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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Essays Before a Sonata, by Charles Ives
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Essays Before a Sonata
+
+Author: Charles Ives
+
+Posting Date: April 29, 2009 [EBook #3673]
+Release Date: January, 2003
+First Posted: July 11, 2001
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ESSAYS BEFORE A SONATA ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by John Mamoun with help from the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team of Charles Franks. HTML
+version by Al Haines.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ESSAYS BEFORE A SONATA
+
+
+by
+
+Charles Ives
+
+
+
+
+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, 11th, 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 is 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 1820--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, Macmillan 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, Macmillan 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.
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