Memories and Studies E-Book

William James

• Herausgeber: Andura Publishing
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Experience the life-changing power of William James with this unforgettable book.

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Leseprobe

Memories and Studies

by William James,

Edited by Henry James, Jr.

PREFATORY NOTE

Professor William James formed the intention

shortly before his death of republishing a number

of popular addresses and essays under the title

which this book now bears; but unfortunately he

found no opportunity to attend to any detail of the

book himself, or to leave definite instructions for

others.  I believe, however, that I have departed

in no substantial degree from my father's idea,

except perhaps by including two or three short

pieces which were first addressed to special

occasions or audiences and which now seem clearly

worthy of republication in their original form,

although he might not have been willing to reprint

them himself without the recastings to which he was

ever most attentive when preparing for new readers.

Everything in this volume has already appeared in

print in magazines or otherwise, and definite

acknowledgements are hereinafter made in the

appropriate places.  Comparison with the original texts

will disclose slight variations in a few passages, and

it is therefore proper to explain that in these

passages the present text follows emendations of the

original which have survived in the author's own

handwriting.

HENRY JAMES, JR.

CONTENTS

    I. LOUIS AGASSIZ

   II. ADDRESS AT THE EMERSON CENTENARY IN CONCORD

  III. ROBERT GOULD SHAW

   IV. FRANCIS BOOTT

    V. THOMAS DAVIDSON: A KNIGHT-ERRANT OF THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE

   VI. HERBERT SPENCER'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  VII. FREDERICK MYERS' SERVICES TO PSYCHOLOGY

 VIII. FINAL IMPRESSIONS OF A PSYCHICAL RESEARCHER

   IX. ON SOME MENTAL EFFECTS OF THE EARTHQUAKE

    X. THE ENERGIES OF MEN

   XI. THE MORAL EQUIVALENT OF WAR

  XII. REMARKS AT THE PEACE BANQUET

 XIII. THE SOCIAL VALUE OF THE COLLEGE-BRED

  XIV. THE UNIVERSITY AND THE INDIVIDUAL

       THE PH. D. OCTOPUS

       THE TRUE HARVARD

       STANFORD'S IDEAL DESTINY

   XV. A PLURALISTIC MYSTIC

I

LOUIS AGASSIZ[1]

It would be unnatural to have such an assemblage as this meet in the

Museum and Faculty Room of this University and yet have no public word

spoken in honor of a name which must be silently present to the minds

of all our visitors.

At some near future day, it is to be hoped some one of you who is well

acquainted with Agassiz's scientific career will discourse here

concerning it,--I could not now, even if I would, speak to you of that

of which you have far more intimate knowledge than I.  On this social

occasion it has seemed that what Agassiz stood for in the way of

character and influence is the more fitting thing to commemorate, and

to that agreeable task I have been called.  He made an impression that

was unrivalled.  He left a sort of popular myth--the Agassiz legend, as

one might say--behind him in the air about us; and life comes kindlier

to all of us, we get more recognition from the world, because we call

ourselves naturalists,--and that was the class to which he also

belonged.

The secret of such an extraordinarily effective influence lay in the

equally extraordinary mixture of the animal and social gifts, the

intellectual powers, and the desires and passions of the man.  From his

boyhood, he looked on the world as if it and he were made for each

other, and on the vast diversity of living things as if he were there

with authority to take mental possession of them all.  His habit of

collecting began in childhood, and during his long life knew no bounds

save those that separate the things of Nature from those of human art.

Already in his student years, in spite of the most stringent poverty,

his whole scheme of existence was that of one predestined to greatness,

who takes that fact for granted, and stands forth immediately as a

scientific leader of men.

His passion for knowing living things was combined with a rapidity of

observation, and a capacity to recognize them again and remember

everything about them, which all his life it seemed an easy triumph and

delight for him to exercise, and which never allowed him to waste a

moment in doubts about the commensurability of his powers with his

tasks.  If ever a person lived by faith, he did.  When a boy of twenty,

with an allowance of two hundred and fifty dollars a year, he

maintained an artist attached to his employ, a custom which never

afterwards was departed from,--except when he maintained two or three.

