Chapter III (2)

Not easy to get on with, assuredly no. You can look to him for adhesion or resistance, but never for submission. You can do nothing with him unless you accept him as he is, with his mulish obstinacy, his final “noes,” his likes and his dislikes. They know him well at the Emersons’: sudden bursts of frankness, resistance without any reason, fits of combativeness, a bluntness that does not always conform to the code of politeness are to be expected from this right-hand man, who shocks them now and then. But it is always wiser to let him follow his own fancy, singular as it may be. If they had engaged a gardener by the year or a day-labourer, he would have done his money’s worth--his money’s worth exactly or a little less, done his job like a duty that enables you to live. With Henry you always get more than your money’s worth, because money to him means nothing--or something so different. You have only to let him choose his own hours and his own way of working. There is no one who will do a job better than he, as long as it has none of the grey tinge of a duty.

For the rest, who could deny the excellence of the arrangement? A man who can do everything about the house and yard is very valuable: how much more so if he can be your literary collaborator as well! Margaret Fuller, who is finding it very difficult to make a success of the _Dial_, the Transcendentalist magazine that only needs subscribers to be the first magazine of the continent, has finally turned over the editorship to Emerson. The latter asks Henry to help him. They will work in the garden and the magazine together. They have to assemble the copy, send it to the printer, read the proofs, put it into pages, canvass for new subscribers. A task not quite so familiar to Henry as grafting and pruning, but he sets to work and does it. Under his hands the magazine takes a new turn. It associates the old Oriental sapience with the fresh wisdom of the Atlantic shores. Henry likes his work as editorial secretary. Here he is at the heart of the movement. And now it is he, whose manuscripts the amiable editress had refused, who judges and inserts the manuscripts of other people. He profits by the change to extract from his Journal, revise and publish long fragments--accounts of excursions, impressions of nature, studies of the fauna and the flora of the country. The editor thinks very highly of this gardener-subeditor who helps him so earnestly in preparing the magazine and filling out the table of contents.

Can you imagine a boy looking back later upon this time of his twenty-fifth year, passed thus in the confidence of a little white house, and not finding in the recollection the happiest of tastes? The best part of it was not so much the privilege of having lived on such intimate terms with a great man as the liberty they had given him, the trust they had reposed in him in this household. Henry, their confidential man--how wise they had been in giving him their confidence!... In return for his board, they had permitted him to live in his own way, giving what he was able to give on this condition. They had not asked him not to be the Henry that he was by the grace of God, with all his oddities and his pig-headedness and his nonchalance.

Everything else could be forgotten, but this noble and affectionate indulgence, this magnanimous faith in him, a young man who had not yet shown his best, had warmed his heart at a time when the future seemed dim to a boy who had nothing to offer the world but what the world had no use for. Whatever this future might be, there would remain between his elder and himself the magnetism of this friendship, the tie of these fraternal years when they had cultivated the garden together. Even if he said little about it, he carried this always in the bottom of his shy, remembering heart.

* * * * *

After a visit to New York in February, 1843, Emerson was at home again by the end of the winter to welcome another spring in Concord. It would soon be two years since Henry had come to his house to live: or had he always been there, and was he to remain always? It was time to do a little thinking. William, the philosopher’s older brother, was looking for a tutor for one of his children. What would the confidential man, the Harvard graduate, say to this? He would have to give up Concord, for William Emerson was living near New York. A serious resolution, to leave his kingdom and his own people. On the other hand, the neighbourhood of New York would be favourable to his literary ambitions, and might help him, who could say, to sell a few articles. This chance to try was perhaps the most tempting opportunity that might offer. And then he would see a new country, another horizon would stand out against the setting sun. Henry had had no further glimpse of New York since he had gone there on business, at nineteen, with his father.

