
+forever melancholy "with Aeolian music like this"?
+
+This is but one of many ways in which Thoreau looked to Nature
+for his greatest inspirations. In her he found an analogy to the
+Fundamental of Transcendentalism. The "innate goodness" of Nature
+is or can be a moral influence; Mother Nature, if man will but
+let her, will keep him straight--straight spiritually and so
+morally and even mentally. If he will take her as a companion,
+and teacher, and not as a duty or a creed, she will give him
+greater thrills and teach him greater truths than man can give or
+teach--she will reveal mysteries that mankind has long concealed.
+It was the soul of Nature not natural history that Thoreau was
+after. A naturalist's mind is one predominantly scientific, more
+interested in the relation of a flower to other flowers than its
+relation to any philosophy or anyone's philosophy. A transcendent
+love of Nature and writing "Rhus glabra" after sumac doesn't
+necessarily make a naturalist. It would seem that although
+thorough in observation (not very thorough according to Mr.
+Burroughs) and with a keen perception of the specific, a
+naturalist--inherently--was exactly what Thoreau was not. He
+seems rather to let Nature put him under her microscope than to
+hold her under his. He was too fond of Nature to practice
+vivisection upon her. He would have found that painful, "for was
+he not a part with her?" But he had this trait of a naturalist,
+which is usually foreign to poets, even great ones; he observed
+acutely even things that did not particularly interest him--a
+useful natural gift rather than a virtue.
+
+The study of Nature may tend to make one dogmatic, but the love
+of Nature surely does not. Thoreau no more than Emerson could be
+said to have compounded doctrines. His thinking was too broad for
+that. If Thoreau's was a religion of Nature, as some say,-and by
+that they mean that through Nature's influence man is brought to
+a deeper contemplation, to a more spiritual self-scrutiny, and
+thus closer to God,-it had apparently no definite doctrines. Some
+of his theories regarding natural and social phenomena and his
+experiments in the art of living are certainly not doctrinal in
+form, and if they are in substance it didn't disturb Thoreau and
+it needn't us..."In proportion as he simplifies his life the laws
+of the universe will appear less complex and solitude will not be
+solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have
+built castles in the air your work need not be lost; that is
+where they should be, now put the foundations under
+them."..."Then we will love with the license of a higher order of
+beings." Is that a doctrine? Perhaps. At any rate, between the
+lines of some such passage as this lie some of the fountain heads
+that water the spiritual fields of his philosophy and the seeds
+from which they are sown (if indeed his whole philosophy is but
+one spiritual garden). His experiments, social and economic, are
+a part of its cultivation and for the harvest--and its
+transmutation, he trusts to moments of inspiration--"only what is
+thought, said, and done at a certain rare coincidence is good."
+
+Thoreau's experiment at Walden was, broadly speaking, one of
+these moments. It stands out in the casual and popular opinion as
+a kind of adventure--harmless and amusing to some, significant
+and important to others; but its significance lies in the fact
+that in trying to practice an ideal he prepared his mind so that
+it could better bring others "into the Walden-state-of-mind." He
+did not ask for a literal approval, or in fact for any approval.
+"I would not stand between any man and his genius." He would have
+no one adopt his manner of life, unless in doing so he adopts his
+own--besides, by that time "I may have found a better one." But
+if he preached hard he practiced harder what he preached--harder
+than most men. Throughout Walden a text that he is always
+pounding out is "Time." Time for inside work out-of-doors;
+preferably out-of-doors, "though you perhaps may have some
+pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor house."
+Wherever the place--time there must be. Time to show the
+unnecessariness of necessities which clog up time. Time to
+contemplate the value of man to the universe, of the universe to
+man, man's excuse for being. Time FROM the demands of social
+conventions. Time FROM too much labor for some, which means too
+much to eat, too much to wear, too much material, too much
+materialism for others. Time FROM the "hurry and waste of life."
+Time FROM the "St. Vitus Dance." BUT, on the other side of the
+ledger, time FOR learning that "there is no safety in stupidity
+alone." Time FOR introspection. Time FOR reality. Time FOR
+expansion. Time FOR practicing the art, of living the art of
+living. Thoreau has been criticized for practicing his policy of
+expansion by living in a vacuum--but he peopled that vacuum with
+a race of beings and established a social order there, surpassing
+any of the precepts in social or political history."...for he put
+some things behind and passed an invisible boundary; new,
+universal, and more liberal laws were around and within him, the
+old laws were expanded and interpreted in a more liberal sense
+and he lived with the license of a higher order"--a community in
+which "God was the only President" and "Thoreau not Webster was
+His Orator." It is hard to believe that Thoreau really refused to
+believe that there was any other life but his own, though he
+probably did think that there was not any other life besides his
+own for him. Living for society may not always be best
+accomplished by living WITH society. "is there any virtue in a
+man's skin that you must touch it?" and the "rubbing of elbows
+may not bring men's minds closer together"; or if he were talking
+through a "worst seller" (magazine) that "had to put it over" he
+might say, "forty thousand souls at a ball game does not,
+necessarily, make baseball the highest expression of spiritual
+emotion." Thoreau, however, is no cynic, either in character or
+thought, though in a side glance at himself, he may have held out
+to be one; a "cynic in independence," possibly because of his
+rule laid down that "self-culture admits of no compromise."
+
+It is conceivable that though some of his philosophy and a good
+deal of his personality, in some of its manifestations, have
+outward colors that do not seem to harmonize, the true and
+intimate relations they bear each other are not affected. This
+peculiarity, frequently seen in his attitude towards social-
+economic problems, is perhaps more emphasized in some of his
+personal outbursts. "I love my friends very much, but I find that
+it is of no use to go to see them. I hate them commonly when I am
+near." It is easier to see what he means than it is to forgive
+him for saying it. The cause of this apparent lack of harmony
+between philosophy and personality, as far as they can be
+separated, may have been due to his refusal "to keep the very
+delicate balance" which Mr. Van Doren in his "Critical Study of
+Thoreau" says "it is necessary for a great and good man to keep
+between his public and private lives, between his own personality
+and the whole outside universe of personalities." Somehow one
+feels that if he had kept this balance he would have lost
+"hitting power." Again, it seems that something of the above
+depends upon the degree of greatness or goodness. A very great
+and especially a very good man has no separate private and public
+life. His own personality though not identical with outside
+personalities is so clear or can be so clear to them that it
+appears identical, and as the world progresses towards its
+inevitable perfection this appearance becomes more and more a
+reality. For the same reason that all great men now agree, in
+principle but not in detail, in so far as words are able to
+communicate agreement, on the great fundamental truths. Someone
+says: "Be specific--what great fundamentals?" Freedom over
+slavery; the natural over the artificial; beauty over ugliness;
+the spiritual over the material; the goodness of man; the Godness
+of man; have been greater if he hadn't written plays. Some say
+that a true composer will never write an opera because a truly
+brave man will not take a drink to keep up his courage; which is
+not the same thing as saying that Shakespeare is not the greatest
+figure in all literature; in fact, it is an attempt to say that
+many novels, most operas, all Shakespeares, and all brave men and
+women (rum or no rum) are among the noblest blessings with which
+God has endowed mankind--because, not being perfect, they are
+perfect examples pointing to that perfection which nothing yet
+has attained.
+
+Thoreau's mysticism at times throws him into elusive moods--but
+an elusiveness held by a thread to something concrete and
+specific, for he had too much integrity of mind for any other
+kind. In these moments it is easier to follow his thought than to
+follow him. Indeed, if he were always easy to follow, after one
+had caught up with him, one might find that it was not Thoreau.
+
+It is, however, with no mystic rod that he strikes at
+institutional life. Here again he felt the influence of the great
+transcendental doctrine of "innate goodness" in human nature--a
+reflection of the like in nature; a philosophic part which, by
+the way, was a more direct inheritance in Thoreau than in his
+brother transcendentalists. For besides what he received from a
+native Unitarianism a good part must have descended to him
+through his Huguenot blood from the "eighteenth-century French
+philosophy." We trace a reason here for his lack of interest in
+"the church." For if revealed religion is the path between God
+and man's spiritual part--a kind of formal causeway--Thoreau's
+highly developed spiritual life felt, apparently unconsciously,
+less need of it than most men. But he might have been more
+charitable towards those who do need it (and most of us do) if he
+had been more conscious of his freedom. Those who look today for
+the cause of a seeming deterioration in the influence of the
+church may find it in a wider development of this feeling of
+Thoreau's; that the need is less because there is more of the
+spirit of Christianity in the world today. Another cause for his
+attitude towards the church as an institution is one always too
+common among "the narrow minds" to have influenced Thoreau. He
+could have been more generous. He took the arc for the circle,
+the exception for the rule, the solitary bad example for the many
+good ones. His persistent emphasis on the value of "example" may
+excuse this lower viewpoint. "The silent influence of the example
+of one sincere life...has benefited society more than all the
+projects devised for its salvation." He has little patience for
+the unpracticing preacher. "In some countries a hunting parson is
+no uncommon sight. Such a one might make a good shepherd dog but
+is far from being a good shepherd." It would have been
+interesting to have seen him handle the speculating parson, who
+takes a good salary--more per annum than all the disciples had to
+sustain their bodies during their whole lives--from a
+metropolitan religious corporation for "speculating" on Sunday
+about the beauty of poverty, who preaches: "Take no thought (for
+your life) what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink nor yet what
+ye shall put on...lay not up for yourself treasure upon
+earth...take up thy cross and follow me"; who on Monday becomes a
+"speculating" disciple of another god, and by questionable
+investments, successful enough to get into the "press," seeks to
+lay up a treasure of a million dollars for his old age, as if a
+million dollars could keep such a man out of the poor-house.
+Thoreau might observe that this one good example of Christian
+degeneracy undoes all the acts of regeneracy of a thousand humble
+five-hundred-dollar country parsons; that it out-influences the
+"unconscious influence" of a dozen Dr. Bushnells if there be that
+many; that the repentance of this man who did not "fall from
+grace" because he never fell into it--that this unnecessary
+repentance might save this man's own soul but not necessarily the
+souls of the million head-line readers; that repentance would put
+this preacher right with the powers that be in this world--and
+the next. Thoreau might pass a remark upon this man's intimacy
+with God "as if he had a monopoly of the subject"--an intimacy
+that perhaps kept him from asking God exactly what his Son meant
+by the "camel," the "needle"--to say nothing of the "rich man."
+Thoreau might have wondered how this man NAILED DOWN the last
+plank in HIS bridge to salvation, by rising to sublime heights of
+patriotism, in HIS war against materialism; but would even
+Thoreau be so unfeeling as to suggest to this exhorter that HIS
+salvation might be clinched "if he would sacrifice his income"
+(not himself) and come--in to a real Salvation Army, or that the
+final triumph, the supreme happiness in casting aside this mere
+$10,000 or $20,000 every year must be denied him--for was he not
+captain of the ship--must he not stick to his passengers (in the
+first cabin--the very first cabin)--not that the ship was sinking
+but that he was...we will go no further. Even Thoreau would not
+demand sacrifice for sacrifice sake--no, not even from Nature.
