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Address At The Emerson Centenary In Concord
by
The insight and creed from which Emerson’s life followed can be best summed up in his own verses:
“So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
So near is God to man!”
Through the individual fact there ever shone for him the effulgence of the Universal Reason. The great Cosmic Intellect terminates and houses itself in mortal men and passing hours. Each of us is an angle of its eternal vision, and the only way to be true to our Maker is to be loyal to ourselves. “O rich and various Man!” he cries, “thou palace of sight and sound, carrying in thy senses the morning and the night and the unfathomable galaxy; in thy brain the geometry of the city of God; in thy heart the bower of love and the realms of right and wrong.”
If the individual open thus directly into the Absolute, it follows that there is something in each and all of us, even the lowliest, that ought not to consent to borrowing traditions and living at second hand. “If John was perfect, why are you and I alive?” Emerson writes; “As long as any man exists there is some need of him; let him fight for his own.” This faith that in a life at first hand there is something sacred is perhaps the most characteristic note in Emerson’s writings. The hottest side of him is this non-conformist persuasion, and if his temper could ever verge on common irascibility, it would be by reason of the passionate character of his feelings on this point. The world is still new and untried. In seeing freshly, and not in hearing of what others saw, shall a man find what truth is. “Each one of us can bask in the great morning which rises out of the Eastern Sea, and be himself one of the children of the light.” “Trust thyself, every heart vibrates to that iron string. There is a time in each man’s education when he must arrive at the conviction that imitation is suicide; when he must take himself for better or worse as his portion; and know that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which it was given him to till.”
The matchless eloquence with which Emerson proclaimed the sovereignty of the living individual electrified and emancipated his generation, and this bugle-blast will doubtless be regarded by future critics as the soul of his message. The present man is the aboriginal reality, the Institution is derivative, and the past man is irrelevant and obliterate for present issues. “If anyone would lay an axe to your tree with a text from 1 John, v, 7, or a sentence from Saint Paul, say to him,” Emerson wrote, “‘My tree is Yggdrasil, the tree of life.’ Let him know by your security that your conviction is clear and sufficient, and, if he were Paul himself, that you also are here and with your Creator.” “Cleave ever to God,” he insisted, “against the name of God;”–and so, in spite of the intensely religious character of his total thought, when he began his career it seemed to many of his brethren in the clerical profession that he was little more than an iconoclast and desecrator.
Emerson’s belief that the individual must in reason be adequate to the vocation for which the Spirit of the world has called him into being, is the source of those sublime pages, hearteners and sustainers of our youth, in which he urges his hearers to be incorruptibly true to their own private conscience. Nothing can harm the man who rests in his appointed place and character. Such a man is invulnerable; he balances the universe, balances it as much by keeping small when he is small, as by being great and spreading when he is great. “I love and honor Epaminondas,” said Emerson, “but I do not wish to be Epaminondas. I hold it more just to love the world of this hour than the world of his hour. Nor can you, if I am true, excite me to the least uneasiness by saying, ‘He acted and thou sittest still.’ I see action to be good when the need is, and sitting still to be also good. Epaminondas, if he was the man I take him for, would have sat still with joy and peace, if his lot had been mine. Heaven is large, and affords space for all modes of love and fortitude.” “The fact that I am here certainly shows me that the Soul has need of an organ here, and shall I not assume the post?”