We arrived early and sat in the third row of seats, as close to the front as possible. Soon the large hall was filled, mostly with distinguished-looking men and women whose bearing and gazes were the epitome of benevolent intelligence and whose manners bespoke, not arrogance, but simple, if well-fed, self-confidence. A more civilized collection of human beings I had never seen, and I could not keep myself from turning in my seat and craning my neck to see and admire them as they entered from the darkening street and took their places.
Father sat stiffly with his hands on his knees, staring straight ahead, as if he were alone in the audience or were in an antechamber awaiting an interview with a prospective employer. There were several people who must be famous, I thought, if only because of the way other folks, when this one or that entered and took his seat, at once stared and whispered to their companions. But I recognized no one, of course. Could that handsome, eagle-eyed man be Charles Sumner? Could that small burl of a woman next to him be the famous agitator for female rights and abolition, Lydia Maria Child? Might the sublimely intelligent Transcendentalist philosopher William Everett Channing be here amongst us?
I knew none of these illustrious people, of course, except by their marvelous reputations, and I believed that anyone who looked more distinguished than Father, as these people surely did, must be at least as distinguished as he and then some. Unlike Father, they had lived in Boston all their lives and came from wealthy old families and had been privileged by fine educations and social relations with one another: they were bound to be beacons on a height. So I believed. And Father’s light, by comparison, was a flickering candle cupped in his hand against the wind. I was, therefore, not so much ashamed of Father in this context as sorry for him, especially sitting there stock-still and stiff in his seat, red-faced and tense, his large, workingman’s hands and wrists sticking out from his sleeves, his mouth tight, his gray eyes staring straight up at the podium. In this impressive company of likeminded people, Father seemed, not enhanced, but sadly, surprisingly diminished.
And when a hush settled over the crowd and Mr. Emerson in utter simplicity and with no introduction came forward and began to speak, Father, poor Father, seemed even smaller than before, to the point of disappearing altogether from my ken, which almost never happened in a public place, for I was rarely able to ignore him or his reactions to a speech or sermon. Busily fashioning my own reaction around what I supposed was his, I seldom heard clearly the speech or sermon itself.
This occasion was different, however. To me, Mr. Emerson was every inch the ideal poet and sage, and if a man may be said to be beautiful, he was that. Slender, but strong and supple-looking, like a man used to outdoor exercise, of medium height with a noble carriage and easy, natural gestures, he stood before us and spoke in a voice that, while intimate and almost conversational in tone, carried to the furthest reaches of the hall, for his every word seemed raptly attended to, even by the last few fellows to squeeze in at the door in back. From his first sentence to his last, there was not a whisper or a rustle from the audience. He relied on none of the usual rhetorical flourishes of the arm and mighty brow that were then so popular with public speakers; none of the tricks of voice and variations of pace and volume to surprise the audience and gain its attention cheaply. Instead, he spoke simply, directly, in a way that made you feel that he was speaking to you alone and to no one else in the hall. His bright eyes were the color of bluebells and did not fix on any single person but fixed on the space just above one’s own head, as if he were contemplating one’s thoughts as they rose in the air. Now and again, he would glance down at the text before him, as if to take in a new paragraph or sometimes an entire page, and then his large, handsome head would lift, and he would go on, with no hesitation or break in the flow of his speech. He was at that time in his mid-forties, I suppose, in the prime of his manhood, although he seemed both younger — in the clarity and openness of his expression — and older — in the wise self-assurance of his delivery.
Awed and rapt as I was, especially at the start, I did not make out much of what he said, as he was at first speaking of figures and literary works I had never heard of — a playwright named Beaumont Fletcher was one, and various characters from the plays. But I did catch that he was indeed speaking of heroism and how it had been misunderstood in the past, as much misunderstood by poets and playwrights as by politicians. He intended here, he declared, to understand it freshly. And he seemed, as Dr. Howe and his wife had promised, to be applying that new understanding of heroism to our present dilemma with regard to the issue of slavery generally and the abolitionist movement in particular.
In the work of the elder British dramatists, he said, there was a constant, obsessive recognition of gentility, just as skin color is recognized in our society today. A marvelous and original reversal, I thought, of how we normally think of those two aspects of society — gentility, or the classes of men, and race. Opposites are made to seem apposite. Yes, this was a freshened way of looking at things.
Then, after a while, he began to isolate and examine the various manifestations of heroism, as if, on the surface, he were discussing merely the literary heros, but all the same, with hints and subtle asides, indicating that our present national crisis over slavery was the necessary field for such a person. He was calling for the arrival of a man out of Plutarch, one of Father’s favorite authors also, I noted with pleasure, a man who could refute the despondency and cowardice of our religious and political theorists with “a wild courage, a stoicism not of the schools, but of the blood!” Mr. Emerson wanted a “tart cathartic virtue!’ he said, that could contend with the violations of the laws of nature committed by our predecessors and by our contemporaries. And here he lapsed into language — or I should say, he rose to language — that, although not once uttering the word itself, excoriated slavery horribly and with great originality. It is a lock-jaw, he said, that bends a man’s head back to his heels. It is a hydrophobia that makes him bark at his wife and babes, an insanity that makes him eat grass.
A man must confront and confound all this external evil, he explained, with a military attitude of the soul. This is the beginnings of heroism, this attitude. The hero advances to his own music, and there is somewhat that is not philosophical in heroism, he noted, somewhat not holy in it. “Heroism seems not to know that other souls are of one texture with it. It has pride. It is the extreme of individual nature,” he declared. These words struck fire with me, for, of course, they described my father perfectly, and I wondered if the Old Man himself realized it. Or was that, too, characteristic of heroism — that the hero does not recognize himself as heroic?
There was more, much more, that put me in mind of Father, as Mr. Emerson continued. Heroism, he told us, is almost ashamed of its body.
And this: that the stoical temperance of the hero is loved by him for its elegance, not for its austerity. “A great man scarcely knows how he dines, how he dresses, but without railing or precision, his living is natural and poetic.”