+
+Property from the standpoint of its influence in checking natural
+self-expansion and from the standpoint of personal and inherent
+right is another institution that comes in for straight and
+cross-arm jabs, now to the stomach, now to the head, but seldom
+sparring for breath. For does he not say that "wherever a man
+goes, men will pursue him with their dirty institutions"? The
+influence of property, as he saw it, on morality or immorality
+and how through this it mayor should influence "government" is
+seen by the following: "I am convinced that if all men were to
+live as simply as I did, then thieving and robbery would be
+unknown. These take place only in communities where some have got
+more than is sufficient while others have not enough--
+
+Nec bella fuerunt,
+Faginus astabat dum
+Scyphus ante dapes--
+
+You who govern public affairs, what need have you to employ
+punishments? Have virtue and the people will be virtuous." If
+Thoreau had made the first sentence read: "If all men were like
+me and were to live as simply," etc., everyone would agree with
+him. We may wonder here how he would account for some of the
+degenerate types we are told about in some of our backwoods and
+mountain regions. Possibly by assuming that they are an instance
+of perversion of the species. That the little civilizing their
+forbears experienced rendered these people more susceptible to
+the physical than to the spiritual influence of nature; in other
+words; if they had been purer naturists, as the Aztecs for
+example, they would have been purer men. Instead of turning to
+any theory of ours or of Thoreau for the true explanation of this
+condition--which is a kind of pseudo-naturalism--for its true
+diagnosis and permanent cure, are we not far more certain to find
+it in the radiant look of humility, love, and hope in the strong
+faces of those inspired souls who are devoting their lives with
+no little sacrifice to these outcasts of civilization and nature.
+In truth, may not mankind find the solution of its eternal
+problem--find it after and beyond the last, most perfect system
+of wealth distribution which science can ever devise--after and
+beyond the last sublime echo of the greatest socialistic
+symphonies--after and beyond every transcendent thought and
+expression in the simple example of these Christ-inspired souls--
+be they Pagan, Gentile, Jew, or angel.
+
+However, underlying the practical or impractical suggestions
+implied in the quotation above, which is from the last paragraph
+of Thoreau's Village, is the same transcendental theme of "innate
+goodness." For this reason there must be no limitation except
+that which will free mankind from limitation, and from a
+perversion of this "innate" possession: And "property" may be one
+of the causes of this perversion--property in the two relations
+cited above. It is conceivable that Thoreau, to the consternation
+of the richest members of the Bolsheviki and Bourgeois, would
+propose a policy of liberation, a policy of a limited personal
+property right, on the ground that congestion of personal
+property tends to limit the progress of the soul (as well as the
+progress of the stomach)--letting the economic noise thereupon
+take care of itself--for dissonances are becoming beautiful--and
+do not the same waters that roar in a storm take care of the
+eventual calm? That this limit of property be determined not by
+the VOICE of the majority but by the BRAIN of the majority under
+a government limited to no national boundaries. "The government
+of the world I live in is not framed in after-dinner
+conversation"--around a table in a capital city, for there is no
+capital--a government of principles not parties; of a few
+fundamental truths and not of many political expediencies. A
+government conducted by virtuous leaders, for it will be led by
+all, for all are virtuous, as then their "innate virtue" will no
+more be perverted by unnatural institutions. This will not be a
+millennium but a practical and possible application of uncommon
+common sense. For is it not sense, common or otherwise, for
+Nature to want to hand back the earth to those to whom it
+belongs--that is, to those who have to live on it? Is it not
+sense, that the average brains like the average stomachs will act
+rightly if they have an equal amount of the right kind of food to
+act upon and universal education is on the way with the right
+kind of food? Is it not sense then that all grown men and women
+(for all are necessary to work out the divine "law of averages")
+shall have a direct not an indirect say about the things that go
+on in this world?
+
+Some of these attitudes, ungenerous or radical, generous or
+conservative (as you will), towards institutions dear to many,
+have no doubt given impressions unfavorable to Thoreau's thought
+and personality. One hears him called, by some who ought to know
+what they say and some who ought not, a crabbed, cold-hearted,
+sour-faced Yankee--a kind of a visionary sore-head--a cross-
+grained, egotistic recluse,--even non-hearted. But it is easier
+to make a statement than prove a reputation. Thoreau may be some
+of these things to those who make no distinction between these
+qualities and the manner which often comes as a kind of by-
+product of an intense devotion of a principle or ideal. He was
+rude and unfriendly at times but shyness probably had something
+to do with that. In spite of a certain self-possession he was
+diffident in most company, but, though he may have been subject
+to those spells when words do not rise and the mind seems wrapped
+in a kind of dull cloth which everyone dumbly stares at, instead
+of looking through--he would easily get off a rejoinder upon
+occasion. When a party of visitors came to Walden and some one
+asked Thoreau if he found it lonely there, he replied: "Only by
+your help." A remark characteristic, true, rude, if not witty.
+The writer remembers hearing a schoolteacher in English
+literature dismiss Thoreau (and a half hour lesson, in which time
+all of Walden,--its surface--was sailed over) by saying that this
+author (he called everyone "author" from Solomon down to Dr.
+Parkhurst) "was a kind of a crank who styled himself a hermit-
+naturalist and who idled about the woods because he didn't want
+to work." Some such stuff is a common conception, though not as
+common as it used to be. If this teacher had had more brains, it
+would have been a lie. The word idled is the hopeless part of
+this criticism, or rather of this uncritical remark. To ask this
+kind of a man, who plays all the "choice gems from celebrated
+composers" literally, always literally, and always with the loud
+pedal, who plays all hymns, wrong notes, right notes, games,
+people, and jokes literally, and with the loud pedal, who will
+die literally and with the loud pedal--to ask this man to smile
+even faintly at Thoreau's humor is like casting a pearl before a
+coal baron. Emerson implies that there is one thing a genius must
+have to be a genius and that is "mother wit."..."Doctor Johnson,
+Milton, Chaucer, and Burns had it. Aunt Mary Moody Emerson has it
+and can write scrap letters. Who has it need never write anything
+but scraps. Henry Thoreau has it." His humor though a part of
+this wit is not always as spontaneous, for it is sometimes pun
+shape (so is Charles Lamb's)--but it is nevertheless a kind that
+can serenely transport us and which we can enjoy without
+disturbing our neighbors. If there are those who think him cold-
+hearted and with but little human sympathy, let them read his
+letters to Emerson's little daughter, or hear Dr. Emerson tell
+about the Thoreau home life and the stories of his boyhood--the
+ministrations to a runaway slave; or let them ask old Sam
+Staples, the Concord sheriff about him. That he "was fond of a
+few intimate friends, but cared not one fig for people in the
+mass," is a statement made in a school history and which is
+superficially true. He cared too much for the masses--too much to
+let his personality be "massed"; too much to be unable to realize
+the futility of wearing his heart on his sleeve but not of
+wearing his path to the shore of "Walden" for future masses to
+walk over and perchance find the way to themselves. Some near-
+satirists are fond of telling us that Thoreau came so close to
+Nature that she killed him before he had discovered her whole
+secret. They remind us that he died with consumption but forget
+that he lived with consumption. And without using much charity,
+this can be made to excuse many of his irascible and uncongenial
+moods. You to whom that gaunt face seems forbidding--look into
+the eyes! If he seems "dry and priggish" to you, Mr. Stevenson,
+"with little of that large unconscious geniality of the world's
+heroes," follow him some spring morning to Baker Farm, as he
+"rambles through pine groves...like temples, or like fleets at
+sea, full-rigged, with wavy boughs and rippling with light so
+soft and green and shady that the Druids would have forsaken
+their oaks to worship in them." Follow him to "the cedar wood
+beyond Flint's Pond, where the trees covered with hoary blue
+berries, spiring higher and higher, are fit to stand before
+Valhalla." Follow him, but not too closely, for you may see
+little, if you do--"as he walks in so pure and bright a light
+gilding its withered grass and leaves so softly and serenely
+bright that he thinks he has never bathed in such a golden
+flood." Follow him as "he saunters towards the holy land till one
+day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever it has done,
+perchance shine into your minds and hearts and light up your
+whole lives with a great awakening, light as warm and serene and
+golden as on a bankside in autumn." Follow him through the golden
+flood to the shore of that "holy land," where he lies dying as
+men say--dying as bravely as he lived. You may be near when his
+stern old aunt in the duty of her Puritan conscience asks him:
+"Have you made your peace with God"? and you may see his kindly
+smile as he replies, "I did not know that we had ever quarreled."
+Moments like these reflect more nobility and equanimity perhaps
+than geniality--qualities, however, more serviceable to world's
+heroes.
+
+The personal trait that one who has affection for Thoreau may
+find worst is a combative streak, in which he too often takes
+refuge. "An obstinate elusiveness," almost a "contrary
+cussedness," as if he would say, which he didn't: "If a truth
+about something is not as I think it ought to be, I'll make it
+what I think, and it WILL be the truth--but if you agree with me,
+then I begin to think it may not be the truth." The causes of
+these unpleasant colors (rather than characteristics) are too
+easily attributed to a lack of human sympathy or to the
+assumption that they are at least symbols of that lack instead of
+to a supersensitiveness, magnified at times by ill health and at
+times by a subconsciousness of the futility of actually living
+out his ideals in this life. It has been said that his brave
+hopes were unrealized anywhere in his career--but it is certain
+that they started to be realized on or about May 6, 1862, and we
+doubt if 1920 will end their fulfillment or his career. But there
+were many in Concord who knew that within their village there was
+a tree of wondrous growth, the shadow of which--alas, too
+frequently--was the only part they were allowed to touch. Emerson
+was one of these. He was not only deeply conscious of Thoreau's
+rare gifts but in the Woodland Notes pays a tribute to a side of
+his friend that many others missed. Emerson knew that Thoreau's
+sensibilities too often veiled his nobilities, that a self-
+cultivated stoicism ever fortified with sarcasm, none the less
+securely because it seemed voluntary, covered a warmth of
+feeling. "His great heart, him a hermit made." A breadth of heart
+not easily measured, found only in the highest type of
+sentimentalists, the type which does not perpetually discriminate
+in favor of mankind. Emerson has much of this sentiment and
+touches it when he sings of Nature as "the incarnation of a
+thought," when he generously visualizes Thoreau, "standing at the
+Walden shore invoking the vision of a thought as it drifts
+heavenward into an incarnation of Nature." There is a Godlike
+patience in Nature,-in her mists, her trees, her mountains--as if
+she had a more abiding faith and a clearer vision than man of the
+resurrection and immortality! There comes to memory an old
+yellow-papered composition of school-boy days whose peroration
+closed with "Poor Thoreau; he communed with nature for forty odd
+years, and then died." "The forty odd years,"--we'll still grant
+that part, but he is over a hundred now, and maybe, Mr. Lowell,
+he is more lovable, kindlier, and more radiant with human
+sympathy today, than, perchance, you were fifty years ago. It may
+be that he is a far stronger, a far greater, an incalculably
+greater force in the moral and spiritual fibre of his fellow-
+countrymen throughout the world today than you dreamed of fifty
+years ago. You, James Russell Lowells! You, Robert Louis
+Stevensons! You, Mark Van Dorens! with your literary perception,
+your power of illumination, your brilliancy of expression, yea,
+and with your love of sincerity, you know your Thoreau, but not
+my Thoreau--that reassuring and true friend, who stood by me one
+"low" day, when the sun had gone down, long, long before sunset.
