The Three Heron's Feathers Part 24

"G.o.d! I will not be an owl, But sun me in the Capitol."

These lines Emerson wisely dropped.

'Forerunners' ("Long I followed happy guides)" mean one's brave hopes and ideals of good to come, our dreams and aspirations. The lines

"No speed of mine avails To hunt upon their s.h.i.+ning trails"

Th.o.r.eau evidently utilized as text for his well-known fable in 'Walden'

of the lost hound, bay horse, and turtle-dove.

The portrait of Hermione, the patient-sweet wife of Leontes in 'The Winter's Tale' of Shakespeare, serves Emerson, in his poem 'Hermione,'

as the model of a perfect wife, and a more acceptable one to this age than Chaucer's abject Griselda. Such a lady as Shakespeare's Hermione, beautiful in person and of rare self-control and virtue, is an adumbration or epitome of the universal beauty. Looking at nature, the American poet finds the features of his Hermione there: "mountains and the misty plains, Her colossal portraiture." I suppose that this sketch, tender and delicately toned as if with a silver point, is autobiographical, and is a shadowing forth of the character of Emerson's first wife, the ethereal souled Ellen Tucker, who died of consumption after only a year and a half of married life. When her "meteor glances came," he says, he was "hermit vowed to books and gloom," and dwelling alone. In the lines

"The chains of kind The distant bind; Deed thou doest she must do,"

he antic.i.p.ates (does he not?) the telepathy of our days,--kindred minds seeking similar places and thinking like thoughts, although in this case, to be sure, the kindred soul is thought of as merged with the inorganic world,--the winds and waterfalls and twilight nooks.

Search the whole world through, you shall find no predecessor of Emerson the poet. The only verse resembling his in general style is that of the enigmatic 'Phoenix and the Turtle,' attributed to Shakespeare, and much admired by Emerson:--

"Let the bird of loudest lay, On the sole Arabian tree.

Herald sad and trumpet be, To whose sound chaste wings obey."

Emerson's verses have also a slight Persian tinge now and then, caught from his studies of Saadi and Hafiz. In his fine lyric cry 'Bacchus,'

in which he calls for a wine of life, a cup of divine soma or amrita, that shall sinew his brain and exalt all his powers of thought and action to a G.o.dlike pitch,--

"Bring me wine, but wine which never grew In the belly of the grape,

That I intoxicated, And by the draught a.s.similated, May float at pleasure through all natures;

Quickened so, will I unlock Every crypt of every rock,"--

he unconsciously gave his lines, I think, the outward form of some verses by Hafiz, in which that singer intimates that, give him the right kind of wine, and he can perform wonders as if with Solomon's ring or Jemschid's wine-cup mirror. Emerson himself in one of his early editions gives a spirited verse translation of Hafiz's poem. Mr.

William R. Alger ('Specimens of Oriental Poetry,' Boston, 1856) translates Hafiz thus:--

"Bring me wine! By my puissant arm The thick net of deceit and of harm Which the priests have spread over the world Shall be rent and in laughter be hurled.

Bring me wine! I the earth will subdue.

Bring me wine! I the heaven will storm through.

Bring me wine, bring it quick, make no halt!

To the throne of both worlds will I vault.

All is in the red streamlet divine.

Bring me wine! O my host, bring me wine!"

'Etienne de la Boece' gets its t.i.tle (with Emersonian variations) from the name of one of Montaigne's most intimate friends,--Estienne de la Boetie. Montaigne tells us about him in Chapter xxvii of his Essays, affirming that he would have accomplished miracles, had he lived. He died when only thirty-three at Bordeaux (1563). His scholars.h.i.+p was solid, his translations from the Greek excellent. He was so eager to read Greek that he copied whole volumes with his own hand. A French critic says, "Les qualites qui brillaient en lui imprimaient a toute sa personne un cachet distingue et un charme severe." Yet he seems to have been something of an imitator of his great friend; and it is in this aspect of his life that Emerson regards him, using him, perhaps somewhat unjustly to his powers and developing genius, as the type of a too imitative disciple:--

"I serve you not, if you I follow, Shadowlike, o'er hill and hollow;

Vainly valiant, you have missed The manhood that should yours resist."

Probably most Americans, if asked to explain the relevancy of the t.i.tle of Emerson's poem 'Guy,' would be unable to answer offhand. The verses celebrate the lucky man:--

"The common waters fell As costly wine into his well.

