Mr. Emerson spoke in an aphoristic style that, no matter how obscure or abstract his thought and language, made it easy for me to understand his ideas and remember his words and quote them afterwards to those who were not so lucky as to have heard them in person. I remember, years later, spouting, as if they were my own, Mr. Emerson’s words that night in Boston. My companions were humble men, Negro and white men, huddled with me around a campfire in Kansas or holed up in a freezing cabin in Iowa or a farmhouse in Maryland, and I would try to inspire them by saying things like, “The characteristic of heroism is its persistency.” And, “If you would serve your brother, because it is fit for you to serve him, do not take back your words when you find that prudent people do not commend you.” And this, which became thereafter my personal motto: “Always do what you are most afraid to do.”
High counsel was how I took Mr. Emerson’s talk on heroism. High counsel, and prophecy, too. “Times of heroism!” he explained, “are generally times of terror.” And then he recalled for us the martyrdom of the brave Lovejoy who, in the name of the Bill of Rights and his right to shout against the sin of slavery, gave himself over to the rage of the mob. We now are living in a time of terror, was Mr. Emerson’s point, and thus are we likewise about to see the arrival of our heroes. They are coming soon. And we must be prepared to recognize them when they appear in our midst, and Mr. Emerson was bending all his considerable, all his incomparable, talents and wisdom to that end. Who could not be grateful?
Well, Father, for one. Perhaps Father alone. In the midst of the applause at the end of Mr. Emerson’s lecture, Father rose from his seat, to applaud the more enthusiastically, I first thought. But, no, it was to leave the hall, and with a glower on his face, he made his way past the laps of his neighbors and hurriedly, pointedly, stalked up the aisle to the exit at the rear. Shocked and more than slightly embarrassed by his rude departure, I followed, head down, and joined him on the street.
For a few moments, we walked in silence. “That man’s truly a boob!” Father blurted. “For the life of me, I can’t understand his fame. Unless the whole world is just as foolish as he is. Godless? He’s not even rational! You’d think, given his godlessness, his sec-u-laahr-ity, he’d be at least rational” he said, and gave a sardonic laugh.
“Yes, but didn’t… didn’t you admire his language?” Mr. Emerson had used language in an oblique and original way that, while it made his personality shine brilliantly, also had made the ostensible subject of his talk opaque, so that, to understand him, one had practically to invent for oneself what he was saying. I found this experience nearly wonderful, as if he were speaking poetry. But I knew not what to point to in Mr. Emerson’s lecture that might have appealed to Father. If you did not swallow the whole of it, you could not accept a part. And if you accepted a part, you had to be nourished by the whole.
“His language? Come on, Owen. Airy nonsense, that’s all it is. For substance, the man offers us clouds, fogs, mists of words. ‘Times of terror; indeed! What does he know of terror? Ralph Waldo Emerson has neither the wit nor the soul to know terror. And he surely has no Christian belief in him! That’s what ought to be terrifying him, the state of his own naked soul.” He sputtered on as we walked back to Dr. Howe’s residence, where the good Mrs. Howe had promised to leave us some cold supper.
I followed silently, pondering the meaning and import of his fulmination, even as I nurtured an odd thought which had come to me towards the end of Mr. Emerson’s peroration — that Father resembled no man so much as the Concord poet himself. The Old Man was a rough-cut, Puritan version of Ralph Waldo Emerson, it seemed to me that first night in Boston and for many years afterwards, and even unto the present time, when it matters probably not at all. But it was that night of some personal significance to me.
Even physically, the two looked enough alike to have been brothers — although Father would have been the cruder, more muscular version. They both wore old-fashioned, hawk-nosed, Yankee faces with pale, deep-set eyes that looked out at the world with such an unblinking gaze as to force you to avert your own gaze at once or give yourself over to the man’s will. And just as easily and selflessly as Father believed in his God, Mr. Emerson believed in the power and everlasting truth of what he called Nature. For both men, God, or Nature, was beginning, cause, and end, and man was merely an agent for beginning, cause, and end.
As I walked, dropping further and further behind the Old Man in my reverie, I found myself amusing myself with the picture of Mr. Emerson coming off a meeting with Father and imagined him saying the same things to his son about the crazy man John Brown. “The man’s truly a boob! For the life of me, I can’t understand his fame!” For if there was a flaw in Mr. Emerson’s argument, it is that he was probably incapable of seeing my father as the very hero he was calling for. And if there was a flaw in my father’s heroism, it may be that he could not see himself in Mr. Emerson’s portrait.
We turned off Charles Street to make our way uphill towards Louisburg Square, and I remember a young man striding downhill in our direction, well-dressed, fresh-faced, and whistling a tune — no tune I recognized; like a bird he was, whistling for the sheer pleasure of it. A purely happy fellow, undivided in himself, it seemed, as if he’d been successfully courting a lovely maiden and had been invited to return tomorrow evening to continue. He whistled past and continued down the street, to his bachelor rooms, no doubt. A happy man! I stopped in my tracks and watched him for a few seconds, wondering what it felt like, to be so uncomplicatedly happy as he, when Father called, “Hurry, Owen! Keep up, keep up! Don’t stare after people like a bumpkin.”
I quickly caught up to him, and when we had walked on in silence a ways, the Old Man, in a low voice that suggested he was having second thoughts, asked me what was my true opinion of Mr. Emerson’s lecture. I saw that he was now somewhat embarrassed by his earlier outburst and that some of the poet’s words may in fact have touched him. Perhaps he had been stung by their similarity to his own thoughts and beliefs and had never before heard them so handsomely expressed, and thus his anger had been directed not at Mr. Emerson but at himself.
“Truthfully?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I have to say, I took his words as high counsel, Father. And prophecy.”
He did not answer at first. Then he said, “High counsel, eh? You heard that? You heard that and nothing else, nothing that contradicted your beliefs?”
“No. What I heard only corroborated my beliefs and strengthened me in them. Not everything Mister Emerson said was altogether clear to me, of course, but all of it was very beautiful. All of it.”
I thought that Father would then upbraid me, but instead he pursed his lips as he often did when thinking something through for the first time and said, “Very interesting. That’s interesting to me, Owen. And prophecy? You heard that, too?”
“Well, yes. I believe so.”
“Very interesting. High counsel and prophecy. Well, who knows? God speaks to us in unexpected ways. Even in the words of philosophers,” he said, and smiled and reached up and put his arm over my shoulder.
We briskly walked that way, side by side, the remaining few blocks to Dr. Howe’s home, and the entire distance, as I strode along, I whistled the same, nearly tuneless tune that I’d heard the happy young man whistle before. I believe that I felt for those few moments just as he had; and it was grand.