+You may know something of the affection that heart yearned for
+but knew it a duty not to grasp; you may know something of the
+great human passions which stirred that soul--too deep for
+animate expression--you may know all of this, all there is to
+know about Thoreau, but you know him not, unless you love him!
+
+And if there shall be a program for our music let it follow his
+thought on an autumn day of Indian summer at Walden--a shadow of
+a thought at first, colored by the mist and haze over the pond:
+
+Low anchored cloud,
+Fountain head and
+Source of rivers...
+Dew cloth, dream drapery--
+Drifting meadow of the air....
+
+but this is momentary; the beauty of the day moves him to a
+certain restlessness--to aspirations more specific--an eagerness
+for outward action, but through it all he is conscious that it is
+not in keeping with the mood for this "Day." As the mists rise,
+there comes a clearer thought more traditional than the first, a
+meditation more calm. As he stands on the side of the pleasant
+hill of pines and hickories in front of his cabin, he is still
+disturbed by a restlessness and goes down the white-pebbled and
+sandy eastern shore, but it seems not to lead him where the
+thought suggests--he climbs the path along the "bolder northern"
+and "western shore, with deep bays indented," and now along the
+railroad track, "where the Aeolian harp plays." But his eagerness
+throws him into the lithe, springy stride of the specie hunter--
+the naturalist--he is still aware of a restlessness; with these
+faster steps his rhythm is of shorter span--it is still not the
+tempo of Nature, it does not bear the mood that the genius of the
+day calls for, it is too specific, its nature is. too external,
+the introspection too buoyant, and he knows now that he must let
+Nature flow through him and slowly; he releases his more personal
+desires to her broader rhythm, conscious that this blends more
+and more with the harmony of her solitude; it tells him that his
+search for freedom on that day, at least, lies in his submission
+to her, for Nature is as relentless as she is benignant.
+
+He remains in this mood and while outwardly still, he seems to
+move with the slow, almost monotonous swaying beat of this
+autumnal day. He is more contented with a "homely burden" and is
+more assured of "the broad margin to his life; he sits in his
+sunny doorway...rapt in revery...amidst goldenrod, sandcherry,
+and sumac...in undisturbed solitude." At times the more definite
+personal strivings for the ideal freedom, the former more active
+speculations come over him, as if he would trace a certain
+intensity even in his submission. "He grew in those seasons like
+corn in the night and they were better than any works of the
+hands. They were not time subtracted from his life but so much
+over and above the usual allowance." "He realized what the
+Orientals meant by contemplation and forsaking of works." "The
+day advanced as if to light some work of his--it was morning and
+lo! now it is evening and nothing memorable is accomplished..."
+"The evening train has gone by," and "all the restless world with
+it. The fishes in the pond no longer feel its rumbling and he is
+more alone than ever..." His meditations are interrupted only by
+the faint sound of the Concord bell--'tis prayer-meeting night in
+the village--"a melody as it were, imported into the
+wilderness..." "At a distance over the woods the sound acquires a
+certain vibratory hum as if the pine needles in the horizon were
+the strings of a harp which it swept...A vibration of the
+universal lyre...Just as the intervening atmosphere makes a
+distant ridge of earth interesting to the eyes by the azure tint
+it imparts."...Part of the echo may be "the voice of the wood;
+the same trivial words and notes sung by the wood nymph." It is
+darker, the poet's flute is heard out over the pond and Walden
+hears the swan song of that "Day" and faintly echoes...Is it a
+transcendental tune of Concord? 'Tis an evening when the "whole
+body is one sense,"...and before ending his day he looks out over
+the clear, crystalline water of the pond and catches a glimpse of
+the shadow--thought he saw in the morning's mist and haze--he
+knows that by his final submission, he possesses the "Freedom of
+the Night." He goes up the "pleasant hillside of pines,
+hickories," and moonlight to his cabin, "with a strange liberty
+in Nature, a part of herself."
+
+
+VI--Epilogue
+
+
+1
+
+
+The futility of attempting to trace the source or primal impulse
+of an art-inspiration may be admitted without granting that human
+qualities or attributes which go with personality cannot be
+suggested, and that artistic intuitions which parallel them
+cannot be reflected in music. Actually accomplishing the latter
+is a problem, more or less arbitrary to an open mind, more or
+less impossible to a prejudiced mind.
+
+That which the composer intends to represent as "high vitality"
+sounds like something quite different to different listeners.
+That which I like to think suggests Thoreau's submission to
+nature may, to another, seem something like Hawthorne's
+"conception of the relentlessness of an evil conscience"--and to
+the rest of our friends, but a series of unpleasant sounds. How
+far can the composer be held accountable? Beyond a certain point
+the responsibility is more or less undeterminable. The outside
+characteristics--that is, the points furthest away from the
+mergings--are obvious to mostly anyone. A child knows a "strain
+of joy," from one of sorrow. Those a little older know the
+dignified from the frivolous--the Spring Song from the season in
+which the "melancholy days have come" (though is there not a
+glorious hope in autumn!). But where is the definite expression
+of late-spring against early-summer, of happiness against
+optimism? A painter paints a sunset--can he paint the setting
+sun?
+
+In some century to come, when the school children will whistle
+popular tunes in quarter-tones--when the diatonic scale will be
+as obsolete as the pentatonic is now--perhaps then these
+borderland experiences may be both easily expressed and readily
+recognized. But maybe music was not intended to satisfy the
+curious definiteness of man. Maybe it is better to hope that
+music may always be a transcendental language in the most
+extravagant sense. Possibly the power of literally distinguishing
+these "shades of abstraction"--these attributes paralleled by
+"artistic intuitions" (call them what you will)-is ever to be
+denied man for the same reason that the beginning and end of a
+circle are to be denied.
+
+
+2
+
+
+There may be an analogy--and on first sight it seems that there
+must be--between both the state and power of artistic perceptions
+and the law of perpetual change, that ever-flowing stream partly
+biological, partly cosmic, ever going on in ourselves, in nature,
+in all life. This may account for the difficulty of identifying
+desired qualities with the perceptions of them in expression.
+Many things are constantly coming into being, while others are
+constantly going out--one part of the same thing is coming in
+while another part is going out of existence. Perhaps this is why
+the above conformity in art (a conformity which we seem naturally
+to look for) appears at times so unrealizable, if not impossible.
+It will be assumed, to make this theory clearer, that the "flow"
+or "change" does not go on in the art-product itself. As a matter
+of fact it probably does, to a certain extent--a picture, or a
+song, may gain or lose in value beyond what the painter or
+composer knew, by the progress and higher development in all art.
+Keats may be only partially true when he says that "A work of
+beauty is a joy forever"--a thing that is beautiful to ME, is a
+joy to ME, as long as it remains beautiful to ME--and if it
+remains so as long as I live, it is so forever, that is, forever
+to ME. If he had put it this way, he would have been tiresome,
+inartistic, but perhaps truer. So we will assume here that this
+change only goes on in man and nature; and that this eternal
+process in mankind is paralleled in some way during each
+temporary, personal life.
+
+A young man, two generations ago, found an identity with his
+ideals, in Rossini; when an older man in Wagner. A young man, one
+generation ago, found his in Wagner, but when older in Cesar
+Franck or Brahms. Some may say that this change may not be
+general, universal, or natural, and that it may be due to a
+certain kind of education, or to a certain inherited or
+contracted prejudice. We cannot deny or affirm this, absolutely,
+nor will we try to even qualitatively--except to say that it will
+be generally admitted that Rossini, today, does not appeal to
+this generation, as he did to that of our fathers. As far as
+prejudice or undue influence is concerned, and as an illustration
+in point, the following may be cited to show that training may
+have but little effect in this connection, at least not as much
+as usually supposed--for we believe this experience to be, to a
+certain extent, normal, or at least, not uncommon. A man
+remembers, when he was a boy of about fifteen years, hearing his
+music-teacher (and father) who had just returned from a
+performance of Siegfried say with a look of anxious surprise that
+"somehow or other he felt ashamed of enjoying the music as he
+did," for beneath it all he was conscious of an undercurrent of
+"make-believe"--the bravery was make-believe, the love was make-
+believe, the passion, the virtue, all make-believe, as was the
+dragon--P. T. Barnum would have been brave enough to have gone
+out and captured a live one! But, that same boy at twenty-five
+was listening to Wagner with enthusiasm, his reality was real
+enough to inspire a devotion. The "Preis-Lied," for instance,
+stirred him deeply. But when he became middle-aged--and long
+before the Hohenzollern hog-marched into Belgium--this music had
+become cloying, the melodies threadbare--a sense of something
+commonplace--yes--of make-believe came. These feelings were
+fought against for association's sake, and because of gratitude
+for bygone pleasures--but the former beauty and nobility were not
+there, and in their place stood irritating intervals of
+descending fourths and fifths. Those once transcendent
+progressions, luxuriant suggestions of Debussy chords of the 9th,
+11th, etc., were becoming slimy. An unearned exultation--a
+sentimentality deadening something within hides around in the
+music. Wagner seems less and less to measure up to the substance
+and reality of Cesar Franck, Brahms, d'Indy, or even Elgar (with
+all his tiresomeness), the wholesomeness, manliness, humility,
+and deep spiritual, possibly religious feeling of these men seem
+missing and not made up for by his (Wagner's) manner and
+eloquence, even if greater than theirs (which is very doubtful).
+
+From the above we would try to prove that as this stream of
+change flows towards the eventual ocean of mankind's perfection,
+the art-works in which we identify our higher ideals come by this
+process to be identified with the lower ideals of those who
+embark after us when the stream has grown in depth. If we stop
+with the above experience, our theory of the effect of man's
+changing nature, as thus explaining artistic progress, is perhaps
+sustained. Thus would we show that the perpetual flow of the life
+stream is affected by and affects each individual riverbed of the
+universal watersheds. Thus would we prove that the Wagner period
+was normal, because we intuitively recognized whatever identity
+we were looking for at a certain period in our life, and the fact
+that it was so made the Franck period possible and then normal at
+a later period in our life. Thus would we assume that this is as
+it should be, and that it is not Wagner's content or substance or
+his lack of virtue, that something in us has made us flow past
+him and not he past us. But something blocks our theory!
+Something makes our hypotheses seem purely speculative if not
+useless. It is men like Bach and Beethoven.