He lectured from the very outset to all those who would hear him.  "I

feel within myself the strength of a whole generation," he wrote to his

father at that time, and launched himself upon the publication of his

costly "Poissons Fossiles" with no clear vision of the quarter from

whence the payment might be expected to come.

At Neuchatel (where between the ages of twenty-five and thirty he

enjoyed a stipend that varied from four hundred to six hundred dollars)

he organized a regular academy of natural history, with its museum,

managing by one expedient or another to employ artists, secretaries,

and assistants, and to keep a lithographic and printing establishment

of his own employed with the work that he put forth.  Fishes, fossil

and living, echinoderms and glaciers, transfigured themselves under his

hand, and at thirty he was already at the zenith of his reputation,

recognized by all as one of those naturalists in the unlimited sense,

one of those folio copies of mankind, like Linnaeus and Cuvier, who aim

at nothing less than an acquaintance with the whole of animated Nature.

His genius for classifying was simply marvellous; and, as his latest

biographer says, nowhere had a single person ever given so decisive an

impulse to natural history.

Such was the human being who on an October morning fifty years ago

disembarked at our port, bringing his hungry heart along with him, his

confidence in his destiny, and his imagination full of plans.  The only

particular resource he was assured of was one course of Lowell

Lectures.  But of one general resource he always was assured, having

always counted on it and never found it to fail,--and that was the good

will of every fellow-creature in whose presence he could find an

opportunity to describe his aims.  His belief in these was so intense

and unqualified that he could not conceive of others not feeling the

furtherance of them to be a duty binding also upon them.  _Velle non

discitur_, as Seneca says:--Strength of desire must be born with a man,

it can't be taught.  And Agassiz came before one with such enthusiasm

glowing in his countenance,--such a persuasion radiating from his

person that his projects were the sole things really fit to interest

man as man,--that he was absolutely irresistible.  He came, in Byron's

words, with victory beaming from his breast, and every one went down

before him, some yielding him money, some time, some specimens, and

some labor, but all contributing their applause and their godspeed.

And so, living among us from month to month and from year to year, with

no relation to prudence except his pertinacious violation of all her

usual laws, he on the whole achieved the compass of his desires,

studied the geology and fauna of a continent, trained a generation of

zoologists, founded one of the chief museums of the world, gave a new

impulse to scientific education in America, and died the idol of the

public, as well as of his circle of immediate pupils and friends.

The secret of it all was, that while his scientific ideals were an

integral part of his being, something that he never forgot or laid

aside, so that wherever he went he came forward as "the Professor," and

talked "shop" to every person, young or old, great or little, learned

or unlearned, with whom he was thrown, he was at the same time so

commanding a presence, so curious and inquiring, so responsive and

expansive, and so generous and reckless of himself and of his own, that

every one said immediately, "Here is no musty savant, but a man, a

great man, a man on the heroic scale, not to serve whom is avarice and

sin."  He elevated the popular notion of what a student of Nature could

be.  Since Benjamin Franklin, we had never had among us a person of

more popularly impressive type.  He did not wait for students to come

to him; he made inquiry for promising youthful collectors, and when he

heard of one, he wrote, inviting and urging him to come.  Thus there is

hardly one now of the American naturalists of my generation whom

Agassiz did not train.  Nay, more; he said to every one that a year or

two of natural history, studied as he understood it, would give the

best training for any kind of mental work.  Sometimes he was amusingly

_naïf_ in this regard, as when he offered to put his whole Museum at

the disposition of the Emperor of Brazil if he would but come and labor

there.  And I well remember how certain officials of the Brazilian

empire smiled at the cordiality with which he pressed upon them a

similar invitation.  But it had a great effect.  Natural history must

indeed be a godlike pursuit, if such a man as this can so adore it,

people said; and the very definition and meaning of the word naturalist

underwent a favorable alteration in the common mind.

Certain sayings of Agassiz's, as the famous one that he "had no time

for making money," and his habit of naming his occupation simply as

that of "teacher," have caught the public fancy, and are permanent

benefactions.  We all enjoy more consideration for the fact that he

manifested himself here thus before us in his day.