So it happened that, in the May of this year, the confidential man found himself on Staten Island, the island with its back to the continent like an animal advancing to sniff that much larger animal, Long Island, which has come out of the Atlantic, with the bay of New York crowding between their two muzzles. It was on the north side of the island that William Emerson had his residence. A beautiful house, worthy souls who did their best to be amiable. But one who had just left a house like that of Waldo and Lidian recognized by the smell, the moment he entered this house, that these people were of another species. It was imposing, grave and stupefying. Henry felt like a stranger among strangers; even the title of Judge, borne by the master of the house, weighed upon him. They did not understand one another, they never would understand one another; but for all that he would do his work as well as he could since he was a tutor and it was a question of Waldo’s brother. Later on, he would see; meanwhile, the tutor was obliged to stay in his room. For on arriving he had caught a violent cold that kept him shut up for a week. A misery to have had such a weak chest ever since that bad case of bronchitis which had made him so ill when he was eighteen.

A bad beginning at the Judge’s, in an unknown country. In front of the house, deep woods, and a mile away the sea, which he heard roaring when the wind blew. The house stood with its back against a hill a hundred yards high, from which you surveyed the immense panorama of the Bay, the Narrows, Brooklyn, New York in the distance, the coast of New Jersey. The first time he climbed it and took in all this horizon, he was sure of one thing: this was the place he would come to for the nourishment he would never find under this roof, where there was nothing to hold him aside from his duties as a tutor. His real daily repast awaited him on the hill. He could live for a few months in a strange house, situated at the foot of a height that commanded such a quarter of space. Alone, up there, he could collect himself towards evening, watching the boats and the sea or reading a dear letter received from far, far over there, beyond the boats and the sea--from old Concord of which he dreamed and the forest paths that preserved the imprint of his feet.

Henry felt a void in his soul. A stoical boy has remedies against homesickness and, wherever he is, his own company helps him to endure it. Just the same, the soul suffers from a sudden change of diet; it is slow in acclimatizing itself. Over there were his own people and the face of his own country, the voices of the two rivers and the Mill Brook and the smell of the upturned earth in Waldo’s garden. Here, everything breathed of exile, and the summer had a different language; in spite of the sun he shivered.

When homesickness prowls about, seeking for some chink by which to worm its way into you, the best thing to do, when you are not shut up between the walls of a college, is to set out for discoveries over the island, to see what it has to offer you. When you are a mighty walker, a born vagabond, you hold homesickness at a respectful distance. From nine to two o’clock Henry makes his pupil work, then he is free. You can see him setting out in his good Concord boots to seek his fortune. The interior of the island is like a great pleasure-park, with its valleys, its woods, its verdure; fruit-trees abound there, cherry-trees are common along the hedges, the tulip-tree flourishes, and the magnolia in July is enthroned like a supernatural bride. A park in which some care has been taken for the views; through the long clefts in the earth you suddenly perceive, over a field, a ship under full sail, passing thirty miles out at sea--as in a magic lantern. In the valleys, shielded by the foliage, are the farms of the Huguenots, the first colonists; the old elm on the shore still marks the spot where they landed, after placing the ocean between themselves and the Dragonnades of Louis XIV--the great-great-grandparents of your own people at Saint-Helier, brought here not by the desire to make fortunes but by their passion for spiritual independence. In the northeastern corner, not very far from Castleton, where the Emersons’ house is, there is another Concord. You find them everywhere. The Sundays are free for long excursions. The vast kingdom of an island seems still more vast, for you are surprised that the seashore can surround so much country. The walker annexes it methodically. Everything is new to him. They raise tomatoes and potatoes in the open fields. Henry has not left at home his old vigilance as a rover. Crossing a field he stoops and picks up an arrow-head. It is really almost laughable. At Concord or wherever he may be, when a flint-flake emerges, however imperceptibly, from the earth or a heap of pebbles, you may be sure that Henry, tramping in that neighbourhood, will fall upon it. He smells it. It is as if in his shrewd glance there were a magnet that makes these arrow-heads emerge for his benefit from the earth where they are hidden.