+
+Is it not a matter nowadays of common impression or general
+opinion (for the law of averages plays strongly in any theory
+relating to human attributes) that the world's attitude towards
+the substance and quality and spirit of these two men, or other
+men of like character, if there be such, has not been affected by
+the flowing stream that has changed us? But if by the measure of
+this public opinion, as well as it can be measured, Bach and
+Beethoven are being flowed past--not as fast perhaps as Wagner
+is, but if they are being passed at all from this deeper
+viewpoint, then this "change" theory holds.
+
+Here we shall have to assume, for we haven't proved it, that
+artistic intuitions can sense in music a weakening of moral
+strength and vitality, and that it is sensed in relation to
+Wagner and not sensed in relation to Bach and Beethoven. If, in
+this common opinion, there is a particle of change toward the
+latter's art, our theory stands--mind you, this admits a change
+in the manner, form, external expression, etc., but not in
+substance. If there is no change here towards the substance of
+these two men, our theory not only falls but its failure
+superimposes or allows us to presume a fundamental duality in
+music, and in all art for that matter.
+
+Does the progress of intrinsic beauty or truth (we assume there
+is such a thing) have its exposures as well as its discoveries?
+Does the non-acceptance of the foregoing theory mean that
+Wagner's substance and reality are lower and his manner higher;
+that his beauty was not intrinsic; that he was more interested in
+the repose of pride than in the truth of humility? It appears
+that he chose the representative instead of the spirit itself,--
+that he chose consciously or unconsciously, it matters not,--the
+lower set of values in this dualism. These are severe accusations
+to bring--especially when a man is a little down as Wagner is
+today. But these convictions were present some time before he was
+banished from the Metropolitan. Wagner seems to take Hugo's place
+in Faguet's criticism of de Vigny that, "The staging to him
+(Hugo) was the important thing--not the conception--that in de
+Vigny, the artist was inferior to the poet"; finally that Hugo
+and so Wagner have a certain pauvrete de fond. Thus would we
+ungenerously make Wagner prove our sum! But it is a sum that
+won't prove! The theory at its best does little more than suggest
+something, which if it is true at all, is a platitude, viz.: that
+progressive growth in all life makes it more and more possible
+for men to separate, in an art-work, moral weakness from artistic
+strength.
+
+
+3
+
+
+Human attributes are definite enough when it comes to their
+description, but the expression of them, or the paralleling of
+them in an art-process, has to be, as said above, more or less
+arbitrary, but we believe that their expression can be less vague
+if the basic distinction of this art-dualism is kept in mind. It
+is morally certain that the higher part is founded, as Sturt
+suggests, on something that has to do with those kinds of
+unselfish human interests which we call knowledge and morality--
+knowledge, not in the sense of erudition, but as a kind of
+creation or creative truth. This allows us to assume that the
+higher and more important value of this dualism is composed of
+what may be called reality, quality, spirit, or substance against
+the lower value of form, quantity, or manner. Of these terms
+"substance" seems to us the most appropriate, cogent, and
+comprehensive for the higher and "manner" for the under-value.
+Substance in a human-art-quality suggests the body of a
+conviction which has its birth in the spiritual consciousness,
+whose youth is nourished in the moral consciousness, and whose
+maturity as a result of all this growth is then represented in a
+mental image. This is appreciated by the intuition, and somehow
+translated into expression by "manner"--a process always less
+important than it seems, or as suggested by the foregoing (in
+fact we apologize for this attempted definition). So it seems
+that "substance" is too indefinite to analyze, in more specific
+terms. It is practically indescribable. Intuitions (artistic or
+not?) will sense it--process, unknown. Perhaps it is an
+unexplained consciousness of being nearer God, or being nearer
+the devil--of approaching truth or approaching unreality--a
+silent something felt in the truth-of-nature in Turner against
+the truth-of-art in Botticelli, or in the fine thinking of Ruskin
+against the fine soundings of Kipling, or in the wide expanse of
+Titian against the narrow-expanse of Carpaccio, or in some such
+distinction that Pope sees between what he calls Homer's
+"invention" and Virgil's "judgment"--apparently an inspired
+imagination against an artistic care, a sense of the difference,
+perhaps, between Dr. Bushnell's Knowing God and knowing about
+God. A more vivid explanation or illustration may be found in the
+difference between Emerson and Poe. The former seems to be almost
+wholly "substance" and the latter "manner." The measure in
+artistic satisfaction of Poe's manner is equal to the measure of
+spiritual satisfaction in Emerson's "substance." The total value
+of each man is high, but Emerson's is higher than Poe's because
+"substance" is higher than "manner"--because "substance" leans
+towards optimism, and "manner" pessimism. We do not know that all
+this is so, but we feel, or rather know by intuition that it is
+so, in the same way we know intuitively that right is higher than
+wrong, though we can't always tell why a thing is right or wrong,
+or what is always the difference or the margin between right and
+wrong.
+
+Beauty, in its common conception, has nothing to do with it
+(substance), unless it be granted that its outward aspect, or the
+expression between sensuous beauty and spiritual beauty can be
+always and distinctly known, which it cannot, as the art of music
+is still in its infancy. On reading this over, it seems only
+decent that some kind of an apology be made for the beginning of
+the preceding sentence. It cannot justly be said that anything
+that has to do with art has nothing to do with beauty in any
+degree,--that is, whether beauty is there or not, it has
+something to do with it. A casual idea of it, a kind of a first
+necessary-physical impression, was what we had in mind. Probably
+nobody knows what actual beauty is--except those serious writers
+of humorous essays in art magazines, who accurately, but kindly,
+with club in hand, demonstrate for all time and men that beauty
+is a quadratic monomial; that it _is_ absolute; that it is
+relative; that it _is _not_ relative, that it _is _not_...The
+word "beauty" is as easy to use as the word "degenerate." Both
+come in handy when one does or does not agree with you. For our
+part, something that Roussel-Despierres says comes nearer to what
+we like to think beauty is..."an infinite source of good...the
+love of the beautiful...a constant anxiety for moral beauty."
+Even here we go around in a circle--a thing apparently
+inevitable, if one tries to reduce art to philosophy. But
+personally, we prefer to go around in a circle than around in a
+parallelepipedon, for it seems cleaner and perhaps freer from
+mathematics--or for the same reason we prefer Whittier to
+Baudelaire--a poet to a genius, or a healthy to a rotten apple--
+probably not so much because it is more nutritious, but because
+we like its taste better; we like the beautiful and don't like
+the ugly; therefore, what we like is beautiful, and what we don't
+like is ugly--and hence we are glad the beautiful is not ugly,
+for if it were we would like something we don't like. So having
+unsettled what beauty is, let us go on.
+
+At any rate, we are going to be arbitrary enough to claim, with
+no definite qualification, that substance can be expressed in
+music, and that it is the only valuable thing in it, and moreover
+that in two separate pieces of music in which the notes are
+almost identical, one can be of "substance" with little "manner,"
+and the other can be of "manner" with little "substance."
+Substance has something to do with character. Manner has nothing
+to do with it. The "substance" of a tune comes from somewhere
+near the soul, and the "manner" comes from--God knows where.
+
+
+4
+
+
+The lack of interest to preserve, or ability to perceive the
+fundamental divisions of this duality accounts to a large extent,
+we believe, for some or many various phenomena (pleasant or
+unpleasant according to the personal attitude) of modern art, and
+all art. It is evidenced in many ways--the sculptors' over-
+insistence on the "mold," the outer rather than the inner subject
+or content of his statue--over-enthusiasm for local color--over-
+interest in the multiplicity of techniques, in the idiomatic, in
+the effect as shown, by the appreciation of an audience rather
+than in the effect on the ideals of the inner conscience of the
+artist or the composer. This lack of perceiving is too often
+shown by an over-interest in the material value of the effect.
+The pose of self-absorption, which some men, in the advertising
+business (and incidentally in the recital and composing business)
+put into their photographs or the portraits of themselves, while
+all dolled up in their purple-dressing-gowns, in their twofold
+wealth of golden hair, in their cissy-like postures over the
+piano keys--this pose of "manner" sometimes sounds out so loud
+that the more their music is played, the less it is heard. For
+does not Emerson tell them this when he says "What you are talks
+so loud, that I cannot hear what you say"? The unescapable
+impression that one sometimes gets by a glance at these public-
+inflicted trade-marks, and without having heard or seen any of
+their music, is that the one great underlying desire of these
+appearing-artists, is to impress, perhaps startle and shock their
+audiences and at any cost. This may have some such effect upon
+some of the lady-part (male or female) of their listeners but
+possibly the members of the men-part, who as boys liked hockey
+better than birthday-parties, may feel like shocking a few of
+these picture-sitters with something stronger than their own
+forzandos.
+
+The insistence upon manner in its relation to local color is
+wider than a self-strain for effect. If local color is a natural
+part, that is, a part of substance, the art-effort cannot help
+but show its color--and it will be a true color, no matter how
+colored; if it is a part, even a natural part of "manner," either
+the color part is bound eventually to drive out the local part or
+the local drive out all color. Here a process of cancellation or
+destruction is going on--a kind of "compromise" which destroys by
+deadlock; a compromise purchasing a selfish pleasure--a decadence
+in which art becomes first dull, then dark, then dead, though
+throughout this process it is outwardly very much alive,--
+especially after it is dead. The same tendency may even be
+noticed if there is over-insistence upon the national in art.
+Substance tends to create affection; manner prejudice. The latter
+tends to efface the distinction between the love of both a
+country's virtue and vices, and the love of only the virtue. A
+true love of country is likely to be so big that it will embrace
+the virtue one sees in other countries and, in the same breath,
+so to speak. A composer born in America, but who has not been
+interested in the "cause of the Freedmen," may be so interested
+in "negro melodies," that he writes a symphony over them. He is
+conscious (perhaps only subconscious) that he wishes it to be
+"American music." He tries to forget that the paternal negro came
+from Africa. Is his music American or African? That is the great
+question which keeps him awake! But the sadness of it is, that if
+he had been born in Africa, his music might have been just as
+American, for there is good authority that an African soul under
+an X-ray looks identically like an American soul. There is a
+futility in selecting a certain type to represent a "whole,"
+unless the interest in the spirit of the type coincides with that
+of the whole. In other words, if this composer isn't as deeply
+interested in the "cause" as Wendell Phillips was, when he fought
+his way through that anti-abolitionist crowd at Faneuil Hall, his
+music is liable to be less American than he wishes. If a middle-
+aged man, upon picking up the Scottish Chiefs, finds that his
+boyhood enthusiasm for the prowess and noble deeds and character
+of Sir Wm. Wallace and of Bruce is still present, let him put, or
+try to put that glory into an overture, let him fill it chuck-
+full of Scotch tunes, if he will. But after all is said and sung
+he will find that his music is American to the core (assuming
+that he is an American and wishes his music to be). It will be as
+national in character as the heart of that Grand Army
+Grandfather, who read those Cragmore Tales of a summer evening,
+when that boy had brought the cows home without witching. Perhaps
+the memories of the old soldier, to which this man still holds
+tenderly, may be turned into a "strain" or a "sonata," and though
+the music does not contain, or even suggest any of the old war-
+songs, it will be as sincerely American as the subject, provided
+his (the composer's) interest, spirit, and character sympathize
+with, or intuitively coincide with that of the subject.