He was a splendid example of the temperament that looks forward and not

backward, and never wastes a moment in regrets for the irrevocable.  I

had the privilege of admission to his society during the Thayer

expedition to Brazil.  I well remember at night, as we all swung in our

hammocks in the fairy-like moonlight, on the deck of the steamer that

throbbed its way up the Amazon between the forests guarding the stream

on either side, how he turned and whispered, "James, are you awake?"

and continued, "_I_ cannot sleep; I am too happy; I keep thinking of

these glorious plans."  The plans contemplated following the Amazon to

its headwaters, and penetrating the Andes in Peru.  And yet, when he

arrived at the Peruvian frontier and learned that that country had

broken into revolution, that his letters to officials would be useless,

and that that part of the project must be given up, although he was

indeed bitterly chagrined and excited for part of an hour, when the

hour had passed over it seemed as if he had quite forgotten the

disappointment, so enthusiastically was he occupied already with the

new scheme substituted by his active mind.

Agassiz's influence on methods of teaching in our community was prompt

and decisive,--all the more so that it struck people's imagination by

its very excess.  The good old way of committing printed abstractions

to memory seems never to have received such a shock as it encountered

at his hands.  There is probably no public school teacher now in New

England who will not tell you how Agassiz used to lock a student up in

a room full of turtle shells, or lobster shells, or oyster shells,

without a book or word to help him, and not let him out till he had

discovered all the truths which the objects contained.  Some found the

truths after weeks and months of lonely sorrow; others never found

them.  Those who found them were already made into naturalists

thereby--the failures were blotted from the book of honor and of life.

"Go to Nature; take the facts into your own hands; look, and see for

yourself!"--these were the maxims which Agassiz preached wherever he

went, and their effect on pedagogy was electric.  The extreme rigor of

his devotion to this concrete method of learning was the natural

consequence of his own peculiar type of intellect, in which the

capacity for abstraction and causal reasoning and tracing chains of

consequences from hypotheses was so much less developed than the genius

for acquaintance with vast volumes of detail, and for seizing upon

analogies and relations of the more proximate and concrete kind.  While

on the Thayer expedition, I remember that I often put questions to him

about the facts of our new tropical habitat, but I doubt if he ever

answered one of these questions of mine outright.  He always said:

"There, you see you have a definite problem; go and look and find the

answer for yourself."  His severity in this line was a living rebuke to

all abstractionists and would-be biological philosophers.  More than

once have I heard him quote with deep feeling the lines from Faust:

  "Grau, theurer Freund, ist alle Theorie.

  Und grun des Lebens goldner Baum."

The only man he really loved and had use for was the man who could

bring him facts.  To see facts, not to argue or _raisonniren_, was what

life meant for him; and I think he often positively loathed the

ratiocinating type of mind.  "Mr. Blank, you are _totally_ uneducated!"

I heard him once say to a student who propounded to him some glittering

theoretic generality.  And on a similar occasion he gave an admonition

that must have sunk deep into the heart of him to whom it was

addressed.  "Mr. X, some people perhaps now consider you a bright young

man; but when you are fifty years old, if they ever speak of you then,

what they will say will be this: 'That X,--oh, yes, I know him; he used

to be a very bright young man!'"  Happy is the conceited youth who at

the proper moment receives such salutary cold water therapeutics as

this from one who, in other respects, is a kind friend.  We cannot all

escape from being abstractionists.  I myself, for instance, have never

been able to escape; but the hours I spent with Agassiz so taught me

the difference between all possible abstractionists and all livers in

the light of the world's concrete fulness, that I have never been able

to forget it.  Both kinds of mind have their place in the infinite

design, but there can be no question as to which kind lies the nearer

to the divine type of thinking.