The zephyr in his garden rolled From plum-trees vegetable gold.

Stream could not so perversely wind But corn of Guy's was there to grind."

The reference, of course, is to a man well known in England,--Thomas Guy (d. 1724), founder of Guy's Hospital in London. He was the George Peabody of his day. Beginning life as a bookseller, he made a good deal of money in printing Bibles, but acquired most of his enormous fortune by financial speculations. He was extremely economical; for example, always ate his dinner on his shop counter, first spreading out a newspaper to catch the crumbs. His charities were boundless. To his hospital he gave $1,000,000; and at his death his will was found to contain an enormous number of special benefactions, including bequests to over ninety cousins. Emerson in his poem compares Guy to Polycrates, who was King of Samos some five hundred years before Christ. He says that Polycrates "chained the suns.h.i.+ne and the breeze"; that is, the very elements seemed to be in his pay. This run of luck was without a break up to his death; his fleet of a hundred s.h.i.+ps was the largest then known; he conquered all his enemies, and ama.s.sed great treasure.

His ally, Amasis, King of Egypt, was so alarmed at his prosperity, fearing the envy of the G.o.ds, that he advised him to make some noteworthy sacrifice. The story goes that Polycrates accordingly threw his emerald signet-ring into the sea, but it came back to his kitchens in the belly of a large fish, as in the Arabian Nights story. The fears of Amasis were finally justified; for the Persian satrap Or[oe]tes enticed Polycrates to the mainland, and crucified him.

'Xenophanes' embodies poetically the doctrine of the earnest old Greek agnostic and monist of that name, that G.o.d, or the All, is uncreated, immovable, and one,--not immovable in its parts, but as a whole, and just because it is all. Xenophanes saw the grandeur and incomprehensibility of the universe, he violently opposed what seemed to him the disgraceful polytheism of Homer, and antic.i.p.ated the modern atomic theory and the doctrine of the unity of life as revealed by the spectroscope and the discovery of the conservation and mutual convertibility of forces. Or, as Emerson puts it in his haunting numbers,--

"By fate, not option, frugal Nature gave One scent to hyson and to wall-flower, One sound to pine-groves and to waterfalls, One aspect to the desert and the lake.

It was her stern necessity."

The t.i.tle of the poem 'Hamatreya' seemed at first to baffle a perfect and indubitable explanation. The word can be found in no English or foreign dictionary that the largest libraries afford. We are indebted, however, to Col. T. W. Higginson (_The Critic_, Feb. 18, 1888) for not only giving us a clew to the t.i.tle, but for pointing out the portion of the Vishnu Purana (Wilson's translation, 1840) on which Emerson based his 'Earth Song' in 'Hamatreya,' and, in fact, got the hint for the whole poem; namely, at the close of Book IV. Maitreya is a disciple of Parasara, who relates to Maitreya the Vishnu Purana. Among other things he tells Maitreya of a chant of the Earth, who said, "When I hear a king sending word to another by his amba.s.sador, 'This earth is mine: immediately resign your pretensions to it,' I am moved to violent laughter at first; but it soon subsides in pity for the infatuated fool." Again, the Purana says, "Earth laughs, as if smiling with autumnal flowers, to behold her kings unable to effect the subjugation of themselves"; which is Emerson's

"Earth laughs in flowers, to see her boastful boys Earth-proud, proud of the earth which is not theirs."

And again: "These were the verses, Maitreya, which Earth recited, and by listening to which ambition fades away, like snow before the sun."

Here are Emerson's lines:--

"When I heard the Earth-song, I was no longer brave; My avarice cooled Like l.u.s.t in the chill of the grave."

Colonel Higginson suggests that Emerson may also have had in mind, in writing 'Hamatreya,' Psalm, xlix. 11. As he rightly says, the t.i.tle evidently is meant to give a hint of the Hindoo source of the argument of the poem. It is in line with the uniform custom of Emerson in giving historical catch-words, especially proper names, as his t.i.tles. After an exhaustive search through all the Hindoo scriptures, I have reached a conviction which approaches absolute certainty that Hamatreya is Emerson's imperfect recollection of Maitreya or that he purposely coined the word. Emerson, it is nearly certain, read the Vishnu Purana, translated by H. H. Wilson (a large and costly work), by the copy then in the Harvard Library or the Boston Athenaeum, perhaps taking brief notes, but omitting to write down "Maitreya." In his exhaustive index of proper names, appended to the Vishnu Purana, Wilson has no such word as Hamatreya, nor does it occur anywhere in the book. To clinch the argument, Prof. Charles R. Lanman, the well-known Sanskrit scholar of Harvard University, writes me that "Hamatreya is not a Sanskrit word."