+
+Again, if a man finds that the cadences of an Apache war-dance
+come nearest to his soul, provided he has taken pains to know
+enough other cadences--for eclecticism is part of his duty--
+sorting potatoes means a better crop next year--let him
+assimilate whatever he finds highest of the Indian ideal, so that
+he can use it with the cadences, fervently, transcendentally,
+inevitably, furiously, in his symphonies, in his operas, in his
+whistlings on the way to work, so that he can paint his house
+with them--make them a part of his prayer-book--this is all
+possible and necessary, if he is confident that they have a part
+in his spiritual consciousness. With this assurance his music
+will have everything it should of sincerity, nobility, strength,
+and beauty, no matter how it sounds; and if, with this, he is
+true to none but the highest of American ideals (that is, the
+ideals only that coincide with his spiritual consciousness) his
+music will be true to itself and incidentally American, and it
+will be so even after it is proved that all our Indians came from
+Asia.
+
+The man "born down to Babbitt's Corners," may find a deep appeal
+in the simple but acute "Gospel Hymns of the New England camp
+meetin'," of a generation or so ago. He finds in them--some of
+them--a vigor, a depth of feeling, a natural-soil rhythm, a
+sincerity, emphatic but inartistic, which, in spite of a
+vociferous sentimentality, carries him nearer the "Christ of the
+people" than does the Te Deum of the greatest cathedral. These
+tunes have, for him, a truer ring than many of those groove-made,
+even-measured, monotonous, non-rhythmed, indoor-smelling, priest-
+taught, academic, English or neo-English hymns (and anthems)--
+well-written, well-harmonized things, well-voice-led, well-
+counterpointed, well corrected, and well O.K.'d, by well
+corrected Mus. Bac. R.F.O.G.'s-personified sounds, correct and
+inevitable to sight and hearing--in a word, those proper forms of
+stained-glass beauty, which our over-drilled mechanisms-boy-
+choirs are limited to. But, if the Yankee can reflect the
+fervency with which "his gospels" were sung--the fervency of
+"Aunt Sarah," who scrubbed her life away, for her brother's ten
+orphans, the fervency with which this woman, after a fourteen-
+hour work day on the farm, would hitch up and drive five miles,
+through the mud and rain to "prayer meetin'"--her one articulate
+outlet for the fullness of her unselfish soul--if he can reflect
+the fervency of such a spirit, he may find there a local color
+that will do all the world good. If his music can but catch that
+"spirit" by being a part with itself, it will come somewhere near
+his ideal--and it will be American, too, perhaps nearer so than
+that of the devotee of Indian or negro melody. In other words, if
+local color, national color, any color, is a true pigment of the
+universal color, it is a divine quality, it is a part of
+substance in art--not of manner. The preceding illustrations are
+but attempts to show that whatever excellence an artist sees in
+life, a community, in a people, or in any valuable object or
+experience, if sincerely and intuitively reflected in his work,
+and so he himself, is, in a way, a reflected part of that
+excellence. Whether he be accepted or rejected, whether his music
+is always played, or never played--all this has nothing to do
+with it--it is true or false by his own measure. If we may be
+permitted to leave out two words, and add a few more, a sentence
+of Hegel appears to sum up this idea, "The universal need for
+expression in art lies in man's rational impulse to exalt the
+inner...world (i.e., the highest ideals he sees in the inner life
+of others) together with what he finds in his own life--into a
+spiritual consciousness for himself." The artist does feel or
+does not feel that a sympathy has been approved by an artistic
+intuition and so reflected in his work. Whether he feels this
+sympathy is true or not in the final analysis, is a thing
+probably that no one but he (the artist) knows but the truer he
+feels it, the more substance it has, or as Sturt puts it, "his
+work is art, so long as he feels in doing it as true artists
+feel, and so long as his object is akin to the objects that true
+artists admire."
+
+Dr. Griggs in an Essay on Debussy, [John C. Griggs, "Debussy"
+Yale Review, 1914] asks if this composer's content is worthy the
+manner. Perhaps so, perhaps not--Debussy himself, doubtless,
+could not give a positive answer. He would better know how true
+his feeling and sympathy was, and anyone else's personal opinion
+can be of but little help here.
+
+We might offer the suggestion that Debussy's content would have
+been worthier his manner, if he had hoed corn or sold newspapers
+for a living, for in this way he might have gained a deeper
+vitality and truer theme to sing at night and of a Sunday. Or we
+might say that what substance there is, is "too coherent"--it is
+too clearly expressed in the first thirty seconds. There you have
+the "whole fragment," a translucent syllogism, but then the
+reality, the spirit, the substance stops and the "form," the
+"perfume," the "manner," shimmer right along, as the soapsuds
+glisten after one has finished washing. Or we might say that his
+substance would have been worthier, if his adoration or
+contemplation of Nature, which is often a part of it, and which
+rises to great heights, as is felt for example, in La Mer, had
+been more the quality of Thoreau's. Debussy's attitude toward
+Nature seems to have a kind of sensual sensuousness underlying
+it, while Thoreau's is a kind of spiritual sensuousness. It is
+rare to find a farmer or peasant whose enthusiasm for the beauty
+in Nature finds outward expression to compare with that of the
+city-man who comes out for a Sunday in the country, but Thoreau
+is that rare country-man and Debussy the city-man with his
+weekend flights into country-aesthetics. We would be inclined to
+say that Thoreau leaned towards substance and Debussy towards
+manner.
+
+
+5
+
+
+There comes from Concord, an offer to every mind--the choice
+between repose and truth, and God makes the offer. "Take which
+you please...between these, as a pendulum, man oscillates. He in
+whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed,
+the first philosophy, the first political party he meets," most
+likely his father's. He gets rest, commodity, and reputation.
+Here is another aspect of art-duality, but it is more drastic
+than ours, as it would eliminate one part or the other. A man may
+aim as high as Beethoven or as high as Richard Strauss. In the
+former case the shot may go far below the mark; in truth, it has
+not been reached since that "thunder storm of 1828" and there is
+little chance that it will be reached by anyone living today, but
+that matters not, the shot will never rebound and destroy the
+marksman. But, in the latter case, the shot may often hit the
+mark, but as often rebound and harden, if not destroy, the
+shooter's heart--even his soul. What matters it, men say, he will
+then find rest, commodity, and reputation--what matters it--if he
+find there but few perfect truths--what matters (men say)--he
+will find there perfect media, those perfect instruments of
+getting in the way of perfect truths.
+
+This choice tells why Beethoven is always modern and Strauss
+always mediaeval--try as he may to cover it up in new bottles. He
+has chosen to capitalize a "talent"--he has chosen the complexity
+of media, the shining hardness of externals, repose, against the
+inner, invisible activity of truth. He has chosen the first
+creed, the easy creed, the philosophy of his fathers, among whom
+he found a half-idiot-genius (Nietzsche). His choice naturally
+leads him to glorify and to magnify all kind of dull things--
+stretched-out geigermusik--which in turn naturally leads him to
+"windmills" and "human heads on silver platters." Magnifying the
+dull into the colossal, produces a kind of "comfort"--the comfort
+of a woman who takes more pleasure in the fit of fashionable
+clothes than in a healthy body--the kind of comfort that has
+brought so many "adventures of baby-carriages at county fairs"--
+"the sensation of Teddy bears, smoking their first cigarette"--on
+the program of symphony orchestras of one hundred performers,--
+the lure of the media--the means--not the end--but the finish,--
+thus the failure to perceive that thoughts and memories of
+childhood are too tender, and some of them too sacred to be worn
+lightly on the sleeve. Life is too short for these one hundred
+men, to say nothing of the composer and the "dress-circle," to
+spend an afternoon in this way. They are but like the rest of us,
+and have only the expectancy of the mortality-table to survive--
+perhaps only this "piece." We cannot but feel that a too great
+desire for "repose" accounts for such phenomena. A MS. score is
+brought to a concertmaster--he may be a violinist--he is kindly
+disposed, he looks it over, and casually fastens on a passage
+"that's bad for the fiddles, it doesn't hang just right, write it
+like this, they will play it better." But that one phrase is the
+germ of the whole thing. "Never mind, it will fit the hand better
+this way--it will sound better." My God! what has sound got to do
+with music! The waiter brings the only fresh egg he has, but the
+man at breakfast sends it back because it doesn't fit his eggcup.
+Why can't music go out in the same way it comes in to a man,
+without having to crawl over a fence of sounds, thoraxes,
+catguts, wire, wood, and brass? Consecutive-fifths are as
+harmless as blue laws compared with the relentless tyranny of the
+"media." The instrument!--there is the perennial difficulty--
+there is music's limitations. Why must the scarecrow of the
+keyboard--the tyrant in terms of the mechanism (be it Caruso or a
+Jew's-harp) stare into every measure? Is it the composer's fault
+that man has only ten fingers? Why can't a musical thought be
+presented as it is born--perchance "a bastard of the slums," or a
+"daughter of a bishop"--and if it happens to go better later on
+a bass-drum (than upon a harp) get a good bass-drummer.
+[Footnote: The first movement (Emerson) of the music, which is
+the cause of all these words, was first thought of (we believe)
+in terms of a large orchestra, the second (Hawthorne) in terms of
+a piano or a dozen pianos, the third (Alcotts)--of an organ (or
+piano with voice or violin), and the last (Thoreau), in terms of
+strings, colored possibly with a flute or horn.] That music must
+be heard, is not essential--what it sounds like may not be what
+it is. Perhaps the day is coming when music--believers will learn
+"that silence is a solvent...that gives us leave to be universal"
+rather than personal.