Agassiz's view of Nature was saturated with simple religious feeling,

and for this deep but unconventional religiosity he found at Harvard

the most sympathetic possible environment.  In the fifty years that

have sped since he arrived here our knowledge of Nature has penetrated

into joints and recesses which his vision never pierced.  The causal

elements and not the totals are what we are now most passionately

concerned to understand; and naked and poverty-stricken enough do the

stripped-out elements and forces occasionally appear to us to be.  But

the truth of things is after all their living fulness, and some day,

from a more commanding point of view than was possible to any one in

Agassiz's generation, our descendants, enriched with the spoils of all

our analytic investigations, will get round again to that higher and

simpler way of looking at Nature.  Meanwhile as we look back upon

Agassiz, there floats up a breath as of life's morning, that makes the

work seem young and fresh once more.  May we all, and especially may

those younger members of our association who never knew him, give a

grateful thought to his memory as we wander through that Museum which

he founded, and through this University whose ideals he did so much to

elevate and define.

[1] Words spoken at the reception of the American Society of

Naturalists by the President and Fellows of Harvard College at

Cambridge, December 30, 1896.  Printed in _Science_, N. S. V. 285.

II

ADDRESS AT THE EMERSON CENTENARY IN CONCORD[1]

The pathos of death is this, that when the days of one's life are

ended, those days that were so crowded with business and felt so heavy

in their passing, what remains of one in memory should usually be so

slight a thing.  The phantom of an attitude, the echo of a certain mode

of thought, a few pages of print, some invention, or some victory we

gained in a brief critical hour, are all that can survive the best of

us.  It is as if the whole of a man's significance had now shrunk into

the phantom of an attitude, into a mere musical note or phrase

suggestive of his singularity--happy are those whose singularity gives

a note so clear as to be victorious over the inevitable pity of such a

diminution and abridgment.

An ideal wraith like this, of Emerson's personality, hovers over all

Concord to-day, taking, in the minds of those of you who were his

neighbors and intimates a somewhat fuller shape, remaining more

abstract in the younger generation, but bringing home to all of us the

notion of a spirit indescribably precious.  The form that so lately

moved upon these streets and country roads, or awaited in these fields

and woods the beloved Muse's visits, is now dust; but the soul's note,

the spiritual voice, rises strong and clear above the uproar of the

times, and seems securely destined to exert an ennobling influence over

future generations.

What gave a flavor so matchless to Emerson's individuality was, even

more than his rich mental gifts, their singularly harmonious

combination.  Rarely has a man so accurately known the limits of his

genius or so unfailingly kept within them.  "Stand by your order," he

used to say to youthful students; and perhaps the paramount impression

one gets of his life is of his loyalty to his own personal type and

mission.  The type was that of what he liked to call the scholar, the

perceiver of pure truth; and the mission was that of the reporter in

worthy form of each perception.  The day is good, he said, in which we

have the most perceptions.  There are times when the cawing of a crow,

a weed, a snowflake, or a farmer planting in his field become symbols

to the intellect of truths equal to those which the most majestic

phenomena can open.  Let me mind my own charge, then, walk alone,

consult the sky, the field and forest, sedulously waiting every morning

for the news concerning the structure of the universe which the good

Spirit will give me.

This was the first half of Emerson, but only half; for genius, as he

said, is insatiate for expression, and truth has to be clad in the

right verbal garment.  The form of the garment was so vital with

Emerson that it is impossible to separate it from the matter.  They

form a chemical combination--thoughts which would be trivial expressed

otherwise, are important through the nouns and verbs to which he

married them.  The style is the man, it has been said; the man

Emerson's mission culminated in his style, and if we must define him in

one word, we have to call him Artist.  He was an artist whose medium

was verbal and who wrought in spiritual material.

This duty of spiritual seeing and reporting determined the whole tenor

of his life.  It was to shield this duty from invasion and distraction

that he dwelt in the country, that he consistently declined to entangle

himself with associations or to encumber himself with functions which,

however he might believe in them, he felt were duties for other men and

not for him.  Even the care of his garden, "with its stoopings and

fingerings in a few yards of space," he found "narrowing and

poisoning," and took to long free walks and saunterings instead,

without apology.  "Causes" innumerable sought to enlist him as their

"worker"--all got his smile and word of sympathy, but none entrapped

him into service.  The struggle against slavery itself, deeply as it

appealed to him, found him firm: "God must govern his own world, and

knows his way out of this pit without my desertion of my post, which

has none to guard it but me.  I have quite other slaves to face than

those Negroes, to wit, imprisoned thoughts far back in the brain of

man, and which have no watchman or lover or defender but me."  This in

reply to the possible questions of his own conscience.  To hot-blooded

moralists with more objective ideas of duty, such a fidelity to the

limits of his genius must often have made him seem provokingly remote

and unavailable; but we, who can see things in more liberal

perspective, must unqualifiably approve the results.  The faultless

tact with which he kept his safe limits while he so dauntlessly

asserted himself within them, is an example fitted to give heart to

other theorists and artists the world over.