"The Atreyas," he says, "were the descendants of Atri." "It is an easy mistake to make _Hamatreya_ out of _Maitreya_. I really think you will have to a.s.sume a simple slip here."

Emerson is not wilfully obscure. But he comes dangerously near to being so in the demand he often makes upon his readers for out-of-the-way knowledge. 'Casella' is the t.i.tle of an Emersonian quatrain,--

"Test of the poet is knowledge of love, For Eros is older than Saturn or Jove.

Never was poet, of late or of yore, Who was not tremulous with love-lore."

The reference is to Dante's friend Casella ("Casella mio"), whom he meets in Purgatory, and who sweetly sings (as of yore on earth he was wont) a canzone by Dante himself,--"_Amor, che nella mente mi ragiona_." Emerson's favorite poet, Milton, in his sonnet to Henry Lawes, alludes, as Mr. Norton points out, to this friends.h.i.+p:--

"Dante shall give fame leave to set thee higher Than his Casella, whom he wooed to sing Met in the milder shades of Purgatory."

The t.i.tle [Greek: adakrun nemontai aiona] is from Pindar, I believe.

Emerson took it from _The Dial_, where (July, '43) it appears as the motto to a poem by Charles A. Dana on 'Manhood.' It means, literally, "They pa.s.s a tearless life"; or, very freely rendered, "They live a life of smiles,"--a sentiment explained by the first lines,--

"A new commandment, said the smiling Muse, I give my darling son, Thou shalt not preach."

Even in so slight a matter as choosing a name for his verses 'To Rhea,'

Emerson's philosophical belief is glimpsed; for Rhea was the mother of G.o.ds, and such he believed all women to be. The thought of this remarkable poem, which its author feigns to have received from the thousand chattering tongues of the poplar-tree, is extremely subtle and somewhat difficult to formulate. The a.n.a.lysis is this. If you, a wife, have lost your supremacy in your husband's affections, take a strange and n.o.ble revenge, not by hating, but, in a kind of calm altruistic despair, endowing him with all the gifts and blessings at your command.

The poem is headed 'To Rhea' (Rhea being the wife of the cruel Saturn, who devoured his own children) as to a wife whose husband had merely "drank of Cupid's nectar cup," married her from s.e.x-instinct alone, and then, the "bandages of purple light" fallen from "his eyes," treated her with indifference. But she continues to love him; and more the poet gives her the advice just noted, ill.u.s.trating by the supposed case of a G.o.d loving a mortal maid, and warily knowing that she, with her inferior ideals, can never adequately requite his love, yet n.o.bly endowing her with all gifts and graces, which are the hostages he p.a.w.ns for freedom from "his thrall." He does this in an altruistic spirit, in order by her to "model newer races" and "carry man to new degrees of power and comeliness." But what thrall? We must walk warily here. In order not to seem to give his verses an autobiographical cast (although the G.o.d, the "wise Immortal," of them is really such a type as the seer Emerson himself), he withdraws into dim recesses and speaks in subtlest metaphors. The thrall, I think, is the bondage a lover or husband is in to his beloved, in whom the solecisms and disenchantments of possession have supplanted the poetic illusions of romantic love. The man of supreme wisdom, by the magic of self-sacrifice and boundless profusion of gifts turns the trap or prison in which nature has caught him into a bower of Eden. By the road of generosity he escapes. He cunningly builds up in her mind grat.i.tude and friends.h.i.+p in place of the lost romanticism. There is in this treatment of love a touch of the coldblooded philosophy of the Emersonian critique of friends.h.i.+p. But if it is not a marriage of ideal kind, such as that of the Brownings, which he celebrates, he at least embodies in his verse the shrewd love-philosophy of the practical-poetical Englishman, united to the average woman for the furtherance of the ends of the species.

Mr. George Brown, in his Emerson primer, thinks that the key-thought of 'Rhea' is in these lines from 'The World-Soul' about the G.o.ds:--