Henry scours the island. A surveyor, no doubt, this lanky fellow whom people see crossing and re-crossing the fields, examining everything with his old habit of inventorying a piece of land, as if he were going to buy it: he cuts across it in a bee-line, whether the ground is good or bad, regardless of the regular road. Or perhaps a man looking for a good site for some speculation. He must be pretty well acquainted with the state of things. A poor devil of a tutor, you say? Come now!... More attractive still than the interior of the island are its watery shores, the salt marshes, the approaches of the sea. Henry wanders along the beach, waiting for this enormous presence to define itself. Never before has he had such a chance to be impressed by it. Perhaps it has things to say to him which the pines about Concord have forgotten to convey. He has the whole of space to himself; there is nothing frivolous to distract him, the hidden musicians play for him alone, and he can walk and walk and walk to its ritornello in the dazzling marine daylight. It is grand enough to overwhelm him if he were not made of tough gristle. A pack of half-wild dogs scours the beaches in quest of carrion thrown up by the ocean. The smallest of them stops and barks after him. He has surely rubbed against mankind, this cur, for he was the one you took under your protection yesterday, driving off with stones the big fellows that were chasing him. The only people you see are fishermen who have drawn their boats up on the shore--herring-fishers, with great nets. Far away glide the boats with men on board who think as you do. You feel as if you were one of these boats, and you too long to spread your sails, instead of leaving your footprints on the wet sand or walking on the shingle like the crabs.

Concord, you are in no danger of being forgotten, but confess that you have no such sight as this to offer. The best place from which to take it in is some height where you are the monarch over this immensity. Then, though you are too far away to reach the shore, the ocean seems to you so near that you could touch it. The whole radiant panorama of the sea, islands, bay, shores, marshes, converges towards your own small self that receives it and feasts upon it; your landsman’s soul drinks in the sea and the sailors. From an old ruined fort, Henry watches the arrival of the vessels; the health-officer climbing on board, the messenger who has come for his bundle of newspapers. Best of all is the hill-top behind the house which he can ascend every evening, the ideal observatory from which to count the sails in sight as the sun sets, revealing more and more of them the lower it falls--passing, returning, departing, sometimes in a long procession, busy, stately, as if they were coming here, between the muzzles of the two fishes, to conclude their tour of the world.

Before this huge spectacle of the bay of New York, this incessant passing of vessels, this amplitude of ocean that is offered to the eye of the little tutor, sitting and musing there on the ridge, his rustic Concord soul communes with itself and wonders if it could become acclimatized here. This hour is the best of the day, and on this hill-top he recovers his balance. Yes, the sea alone can mitigate the separation. It is like the winds that blow in the woods at home. But if, at the foot of the hill or on his return from a walk, there were only some friend with whom he could talk as a brother! Or if he could merely find himself again in some circle of familiar silence bathed in an atmosphere of trust! For Henry solitude is an old and honoured acquaintance: but never till now has it wearied him as it sometimes wearies him here. There are no human faces about him on the island--for all these New York families who come over to spend the summer--save an old fisherman, a neighbour, who invites him to come to the beach and see the beautiful shad he has caught. So Staten Island is not a desert island; it is inhabited by old Smith in whose presence he feels happy as a man and a fresh-water fisherman himself.

In a rapid, sloping hand, cut with dashes for punctuation, Henry writes affectionate letters to his family and friends in Concord--an extraordinary number of letters for him. This cheers him up when the unsavoury food of his days, served on the Judge’s table, leaves on his palate an after-taste of exile. He entreats his mother for details of the life at home, for news of everybody, including Aunt Louisa, whose benignant face smiles upon him like an apparition from the wall of his room, and Cousin George Minot. The lonely boy ingenuously commits all sorts of enormities: he, with his sovereign contempt for newspapers, asks them to send him the Concord paper. Of course it is perfectly idiotic there, but how good it would be here, alone on the hill in the evening, or in his room, to have a taste of the printed news from home! And business, the pencils? And the vegetable garden? Henry is still so full of Concord that, when he wakes up at night he can hardly believe that the sound of the neighbouring sea is not that of the wind among the woods of his childhood. In his dreams he sits under the poplar behind his father’s house, sure that he is going to spend his whole life there. He has bought a new pair of pantaloons which have cost him $2.25 ready-made; the stockings are wearing well, for they are properly made--knitted at home. His mother need have no fears: his outfit will not have to be renewed yet--it withstands the new climate as well as its master’s frame. Henry is going through a period of strange mental lethargy, which makes him think of his waggish Uncle Charles, the famous wrestler who was so speedily overthrown by the demon of sleep, in the very middle of a conversation or even while he was shaving. And he also thinks of his brother, in his grave now for more than a year.... He writes to Waldo. How conceal the fact that he grates upon William and Susan Emerson as much as these excellent people grate upon him? His pupil is clever and is making progress, but nothing about him wins the affection of his tutor. He takes after the Judge. As for your brother, your sister-in-law, your nephews, dear Waldo, you can’t guess how much further away one feels from them, thinking of you and yours and the years passed in the little white house! He writes to Lidian. How are the flowers getting on in her garden? Are the weeds coming up too fast? She must have a new gardener. And the chickens? And do they go huckleberrying as they used to do? The poor woman is not well and she has told him about her difficulties; and in his own solitude, in his affection and respect, her old right-hand man feels more grateful than ever to this noble friend. Henry has a heavy heart, but as he breathes these dear odours of Concord his hand does not tremble. His advice to a sick friend is an exhortation to fortitude; his letters to Waldo are as luminous as the conversations they had had when they were off together on some excursion in the fields. The exile dreams, collects his thoughts, struggles against his debility. The penholder and the pocket inkstand which Elizabeth Hoar, Emerson’s friend, had given him for his journey, are there like a feminine invitation. He translates the “Seven Against Thebes,” and even composes for the _Dial_ a piece that is full of visions of dear Concord, _A Winter Walk_. If it comes out well he will send it off for the next number. He can only follow from afar the little review they are making among themselves, imprinting it with a style all its own; but how he loves it as a ray of light, an annunciation--and how he loves its disdain for commercial methods.