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?"

The vanity of all superserviceableness and pretence was never more

happily set forth than by Emerson in the many passages in which he

develops this aspect of his philosophy.  Character infallibly proclaims

itself.  "Hide your thoughts!--hide the sun and moon.  They publish

themselves to the universe.  They will speak through you though you

were dumb.  They will flow out of your actions, your manners and your

face. . . .  Don't say things: What you are stands over you the while

and thunders so that I cannot say what you say to the contrary. . . .

What a man _is_ engraves itself upon him in letters of light.

Concealment avails him nothing, boasting nothing.  There is confession

in the glances of our eyes; in our smiles; in salutations; and the

grasp of hands.  His sin bedaubs him, mars all his good impression.

Men know not why they do not trust him, but they do not trust him.  His

vice glasses the eye, casts lines of mean expression in the cheek,

pinches the nose, sets the mark of the beast upon the back of the head,

and writes, O fool! fool! on the forehead of a king.  If you would not

be known to do a thing, never do it; a man may play the fool in the

drifts of a desert, but every grain of sand shall seem to see.--How can

a man be concealed?  How can he be concealed?"

On the other hand, never was a sincere word or a sincere thought

utterly lost.  "Never a magnanimity fell to the ground but there is

some heart to greet and accept it unexpectedly. . . .  The hero fears

not that if he withstood the avowal of a just and brave act, it will go

unwitnessed and unloved.  One knows it,--himself,--and is pledged by it

to sweetness of peace and to nobleness of aim, which will prove in the

end a better proclamation than the relating of the incident."

The same indefeasible right to be exactly what one is, provided one

only be authentic, spreads itself, in Emerson's way of thinking, from

persons to things and to times and places.  No date, no position is

insignificant, if the life that fills it out be only genuine:--

"In solitude, in a remote village, the ardent youth loiters and mourns.

With inflamed eye, in this sleeping wilderness, he has read the story

of the Emperor, Charles the Fifth, until his fancy has brought home to

the surrounding woods the faint roar of cannonades in the Milanese, and

marches in Germany.  He is curious concerning that man's day.  What

filled it?  The crowded orders, the stern decisions, the foreign

despatches, the Castilian etiquette?  The soul answers--Behold his day

here!  In the sighing of these woods, in the quiet of these gray

fields, in the cool breeze that sings out of these northern mountains;

in the workmen, the boys, the maidens you meet,--in the hopes of the

morning, the ennui of noon, and sauntering of the afternoon; in the

disquieting comparisons; in the regrets at want of vigor; in the great

idea and the puny execution,--behold Charles the Fifth's day; another,

yet the same; behold Chatham's, Hampden's, Bayard's, Alfred's,

Scipio's, Pericles's day,--day of all that are born of women.  The

difference of circumstance is merely costume.  I am tasting the

self-same life,--its sweetness, its greatness, its pain, which I so

admire in other men.  Do not foolishly ask of the inscrutable,

obliterated past what it cannot tell,--the details of that nature, of

that day, called Byron or Burke;--but ask it of the enveloping

Now. . . .  Be lord of a day, and you can put up your history books."

"The deep to-day which all men scorn," receives thus from Emerson

superb revindication.  "Other world! there is no other world."  All

God's life opens into the individual particular, and here and now, or

nowhere, is reality.  "The present hour is the decisive hour, and every

day is doomsday."

Such a conviction that Divinity is everywhere may easily make of one an

optimist of the sentimental type that refuses to speak ill of anything.