+
+Some fiddler was once honest or brave enough, or perhaps ignorant
+enough, to say that Beethoven didn't know how to write for the
+violin,--that, maybe, is one of the many reasons Beethoven is not
+a Vieuxtemps. Another man says Beethoven's piano sonatas are not
+pianistic--with a little effort, perhaps, Beethoven could have
+become a Thalberg. His symphonies are perfect-truths and perfect
+for the orchestra of l820--but Mahler could have made them--
+possibly did make them--we will say, "more perfect," as far as
+their media clothes are concerned, and Beethoven is today big
+enough to rather like it. He is probably in the same amiable
+state of mind that the Jesuit priest said, "God was in," when He
+looked down on the camp ground and saw the priest sleeping with a
+Congregational Chaplain. Or in the same state of mind you'll be
+in when you look down and see the sexton keeping your tombstone
+up to date. The truth of Joachim offsets the repose of Paganini
+and Kubelik. The repose and reputation of a successful pianist--
+(whatever that means) who plays Chopin so cleverly that he covers
+up a sensuality, and in such a way that the purest-minded see
+nothing but sensuous beauty in it, which, by the way, doesn't
+disturb him as much as the size of his income-tax--the repose and
+fame of this man is offset by the truth and obscurity of the
+village organist who plays Lowell Mason and Bach with such
+affection that he would give his life rather than lose them. The
+truth and courage of this organist, who risks his job, to fight
+the prejudice of the congregation, offset the repose and large
+salary of a more celebrated choirmaster, who holds his job by
+lowering his ideals, who is willing to let the organ smirk under
+an insipid, easy-sounding barcarolle for the offertory, who is
+willing to please the sentimental ears of the music committee
+(and its wives)--who is more willing to observe these forms of
+politeness than to stand up for a stronger and deeper music of
+simple devotion, and for a service of a spiritual unity, the kind
+of thing that Mr. Bossitt, who owns the biggest country place,
+the biggest bank, and the biggest "House of God" in town (for is
+it not the divine handiwork of his own-pocketbook)--the kind of
+music that this man, his wife, and his party (of property right
+in pews) can't stand because it isn't "pretty."
+
+The doctrine of this "choice" may be extended to the distinction
+between literal-enthusiasm and natural-enthusiasm (right or wrong
+notes, good or bad tones against good or bad interpretation, good
+or bad sentiment) or between observation and introspection, or to
+the distinction between remembering and dreaming. Strauss
+remembers, Beethoven dreams. We see this distinction also in
+Goethe's confusion of the moral with the intellectual. There is
+no such confusion in Beethoven--to him they are one. It is told,
+and the story is so well known that we hesitate to repeat it
+here, that both these men were standing in the street one day
+when the Emperor drove by--Goethe, like the rest of the crowd,
+bowed and uncovered--but Beethoven stood bolt upright, and
+refused even to salute, saying: "Let him bow to us, for ours is a
+nobler empire." Goethe's mind knew this was true, but his moral
+courage was not instinctive.
+
+This remembering faculty of "repose," throws the mind in
+unguarded moments quite naturally towards "manner" and thus to
+the many things the media can do. It brings on an itching to
+over-use them--to be original (if anyone will tell what that is)
+with nothing but numbers to be original with. We are told that a
+conductor (of the orchestra) has written a symphony requiring an
+orchestra of one hundred and fifty men. If his work perhaps had
+one hundred and fifty valuable ideas, the one hundred and fifty
+men might be justifiable--but as it probably contains not more
+than a dozen, the composer may be unconsciously ashamed of them,
+and glad to cover them up under a hundred and fifty men. A man
+may become famous because he is able to eat nineteen dinners a
+day, but posterity will decorate his stomach, not his brain.
+
+Manner breeds a cussed-cleverness--only to be clever--a satellite
+of super-industrialism, and perhaps to be witty in the bargain,
+not the wit in mother-wit, but a kind of indoor, artificial,
+mental arrangement of things quickly put together and which have
+been learned and studied--it is of the material and stays there,
+while humor is of the emotional and of the approaching spiritual.
+Even Dukas, and perhaps other Gauls, in their critical heart of
+hearts, may admit that "wit" in music, is as impossible as "wit"
+at a funeral. The wit is evidence of its lack. Mark Twain could
+be humorous at the death of his dearest friend, but in such a way
+as to put a blessing into the heart of the bereaved. Humor in
+music has the same possibilities. But its quantity has a serious
+effect on its quality, "inverse ratio" is a good formula to adopt
+here. Comedy has its part, but wit never. Strauss is at his best
+in these lower rooms, but his comedy reminds us more of the
+physical fun of Lever rather than "comedy in the Meredithian
+sense" as Mason suggests. Meredith is a little too deep or too
+subtle for Strauss--unless it be granted that cynicism is more a
+part of comedy than a part of refined-insult. Let us also
+remember that Mr. Disston, not Mr. Strauss, put the funny notes
+in the bassoon. A symphony written only to amuse and entertain is
+likely to amuse only the writer--and him not long after the check
+is cashed.
+
+"Genius is always ascetic and piety and love," thus Emerson
+reinforces "God's offer of this choice" by a transcendental
+definition. The moment a famous violinist refused "to appear"
+until he had received his check,--at that moment, precisely
+(assuming for argument's sake, that this was the first time that
+materialism had the ascendancy in this man's soul) at that moment
+he became but a man of "talent"--incidentally, a small man and a
+small violinist, regardless of how perfectly he played,
+regardless to what heights of emotion he stirred his audience,
+regardless of the sublimity of his artistic and financial
+success.
+
+d'Annunzio, it is told, becoming somewhat discouraged at the
+result of some of his Fiume adventures said: "We are the only
+Idealists left." This remark may have been made in a moment of
+careless impulse, but if it is taken at its face value, the
+moment it was made that moment his idealism started downhill. A
+grasp at monopoly indicates that a sudden shift has taken place
+from the heights where genius may be found, to the lower plains
+of talent. The mind of a true idealist is great enough to know
+that a monopoly of idealism or of wheat is a thing nature does
+not support.
+
+A newspaper music column prints an incident (so how can we assume
+that it is not true?) of an American violinist who called on Max
+Reger, to tell him how much he (the American) appreciated his
+music. Reger gives him a hopeless look and cries: "What! a
+musician and not speak German!" At that moment, by the clock,
+regardless of how great a genius he may have been before that
+sentence was uttered--at that moment he became but a man of
+"talent." "For the man of talent affects to call his
+transgressions of the laws of sense trivial and to count them
+nothing considered with his devotion to his art." His art never
+taught him prejudice or to wear only one eye. "His art is less
+for every deduction from his holiness and less for every defect
+of common sense." And this common sense has a great deal to do
+with this distinguishing difference of Emerson's between genius
+and talent, repose and truth, and between all evidences of
+substance and manner in art. Manner breeds partialists. "Is
+America a musical nation?"--if the man who is ever asking this
+question would sit down and think something over he might find
+less interest in asking it--he might possibly remember that all
+nations are more musical than any nation, especially the nation
+that pays the most--and pays the most eagerly, for anything,
+after it has been professionally-rubber stamped. Music may be yet
+unborn. Perhaps no music has ever been written or heard. Perhaps
+the birth of art will take place at the moment, in which the last
+man, who is willing to make a living out of art is gone and gone
+forever. In the history of this youthful world the best product
+that human-beings can boast of is probably, Beethoven--but,
+maybe, even his art is as nothing in comparison with the future
+product of some coal-miner's soul in the forty-first century. And
+the same man who is ever asking about the most musical nation, is
+ever discovering the most musical man of the most musical nation.
+When particularly hysterical he shouts, "I have found him! Smith
+Grabholz--the one great American poet,--at last, here is the
+Moses the country has been waiting for"--(of course we all know
+that the country has not been waiting for anybody--and we have
+many Moses always with us). But the discoverer keeps right on
+shouting "Here is the one true American poetry, I pronounce it
+the work of a genius. I predict for him the most brilliant
+career--for his is an art that...--for his is a soul that... for
+his is a..." and Grabholz is ruined;--but ruined, not alone, by
+this perennial discoverer of pearls in any oyster-shell that
+treats him the best, but ruined by his own (Grabholz's) talent,--
+for genius will never let itself be discovered by "a man." Then
+the world may ask "Can the one true national "this" or "that" be
+killed by its own discoverer?" "No," the country replies, "but
+each discovery is proof of another impossibility." It is a sad
+fact that the one true man and the one true art will never behave
+as they should except in the mind of the partialist whom God has
+forgotten. But this matters little to him (the man)--his business
+is good--for it is easy to sell the future in terms of the past--
+and there are always some who will buy anything. The individual
+usually "gains" if he is willing to but lean on "manner." The
+evidence of this is quite widespread, for if the discoverer
+happens to be in any other line of business his sudden
+discoveries would be just as important--to him. In fact, the
+theory of substance and manner in art and its related dualisms,
+"repose and truth, genius and talent," &c., may find illustration
+in many, perhaps most, of the human activities. And when examined
+it (the illustration) is quite likely to show how "manner" is
+always discovering partisans. For example, enthusiastic
+discoveries of the "paragon" are common in politics--an art to
+some. These revelations, in this profession are made easy by the
+pre-election discovering-leaders of the people. And the genius
+who is discovered, forthwith starts his speeches of "talent"--
+though they are hardly that--they are hardly more than a string
+of subplatitudes, square-looking, well-rigged things that almost
+everybody has seen, known, and heard since Rome or man fell.
+Nevertheless these signs of perfect manner, these series of noble
+sentiments that the "noble" never get off, are forcibly, clearly,
+and persuasively handed out--eloquently, even beautifully
+expressed, and with such personal charm, magnetism, and strength,
+that their profound messages speed right through the minds and
+hearts, without as much as spattering the walls, and land right
+square in the middle of the listener's vanity. For all this is a
+part of manner and its quality is of splendor--for manner is at
+times a good bluff but substance a poor one and knows it. The
+discovered one's usual and first great outburst is probably the
+greatest truth that he ever utters. Fearlessly standing, he looks
+straight into the eyes of the populace and with a strong ringing
+voice (for strong voices and strong statesmanship are
+inseparable) and with words far more eloquent than the following,
+he sings "This honor is greater than I deserve but duty calls me-
+-(what, not stated)... If elected, I shall be your servant"...
+(for, it is told, that he believes in modesty,--that he has even
+boasted that he is the most modest man in the country)... Thus he
+has the right to shout, "First, last and forever I am for the
+people. I am against all bosses. I have no sympathy for
+politicians. I am for strict economy, liberal improvements and
+justice! I am also for the--ten commandments" (his intuitive
+political sagacity keeps him from mentioning any particular
+one).--But a sublime height is always reached in his perorations.
+Here we learn that he believes in honesty--(repeat "honesty");--
+we are even allowed to infer that he is one of the very few who
+know that there is such a thing; and we also learn that since he
+was a little boy (barefoot) his motto has been "Do Right,"--he
+swerves not from the right!--he believes in nothing but the
+right; (to him--everything is right!--if it gets him elected);
+but cheers invariably stop this great final truth (in brackets)
+from rising to animate expression. Now all of these translucent
+axioms are true (are not axioms always true?),--as far as manner
+is concerned. In other words, the manner functions perfectly. But
+where is the divine substance? This is not there--why should it
+be--if it were he might not be there. "Substance" is not featured
+in this discovery. For the truth of substance is sometimes
+silence, sometimes ellipses,--and the latter if supplied might
+turn some of the declarations above into perfect truths,--for
+instance "first and last and forever I am for the people ('s
+votes). I'm against all bosses (against me). I have no sympathy
+for (rival) politicians," etc., etc. But these tedious attempts
+at comedy should stop,--they're too serious,--besides the
+illustration may be a little hard on a few, the minority (the
+non-people) though not on the many, the majority (the people)!