As for the nearby metropolis, visible to the North, Henry was not satisfied with observing it from the hill-top when his evening thought interrogated the horizon. Since the first month of his arrival he had profited by his Saturdays to go over and see New York. It was easy: a half-hour’s walk on the road that passed in front of the house, then three-quarters of a mile along the shore to the village of Castleton, where you took the boat. In the city he went at once to see two young friends of Emerson, clerks in an office. They had a drink together. Thanks to these pleasant boys he did not feel alone in this pandemonium, where everything shocked and grated on his country nerves. Then he went to see a few sights that would serve as landmarks, the Station, the Reservoir, the National Academy. He was not living so far away; he would come back. Such a big morsel was not to be swallowed at one mouthful. But there was one sight that had struck the Concord boy much more than any of the monuments mentioned in the guide-books: the crowd, the flood of faces in this Babel of a metropolis. The churches, the Stock Exchange, the great pretentious buildings were mean, vulgar, insupportable. But the crowd surging through the canyon-like streets was a phenomenon that surpassed all these monuments, whether they were dedicated to the worship of gold, God or the devil. Nothing like this in Boston; it was a revelation. He would not forget the name of this power. The crowd, yes, the herd that counted for so little beside the individual. But what if the hum that rose from these swarms of nobodies, this surge of faces in the great arteries, did correspond to the waves that he had seen rushing together in the Narrows, or beating the shores of the metropolis? He had the impression that this human flood could, when it wished, submerge these stupid cubes of stone. The crowd had imposed itself on little man.

Henry returned to the city whenever he could. He would have returned oftener were it not for the expense. The boats left every hour, but you had to pay your fare, and he was in rather bad straits. The distances were great in the city, and he would have taken the stage often had it not been for this miserable impecuniosity. If only that wretch of an editor who had published one of his articles with a promise of remuneration and who pretended to be dead would only have paid him! He was obliged to space out his visits to New York. He went to see Henry James, the Swedenborgian, a little plump, rosy, lame man who looked like a broker. Henry spent three hours talking with him: in the questions the latter asked he came into touch with a soul of wisdom and goodness that refreshed him. One of those men who were able to enliven a city whose tawdry buildings disheartened him. By degrees the villager became used to the monster. He went to read in the libraries, where he found the magazines and one or two substantial mouthfuls like Carlyle’s last article; especially the Mercantile Library, the keeper of which, an old Harvard tutor, had given him a card of admission for a month. Moreover, in spite of this mental lethargy from which he suffered, he did not forget one of the reasons that had led him to try New York. He had come with the idea of seeing how the land lay in the literary world. Horace Greeley, the editor-in-chief of the _Tribune_, upon whom he called, made a good impression on him. They talked over the experimental phalansteries, in which Horace had more faith than Henry. Horace was a strong and important connection. He recommended the beginner to the _Democratic Review_ which accepted his paper “The Landlord,” for its October number. This was no great source of wealth, for the magazine was poor and only paid famine prices. So he thought it would be a good thing to find something else, for there was always this irritating question of money. Henry held his lethargy in check and boldly called upon publishers and editors; there might be one who needed a young writer like himself, just fresh from his village, a fruit of the orchards of Concord with their bloom still on him. One of them proposed some work that an honest man could not do. Another jingled the $50,000 in profits which he made year in, year out, just by letting well enough alone. No doubt, no doubt. This chinking of dollars made Henry feel that he was rich enough to despise them. There was nothing much to tempt him indeed among fellows like that. It was just as it was in Concord; no one needed him, and those who would have liked to give him a welcome were unable to pay him. He had gone the rounds of the magazines; those that he had thought of as possible had obliging contributors by the dozen. There was, to be sure, the _Ladies’ Companion_, which paid; but he was not likely to stray into that company. Ask somebody else, dear lady. And yet he was absolutely obliged to earn a little money. So Henry spent a whole day hawking _The Agriculturist_ about New York. This was less humiliating than scribbling for a trashy publisher. If there was nothing for a writer to do in New York, he would wait for luckier days. The Republic of Letters would not die, nor would Henry either. He would retire in good order, as light in money and the hope of money as when he arrived. His flat purse, on his return as on his departure, would serve to identify him....