Emerson's drastic perception of differences kept him at the opposite

pole from this weakness.  After you have seen men a few times, he could

say, you find most of them as alike as their barns and pantries, and

soon as musty and as dreary.  Never was such a fastidious lover of

significance and distinction, and never an eye so keen for their

discovery.  His optimism had nothing in common with that indiscriminate

hurrahing for the Universe with which Walt Whitman has made us

familiar.  For Emerson, the individual fact and moment were indeed

suffused with absolute radiance, but it was upon a condition that saved

the situation--they must be worthy specimens,--sincere, authentic,

archetypal; they must have made connection with what he calls the Moral

Sentiment, they must in some way act as symbolic mouthpieces of the

Universe's meaning.  To know just which thing does act in this way, and

which thing fails to make the true connection, is the secret (somewhat

incommunicable, it must be confessed) of seership, and doubtless we

must not expect of the seer too rigorous a consistency.  Emerson

himself was a real seer.  He could perceive the full squalor of the

individual fact, but he could also see the transfiguration.  He might

easily have found himself saying of some present-day agitator against

our Philippine conquest what he said of this or that reformer of his

own time.  He might have called him, as a private person, a tedious

bore and canter.  But he would infallibly have added what he then

added: "It is strange and horrible to say this, for I feel that under

him and his partiality and exclusiveness is the earth and the sea, and

all that in them is, and the axis round which the Universe revolves

passes through his body where he stands."

Be it how it may, then, this is Emerson's revelation:--The point of any

pen can be an epitome of reality; the commonest person's act, if

genuinely actuated, can lay hold on eternity.  This vision is the

head-spring of all his outpourings; and it is for this truth, given to

no previous literary artist to express in such penetratingly persuasive

tones, that posterity will reckon him a prophet, and, perhaps

neglecting other pages, piously turn to those that convey this message.

His life was one long conversation with the invisible divine,

expressing itself through individuals and particulars:--"So nigh is

grandeur to our dust, so near is God to man!"

I spoke of how shrunken the wraith, how thin the echo, of men is after

they are departed?  Emerson's wraith comes to me now as if it were but

the very voice of this victorious argument.  His words to this effect

are certain to be quoted and extracted more and more as time goes on,

and to take their place among the Scriptures of humanity.  "'Gainst

death and all oblivious enmity, shall you pace forth," beloved Master.

As long as our English language lasts men's hearts will be cheered and

their souls strengthened and liberated by the noble and musical pages

with which you have enriched it.

[1] An Address delivered at the Centenary of the Birth of Ralph Waldo

Emerson in Concord, May 25, 1903, and printed in the published

proceedings of that meeting.

III

ROBERT GOULD SHAW[1]

Your Excellency, your Honor, Soldiers, and Friends: In these unveiling

exercises the duty falls to me of expressing in simple words some of

the feelings which have actuated the givers of St. Gaudens' noble work

of bronze, and of briefly recalling the history of Robert Shaw and of

his regiment to the memory of this possibly too forgetful generation.

The men who do brave deeds are usually unconscious of their

picturesqueness.  For two nights previous to the assault upon Fort

Wagner, the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Regiment had been afoot, making

forced marches in the rain; and on the day of the battle the men had

had no food since early morning.  As they lay there in the evening

twilight, hungry and wet, against the cold sands of Morris Island, with

the sea-fog drifting over them, their eyes fixed on the huge bulk of

the fortress looming darkly three-quarters of a mile ahead against the

sky, and their hearts beating in expectation of the word that was to

bring them to their feet and launch them on their desperate charge,

neither officers nor men could have been in any holiday mood of

contemplation.  Many and different must have been the thoughts that

came and went in them during that hour of bodeful reverie; but however

free the flights of fancy of some of them may have been, it is

improbable that any one who lay there had so wild and whirling an

imagination as to foresee in prophetic vision this morning of a future

May, when we, the people of a richer and more splendid Boston, with

mayor and governor, and troops from other States, and every

circumstance of ceremony, should meet together to celebrate their

conduct on that evening, and do their memory this conspicuous honor.

How, indeed, comes it that out of all the great engagements of the war,

engagements in many of which the troops of Massachusetts had borne the

most distinguished part, this officer, only a young colonel, this

regiment of black men and its maiden battle,--a battle, moreover, which

was lost,--should be picked out for such unusual commemoration?