+But even an assumed parody may help to show what a power manner
+is for reaction unless it is counterbalanced and then saturated
+by the other part of the duality. Thus it appears that all there
+is to this great discovery is that one good politician has
+discovered another good politician. For manner has brought forth
+its usual talent;--for manner cannot discover the genius who has
+discarded platitudes--the genius who has devised a new and
+surpassing order for mankind, simple and intricate enough,
+abstract and definite enough, locally impractical and universally
+practical enough, to wipe out the need for further discoveries of
+"talent" and incidentally the discoverer's own fortune and
+political "manner." Furthermore, he (this genius) never will be
+discovered until the majority-spirit, the common-heart, the
+human-oversoul, the source of all great values, converts all
+talent into genius, all manner into substance--until the direct
+expression of the mind and soul of the majority, the divine right
+of all consciousness, social, moral, and spiritual, discloses the
+one true art and thus finally discovers the one true leader--even
+itself:--then no leaders, no politicians, no manner, will hold
+sway--and no more speeches will be heard.
+
+The intensity today, with which techniques and media are
+organized and used, tends to throw the mind away from a "common
+sense" and towards "manner" and thus to resultant weak and mental
+states--for example, the Byronic fallacy--that one who is full of
+turbid feeling about himself is qualified to be some sort of an
+artist. In this relation "manner" also leads some to think that
+emotional sympathy for self is as true a part of art as sympathy
+for others; and a prejudice in favor of the good and bad of one
+personality against the virtue of many personalities. It may be
+that when a poet or a whistler becomes conscious that he is in
+the easy path of any particular idiom,--that he is helplessly
+prejudiced in favor of any particular means of expression,--that
+his manner can be catalogued as modern or classic,--that he
+favors a contrapuntal groove, a sound-coloring one, a sensuous
+one, a successful one, or a melodious one (whatever that means),-
+-that his interests lie in the French school or the German
+school, or the school of Saturn,--that he is involved in this
+particular "that" or that particular "this," or in any particular
+brand of emotional complexes,--in a word, when he becomes
+conscious that his style is "his personal own,"--that it has
+monopolized a geographical part of the world's sensibilities,
+then it may be that the value of his substance is not growing,--
+that it even may have started on its way backwards,--it may be
+that he is trading an inspiration for a bad habit and finally
+that he is reaching fame, permanence, or some other under-value,
+and that he is getting farther and farther from a perfect truth.
+But, on the contrary side of the picture, it is not unreasonable
+to imagine that if he (this poet, composer, and laborer) is open
+to all the overvalues within his reach,--if he stands unprotected
+from all the showers of the absolute which may beat upon him,--if
+he is willing to use or learn to use, or at least if he is not
+afraid of trying to use, whatever he can, of any and all lessons
+of the infinite that humanity has received and thrown to man,--
+that nature has exposed and sacrificed, that life and death have
+translated--if he accepts all and sympathizes with all, is
+influenced by all, whether consciously or sub-consciously,
+drastically or humbly, audibly or inaudibly, whether it be all
+the virtue of Satan or the only evil of Heaven--and all, even, at
+one time, even in one chord,--then it may be that the value of
+his substance, and its value to himself, to his art, to all art,
+even to the Common Soul is growing and approaching nearer and
+nearer to perfect truths--whatever they are and wherever they may
+be.
+
+Again, a certain kind of manner-over-influence may be caused by a
+group-disease germ. The over-influence by, the over-admiration
+of, and the over-association with a particular artistic
+personality or a particular type or group of personalities tends
+to produce equally favorable and unfavorable symptoms, but the
+unfavorable ones seem to be more contagious. Perhaps the impulse
+remark of some famous man (whose name we forget) that he "loved
+music but hated musicians," might be followed (with some good
+results) at least part of the time. To see the sun rise, a man
+has but to get up early, and he can always have Bach in his
+pocket. We hear that Mr. Smith or Mr. Morgan, etc., et al. design
+to establish a "course at Rome," to raise the standard of
+American music, (or the standard of American composers--which is
+it?) but possibly the more our composer accepts from his patrons
+"et al." the less he will accept from himself. It may be possible
+that a day in a "Kansas wheat field" will do more for him than
+three years in Rome. It may be, that many men--perhaps some of
+genius--(if you won't admit that all are geniuses) have been
+started on the downward path of subsidy by trying to write a
+thousand dollar prize poem or a ten thousand dollar prize opera.
+How many masterpieces have been prevented from blossoming in this
+way? A cocktail will make a man eat more, but will not give him a
+healthy, normal appetite (if he had not that already). If a
+bishop should offer a "prize living" to the curate who will love
+God the hardest for fifteen days, whoever gets the prize would
+love God the least. Such stimulants, it strikes us, tend to
+industrialize art, rather than develop a spiritual sturdiness--a
+sturdiness which Mr. Sedgwick says [footnote: H. D. Sedgwick. The
+New American Type. Riverside Press. ] "shows itself in a close
+union between spiritual life and the ordinary business of life,"
+against spiritual feebleness which "shows itself in the
+separation of the two." If one's spiritual sturdiness is
+congenital and somewhat perfect he is not only conscious that
+this separation has no part in his own soul, but he does not feel
+its existence in others. He does not believe there is such a
+thing. But perfection in this respect is rare. And for the most
+of us, we believe, this sturdiness would be encouraged by
+anything that will keep or help us keep a normal balance between
+the spiritual life and the ordinary life. If for every thousand
+dollar prize a potato field be substituted, so that these
+candidates of "Clio" can dig a little in real life, perhaps dig
+up a natural inspiration, arts--air might be a little clearer--a
+little freer from certain traditional delusions, for instance,
+that free thought and free love always go to the same cafe--that
+atmosphere and diligence are synonymous. To quote Thoreau
+incorrectly: "When half-Gods talk, the Gods walk!" Everyone
+should have the opportunity of not being over-influenced.
+
+Again, this over-influence by and over-insistence upon "manner"
+may finally lead some to believe "that manner for manner's sake
+is a basis of music." Someone is quoted as saying that "ragtime
+is the true American music." Anyone will admit that it is one of
+the many true, natural, and, nowadays, conventional means of
+expression. It is an idiom, perhaps a "set or series of
+colloquialisms," similar to those that have added through
+centuries and through natural means, some beauty to all
+languages. Every language is but the evolution of slang, and
+possibly the broad "A" in Harvard may have come down from the
+"butcher of Southwark." To examine ragtime rhythms and the
+syncopations of Schumann or of Brahms seems to the writer to show
+how much alike they are not. Ragtime, as we hear it, is, of
+course, more (but not much more) than a natural dogma of shifted
+accents, or a mixture of shifted and minus accents. It is
+something like wearing a derby hat on the back of the head, a
+shuffling lilt of a happy soul just let out of a Baptist Church
+in old Alabama. Ragtime has its possibilities. But it does not
+"represent the American nation" any more than some fine old
+senators represent it. Perhaps we know it now as an ore before it
+has been refined into a product. It may be one of nature's ways
+of giving art raw material. Time will throw its vices away and
+weld its virtues into the fabric of our music. It has its uses as
+the cruet on the boarding-house table has, but to make a meal of
+tomato ketchup and horse-radish, to plant a whole farm with
+sunflowers, even to put a sunflower into every bouquet, would be
+calling nature something worse than a politician. Mr. Daniel
+Gregory Mason, whose wholesome influence, by the way, is doing as
+much perhaps for music in America as American music is, amusingly
+says: "If indeed the land of Lincoln and Emerson has degenerated
+until nothing remains of it but a 'jerk and rattle,' then we, at
+least, are free to repudiate this false patriotism of 'my Country
+right or wrong,' to insist that better than bad music is no
+music, and to let our beloved art subside finally under the
+clangor of the subway gongs and automobile horns, dead, but not
+dishonored." And so may we ask: Is it better to sing inadequately
+of the "leaf on Walden floating," and die "dead but not
+dishonored," or to sing adequately of the "cherry on the
+cocktail," and live forever?
+
+
+6
+
+
+If anyone has been strong enough to escape these rocks--this
+"Scylla and Charybdis,"--has survived these wrong choices, these
+under-values with their prizes, Bohemias and heroes, is not such
+a one in a better position, is he not abler and freer to "declare
+himself and so to love his cause so singly that he will cleave to
+it, and forsake all else? What is this cause for the American
+composer but the utmost musical beauty that he, as an individual
+man, with his own qualities and defects, is capable of
+understanding and striving towards?--forsaking all else except
+those types of musical beauty that come home to him," [footnote:
+Contemporary Composers, D. G. Mason, Macmil1an Co., N. Y.] and
+that his spiritual conscience intuitively approves.
+
+"It matters not one jot, provided this course of personal loyalty
+to a cause be steadfastly pursued, what the special
+characteristics of the style of the music may be to which one
+gives one's devotion." [footnote: Contemporary Composers, D. G.
+Mason, Macmil1an Co., N. Y.] This, if over-translated, may be
+made to mean, what we have been trying to say--that if your
+interest, enthusiasm, and devotion on the side of substance and
+truth, are of the stuff to make you so sincere that you sweat--to
+hell with manner and repose! Mr. Mason is responsible for too
+many young minds, in their planting season to talk like this, to
+be as rough, or to go as far, but he would probably admit that,
+broadly speaking--some such way, i.e., constantly recognizing
+this ideal duality in art, though not the most profitable road
+for art to travel, is almost its only way out to eventual freedom
+and salvation. Sidney Lanier, in a letter to Bayard Taylor
+writes: "I have so many fair dreams and hopes about music in
+these days (1875). It is gospel whereof the people are in great
+need. As Christ gathered up the Ten Commandments and redistilled
+them into the clear liquid of the wondrous eleventh--love God
+utterly and thy neighbor as thyself--so I think the time will
+come when music rightly developed to its now little forseen
+grandeur will be found to be a late revelation of all gospels in
+one." Could the art of music, or the art of anything have a more
+profound reason for being than this? A conception unlimited by
+the narrow names of Christian, Pagan, Jew, or Angel! A vision
+higher and deeper than art itself!
+
+
+7
+
+
+The humblest composer will not find true humility in aiming low--
+he must never be timid or afraid of trying to express that which
+he feels is far above his power to express, any more than he
+should be afraid of breaking away, when necessary, from easy
+first sounds, or afraid of admitting that those half truths that
+come to him at rare intervals, are half true, for instance, that
+all art galleries contain masterpieces, which are nothing more
+than a history of art's beautiful mistakes. He should never fear
+of being called a high-brow--but not the kind in Prof. Brander
+Matthews' definition. John L. Sullivan was a "high-brow" in his
+art. A high-brow can always whip a low-brow.