But have you reckoned up exactly what you are bringing back, my friend? It is more than your purse would hold. Or even your portmanteau, between your socks and your books. Your wealth, young man of Concord, is solid and durable in a different way from the ready-made trousers you have bought in New York. The experience of the literary market--how much do you think that is worth? You have watched these shopkeepers, big and little, at their counters; while they were talking, you have caught the odours from the back-shop. These few glimpses were enough for you to divine the flavour of their cooking, their motives, the quality of their trade. The most generous of them could not pay for your collaboration a more royal price than that of this experience. At twenty-six, when you are beginning, to know once and for all that the literary market is a market like other markets, to which you bring your merchandise, which will remain on your hands if it does not suit the taste of the customer; to know that the career of letters as you understand it is not a trade that enables a man to subsist and that there is no profit of money for you to hope for in this way ... tie up this truth tight in your handkerchief and keep it as the rarest of your arrow-heads.

And this ocean of faces in the streets, on the wharves, the human flood of New York--how much is it worth, from your point of view, to have coasted along that and felt it beat against you? The passionate individualist is in rebellion against the power of the mass. But it has fascinated you, disturbed you; its magnetism has impressed you at the first contact. A mob, undoubtedly. But with a movement as grand and sweeping as that of the clouds and the winds and the waves. And the watery surroundings of the city, that luxuriance of ocean and horizon and ships, absorbed from the hill-top, and those long walks on the shore--do you imagine they have not affected you also? Recall those crowds of immigrants you have seen passing, stopping for a day or two, pent up on a wharf, men, women, children, tattered but so very human, so real, washing their linen unconcernedly, cooking their dinner in the open air, whole families come from the four corners of the Old World to seek their fortunes in the hospitable West. Always the mob, observed with a distrustful sympathy by a savage who will never admit that man can keep his quality as a man by mingling in the mob. Yes, but in this swarm of poor wretches, encamped on a wharf, among these playing, whining children, these mothers sitting on their bundles of clothing, has it not occurred to you as you observed them with the eye of an artist fascinated by this picturesque parade, that there might be some Henry going West with his tools and his fortune and a soul as rich as your own or even greater? In any case, your glances have scrutinized this horde on the march and recognized human faces in transit. And what remains to you from this must not be forgotten when you balance your accounts.

Have you lost your homesickness? Has even your health been strengthened by the air of the bay? When you go home, you will remember, with a leaping of the heart that will warm the November air, how much you have been repaid for your months of exile by all that those crowds, that ocean, those wharves, those steamers have left in you--yes, and those hours of solitude when, from the top of the hill, your sick soul was fed by the play of the storm and the sunlight and the moonlight at midnight over the bay. And that sound of the sea which you have heard in your bed in the silence of the Judge’s house, and the spectacle of the sun rising from the Atlantic--do you think they will not add something to the magnificence of the sunset when you have contemplated it anew from your riverside heights of Musketaquid?