The historic significance of an event is measured neither by its

material magnitude, nor by its immediate success.  Thermopylae was a

defeat; but to the Greek imagination, Leonidas and his few Spartans

stood for the whole worth of Grecian life.  Bunker Hill was a defeat;

but for our people, the fight over that breastwork has always seemed to

show as well as any victory that our forefathers were men of a temper

not to be finally overcome.  And so here.  The war for our Union, with

all the constitutional questions which it settled, and all the military

lessons which it gathered in, has throughout its dilatory length but

one meaning in the eye of history.  And nowhere was that meaning better

symbolized and embodied than in the constitution of this first Northern

negro regiment.

Look at the monument and read the story;--see the mingling of elements

which the sculptor's genius has brought so vividly before the eye.

There on foot go the dark outcasts, so true to nature that one can

almost hear them breathing as they march.  State after State by its

laws had denied them to be human persons.  The Southern leaders in

congressional debates, insolent in their security, loved most to

designate them by the contemptuous collective epithet of "this peculiar

kind of property."  There they march, warm-blooded champions of a

better day for man.  There on horseback, among them, in his very habit

as he lived, sits the blue-eyed child of fortune, upon whose happy

youth every divinity had smiled.  Onward they move together, a single

resolution kindled in their eyes, and animating their otherwise so

different frames.  The bronze that makes their memory eternal betrays

the very soul and secret of those awful years.

Since the 'thirties the slavery question been the only question, and by

the end of 'fifties our land lay sick and shaking with it like a

traveller who has thrown himself down at night beside a pestilential

swamp, and in the morning finds the fever through the marrow of his

bones.  "Only muzzle the Abolition fanatics," said the South, "and all

will be well again!"  But the Abolitionists would not be muzzled,--they

were the voice of the world's conscience, they were a part of destiny.

Weak as they were, they drove the South to madness.  "Every step she

takes in her blindness," said Wendell Phillips, "is one more step

towards ruin."  And when South Carolina took the final step in

battering down Fort Sumter, it was the fanatics of slavery themselves

who called upon their idolized institution ruin swift and complete.

What law and reason were unable to accomplish, had now to be done by

that uncertain and dreadful dispenser of God's judgments, War--War,

with its abominably casual, inaccurate methods, destroying good and bad

together, but at last able to hew a way out of intolerable situations,

when through man's delusion of perversity every better way is blocked.

Our great western republic had from its origin been a singular anomaly.

A land of freedom, boastfully so-called, with human slavery enthroned

at the heart of it, and at last dictating terms of unconditional

surrender to every other organ of its life, what was it but a thing of

falsehood and horrible self-contradiction?  For three-quarters of a

century it had nevertheless endured, kept together by policy,

compromise, and concession.  But at the last that republic was torn in

two; and truth was to be possible under the flag.  Truth, thank God,

truth! even though for the moment it must be truth written in hell-fire.

And this, fellow-citizens, is why, after the great generals have had

their monuments, and long after the abstract soldier's-monuments have

been reared on every village green, we have chosen to take Robert Shaw

and his regiment as the subjects of the first soldier's-monument to be

raised to a particular set of comparatively undistinguished men.  The

very lack of external complication in the history of these soldiers is

what makes them represent with such typical purity the profounder

meaning of the Union cause.

Our nation had been founded in what we may call our American religion,

baptized and reared in the faith that a man requires no master to take

care of him, and that common people can work out their salvation well

enough together if left free to try.  But the founders had not dared to

touch the great intractable exception; and slavery had wrought until at

last the only alternative for the nation was to fight or die.  What

Shaw and his comrades stand for and show us is that in such an

emergency Americans of all complexions and conditions can go forth like

brothers, and meet death cheerfully if need be, in order that this

religion of our native land shall not become a failure on earth.

We of this Commonwealth believe in that religion; and it is not at all

because Robert Shaw was an exceptional genius, but simply because he

was faithful to it as we all may hope to be faithful in our measure

when the times demand, that we wish his beautiful image to stand here

for all time, an inciter to similarly unselfish public deeds.

Shaw thought but little of himself, yet he had a personal charm which,

as we look back on him, makes us repeat: "None knew thee but to love