+
+If he "truly seeks," he "will surely find" many things to sustain
+him. He can go to a part of Alcott's philosophy--"that all
+occupations of man's body and soul in their diversity come from
+but one mind and soul!" If he feels that to subscribe to all of
+the foregoing and then submit, though not as evidence, the work
+of his own hands is presumptuous, let him remember that a man is
+not always responsible for the wart on his face, or a girl for
+the bloom on her cheek, and as they walk out of a Sunday for an
+airing, people will see them--but they must have the air. He can
+remember with Plotinus, "that in every human soul there is the
+ray of the celestial beauty," and therefore every human outburst
+may contain a partial ray. And he can believe that it is better
+to go to the plate and strike out than to hold the bench down,
+for by facing the pitcher, he may then know the umpire better,
+and possibly see a new parabola. His presumption, if it be that,
+may be but a kind of courage juvenal sings about, and no harm can
+then be done either side. "Cantabit vacuus coram latrone viator."
+
+
+8
+
+
+To divide by an arbitrary line something that cannot be divided
+is a process that is disturbing to some. Perhaps our deductions
+are not as inevitable as they are logical, which suggests that
+they are not "logic." An arbitrary assumption is never fair to
+all any of the time, or to anyone all the time. Many will resent
+the abrupt separation that a theory of duality in music suggests
+and say that these general subdivisions are too closely inter-
+related to be labeled decisively--"this or that." There is
+justice in this criticism, but our answer is that it is better to
+be short on the long than long on the short. In such an abstruse
+art as music it is easy for one to point to this as substance and
+to that as manner. Some will hold and it is undeniable--in fact
+quite obvious--that manner has a great deal to do with the beauty
+of substance, and that to make a too arbitrary division, or
+distinction between them, is to interfere, to some extent, with
+an art's beauty and unity. There is a great deal of truth in this
+too. But on the other hand, beauty in music is too often confused
+with something that lets the ears lie back in an easy chair. Many
+sounds that we are used to, do not bother us, and for that
+reason, we are inclined to call them beautiful. Frequently,--
+possibly almost invariably,--analytical and impersonal tests will
+show, we believe, that when a new or unfamiliar work is accepted
+as beautiful on its first hearing, its fundamental quality is one
+that tends to put the mind to sleep. A narcotic is not always
+unnecessary, but it is seldom a basis of progress,--that is,
+wholesome evolution in any creative experience. This kind of
+progress has a great deal to do with beauty--at least in its
+deeper emotional interests, if not in its moral values. (The
+above is only a personal impression, but it is based on carefully
+remembered instances, during a period of about fifteen or twenty
+years.) Possibly the fondness for individual utterance may throw
+out a skin-deep arrangement, which is readily accepted as
+beautiful--formulae that weaken rather than toughen up the
+musical-muscles. If the composer's sincere conception of his art
+and of its functions and ideals, coincide to such an extent with
+these groove-colored permutations of tried out progressions in
+expediency, that he can arrange them over and over again to his
+transcendent delight--has he or has he not been drugged with an
+overdose of habit-forming sounds? And as a result do not the
+muscles of his clientele become flabbier and flabbier until they
+give way altogether and find refuge only in a seasoned opera
+box--where they can see without thinking? And unity is too
+generally conceived of, or too easily accepted as analogous to
+form, and form (as analogous) to custom, and custom to habit, and
+habit may be one of the parents of custom and form, and there are
+all kinds of parents. Perhaps all unity in art, at its inception,
+is half-natural and half-artificial but time insists, or at least
+makes us, or inclines to make us feel that it is all natural. It
+is easy for us to accept it as such. The "unity of dress" for a
+man at a ball requires a collar, yet he could dance better
+without it. Coherence, to a certain extent, must bear some
+relation to the listener's subconscious perspective. For example,
+a critic has to listen to a thousand concerts a year, in which
+there is much repetition, not only of the same pieces, but the
+same formal relations of tones, cadences, progressions, etc.
+There is present a certain routine series of image-necessity-
+stimulants, which he doesn't seem to need until they disappear.
+Instead of listening to music, he listens around it. And from
+this subconscious viewpoint, he inclines perhaps more to the
+thinking about than thinking in music. If he could go into some
+other line of business for a year or so perhaps his perspective
+would be more naturally normal. The unity of a sonata movement
+has long been associated with its form, and to a greater extent
+than is necessary. A first theme, a development, a second in a
+related key and its development, the free fantasia, the
+recapitulation, and so on, and over again. Mr. Richter or Mr.
+Parker may tell us that all this is natural, for it is based on
+the classic-song form, but in spite of your teachers a vague
+feeling sometimes creeps over you that the form-nature of the
+song has been stretched out into deformity. Some claim for
+Tchaikowsky that his clarity and coherence of design is
+unparalleled (or some such word) in works for the orchestra. That
+depends, it seems to us, on how far repetition is an essential
+part of clarity and coherence. We know that butter comes from
+cream--but how long must we watch the "churning arm!" If nature
+is not enthusiastic about explanation, why should Tschaikowsky
+be? Beethoven had to churn, to some extent, to make his message
+carry. He had to pull the ear, hard and in the same place and
+several times, for the 1790 ear was tougher than the 1890 one.
+But the "great Russian weeper" might have spared us. To Emerson,
+"unity and the over-soul, or the common-heart, are synonymous."
+Unity is at least nearer to these than to solid geometry, though
+geometry may be all unity.
+
+But to whatever unpleasantness the holding to this theory of
+duality brings us, we feel that there is a natural law underneath
+it all, and like all laws of nature, a liberal interpretation is
+the one nearest the truth. What part of these supplements are
+opposites? What part of substance is manner? What part of this
+duality is polarity? These questions though not immaterial may be
+disregarded, if there be a sincere appreciation (intuition is
+always sincere) of the "divine" spirit of the thing. Enthusiasm
+for, and recognition of these higher over these lower values will
+transform a destructive iconoclasm into creation, and a mere
+devotion into consecration--a consecration which, like Amphion's
+music, will raise the Walls of Thebes.
+
+
+9
+
+
+Assuming, and then granting, that art-activity can be transformed
+or led towards an eventual consecration, by recognizing and using
+in their true relation, as much as one can, these higher and
+lower dual values--and that the doing so is a part, if not the
+whole of our old problem of paralleling or approving in art the
+highest attributes, moral and spiritual, one sees in life--if you
+will grant all this, let us offer a practical suggestion--a thing
+that one who has imposed the foregoing should try to do just out
+of common decency, though it be but an attempt, perhaps, to make
+his speculations less speculative, and to beat off metaphysics.
+
+All, men-bards with a divine spark, and bards without, feel the
+need at times of an inspiration from without, "the breath of
+another soul to stir our inner flame," especially when we are in
+pursuit of a part of that "utmost musical beauty," that we are
+capable of understanding--when we are breathlessly running to
+catch a glimpse of that unforeseen grandeur of Mr. Lanier's
+dream. In this beauty and grandeur perhaps marionettes and their
+souls have a part--though how great their part is, we hear, is
+still undetermined; but it is morally certain that, at times, a
+part with itself must be some of those greater contemplations
+that have been caught in the "World's Soul," as it were, and
+nourished for us there in the soil of its literature.
+
+If an interest in, and a sympathy for, the thought-visions of men
+like Charles Kingsley, Marcus Aurelius, Whit tier, Montaigne,
+Paul of Tarsus, Robert Browning, Pythagoras, Channing, Milton,
+Sophocles, Swedenborg, Thoreau, Francis of Assisi, Wordsworth,
+Voltaire, Garrison, Plutarch, Ruskin, Ariosto, and all kindred
+spirits and souls of great measure, from David down to Rupert
+Brooke,--if a study of the thought of such men creates a
+sympathy, even a love for them and their ideal-part, it is
+certain that this, however inadequately expressed, is nearer to
+what music was given man for, than a devotion to "Tristan's
+sensual love of Isolde," to the "Tragic Murder of a Drunken
+Duke," or to the sad thoughts of a bathtub when the water is
+being let out. It matters little here whether a man who paints a
+picture of a useless beautiful landscape imperfectly is a greater
+genius than the man who paints a useful bad smell perfectly.
+
+It is not intended in this suggestion that inspirations coming
+from the higher planes should be limited to any particular
+thought or work, as the mind receives it. The plan rather
+embraces all that should go with an expression of the composite-
+value. It is of the underlying spirit, the direct unrestricted
+imprint of one soul on another, a portrait, not a photograph of
+the personality--it is the ideal part that would be caught in
+this canvas. It is a sympathy for "substance"--the over-value
+together with a consciousness that there must be a lower value--
+the "Demosthenic part of the Philippics"--the "Ciceronic part of
+the Catiline," the sublimity, against the vileness of Rousseau's
+Confessions. It is something akin to, but something more than
+these predominant partial tones of Hawthorne--"the grand old
+countenance of Homer; the decrepit form, but vivid face of Aesop;
+the dark presence of Dante; the wild Ariosto; Rabelais' smile of
+deep-wrought mirth; the profound, pathetic humor of Cervantes;
+the all-glorious Shakespeare; Spenser, meet guest for allegoric
+structure; the severe divinity of Milton; and Bunyan, molded of
+humblest clay, but instinct with celestial fire."
+
+There are communities now, partly vanished, but cherished and
+sacred, scattered throughout this world of ours, in which freedom
+of thought and soul, and even of body, have been fought for. And
+we believe that there ever lives in that part of the over-soul,
+native to them, the thoughts which these freedom-struggles have
+inspired. America is not too young to have its divinities, and
+its place legends. Many of those "Transcendent Thoughts" and
+"Visions" which had their birth beneath our Concord elms--
+messages that have brought salvation to many listening souls
+throughout the world--are still growing, day by day, to greater
+and greater beauty--are still showing clearer and clearer man's
+way to God!
+
+No true composer will take his substance from another finite
+being--but there are times, when he feels that his self-
+expression needs some liberation from at least a part of his own
+soul. At such times, shall he not better turn to those greater
+souls, rather than to the external, the immediate, and the
+"Garish Day"?
+
+The strains of one man may fall far below the course of those
+Phaetons of Concord, or of the Aegean Sea, or of Westmorland--but
+the greater the distance his music falls away, the more reason
+that some greater man shall bring his nearer those higher
+spheres.
+
+
+**************************************************************
+
+
+INFO ABOUT THIS E-TEXT EDITION
+
+This edition of Charles Ives' "Essays Before a Sonata" was
+originally published in 1920 by The Knickerbocker Press. It has
+also been republished unabridged by Dover Publications, Inc., in a
+1962 edition, ISBN 0-486-20320-4.
+
+This electronic text was prepared by John Mamoun with help from
+numerous other proofreaders, including those associated with
+Charles Franks' Distributed Proofreaders website. This e-text is
+public domain, freely copyable and distributable for any non-
+commercial purpose, and may be included without royalty or
+permission on a mass media storage product, such as a cd-rom, that
+contains at least 50 public domain electronic texts, whether
+offered for non-commercial or commercial purposes. Any other
+commercial usage requires permission.
+
+
+
+
+
+Use of the Project Gutenberg Trademark requires separate
+permission.
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg Etext "Essays Before a Sonata," by
+Charles Ives
+
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