PAGE 20
Emerson And His Journals
by
X
How fruitful in striking and original men New England was in those days–poets, orators, picturesque characters! In Concord, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Alcott; in Boston and Cambridge, Lowell, Longfellow, Norton, Holmes, Higginson, Father Taylor, Bancroft, Everett, and others, with Webster standing out like a Colossus on the New Hampshire granite. This crop of geniuses seems to have been the aftermath of the Revolution. Will our social and industrial revolution bring anything like another such a crop? Will the great World War produce another? Until now too much prosperity, too much mammon, too much “at ease in Zion” has certainly prevailed for another band of great idealists to appear.
Emerson could never keep his eyes off Webster. He was fairly hypnotized by the majesty and power of his mind and personality, and he recurs to him in page after page of his Journal. Webster was of primary stuff like the granite of his native hills, while such a man as Everett was of the secondary formation, like the sandstone rocks. Emerson was delighted when he learned that Carlyle, “with those devouring eyes, with that portraying hand,” had seen Webster. And this is the portrait Carlyle drew of him: “As a Logic-fencer, Advocate, or Parliamentary Hercules, one would incline to back him at first sight against all the extant world. The tanned complexion, that amorphous, crag-like face; the dull black eyes under their precipice of brows, like dull anthracite furnaces, needing only to be blown; the mastiff-mouth, accurately closed:–I have not traced as much of silent Berserkir-rage, that I remember of, in any other man.”
Emerson’s description and praise and criticism of Webster form some of the most notable pages in his Journal. In 1843, when Webster came to Concord as counsel in a famous case that was tried there, the fact so excited Emerson that he could not sleep. It was like the perturbation of a planet in its orbit when a large body passes near it. Emerson seems to have spent much time at the court-house to hear and study him: “Webster quite fills our little town, and I doubt if I shall get settled down to writing until he has well gone from the county. He is a natural Emperor of men.” He adjourned the court every day in true imperial fashion, simply by rising and taking his hat and looking the Judge coolly in the face, whereupon the Judge “bade the Crier adjourn the Court.” But when Emerson finally came to look upon him with the same feeling with which he saw one of those strong Paddies of the railroad, he lost his interest in the trial and did not return to the court in the afternoon. “The green fields on my way home were too fresh and fair, and forbade me to go again.”
It was with profound grief that he witnessed the decline of Webster’s political career, owing to his truckling to the Southern proslavery element, and to his increasing intemperance. To see the placid, transcendental Emerson “fighting mad,” flaring up in holy wrath, read his criticisms of Webster, after Webster’s defection–his moral collapse to win the South and his support of the Fugitive Slave Law. This got into Emerson’s blood and made him think “daggers and tomahawks.” He has this to say of a chance meeting with Webster in Boston, at this period: “I saw Webster on the street–but he was changed since I saw him last–black as a thunder-cloud, and careworn…. I did not wonder that he depressed his eyes when he saw me and would not meet my face.”
In 1851 he said that some of Webster’s late speeches and state papers were like “Hail Columbia” when sung at a slave-auction; then he follows with the terrible remark: “The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtezan.”
The prizes or fancied prizes of politics seem to have corrupted all the great men of that day–Webster, Choate, Foote, Clay, Everett. Their “disgusting obsequiousness” to the South fired Emerson’s wrath.