Chapter XII: The Lure of the West

“_If I had a pocket full of money I think I should go down the Ohio and up and down the Mississippi by way of antidote to what small remains of Orientalism (so endemic in these parts) there may still be in me--to cast out, I mean, the passion for Europe, by the passion for America; and our reverence for Cambridge, which is only a part of our reverence for London, must be transferred across the Alleghany ridge._”--EMERSON TO MARGARET FULLER.

New England has always been the home of an intense patriotism. The spirit of Bunker Hill and Lexington has never been quenched. Nor can it be said that any part of the country has sent out more men who have taken part in an effective way in large national enterprises.

Yet in the days before the Civil War, when Boston became conscious of itself as a literary center, it was open to the charge of not having yet discovered America. It belonged to a New England that still looked to Old England for its models. This, I take it, was always true more of the literary circles than of the mass of the people, but it was that which determined the admiration of those who aspired to “culture.” As Daniel in Babylon prayed with his windows opened toward Jerusalem, so the Boston literati, when they took pen in hand, wrote with their study windows open toward London. As to what was happening in the great hinterland beyond the Hudson, they cared little. And the people in the hinterland, who were so busy opening up the resources of the continent that they hadn’t time to be literary, resented in a good-natured way the Bostonian attitude. It had that “certain condescension” which Lowell resented on the part of Europeans, but from which he and his friends were not altogether free when they encountered the representative men of the West.

I think if is fair to say that Emerson did more than any one else to redeem the New England group of authors from the kind of provincialism which was their darling sin. He did it in a twofold way: first, by attacking their imitation of things English, and then by inculcating a hearty admiration for the America that was growing up in the West.

In “English Traits” he pays tribute to the sturdy virtues of the English character and the wealth of English talent. But he insists on treating England not as the Mother Country, but as a different country,--as different as France or Italy. He admires it, but it is with a critical detachment. Hawthorne wrote of England as The Old Home. Emerson had very little of the Old Home idea. There were ties of deep friendship, but he recognized that the genius of Britain and the genius of America were different. He admired the differences.

“The wealth of the source is seen in the plenitude of English nature. What variety of power and talent, what facility and plenteousness of knighthood, lordship, ladyship, royalty, loyalty; what a proud chivalry is indicated in ‘Collin’s peerage’ through eight hundred years. What dignity resting on what reality and stoutness. What courage in war, what sinew in labor, what cunning unknown, what inventors and engineers, what seamen and pilots, what clerks and scholars.”

But this admiration has nothing in it of the provincial’s attitude to the greatness and privilege of those who belong to the capital. Had one said, “Go thou and do and be likewise,” Emerson would not have budged an inch. His attitude toward the sturdy Englishman would be like his attitude toward the Churchman:

“I like a church, I like a cowl,
I love a prophet of the soul,
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
Yet not for all his faith can see
Would I that cowlèd churchman be.”

Emerson had an admiration for the true-born Englishman, but not for the anglicized American. He believed in culture, but there must be an American culture that must grow out of the conditions of our own life. In his lines entitled “Culture” he defined the cultivated man as one who

“To his native center fast,
Shall into Future fuse the Past,
And the world’s flowing fates in his own mould recast.”

And when he thought of the world’s flowing fates, his mind turned westward. There great things were happening. A new civilization was being created. There was nothing condescending in the attitude of the thinker to these men of action, who on an unparalleled stage were beginning a new act.

Against the fastidious critics of Boston, Emerson defends the rough and ready men of the West, who were already making their influences felt in politics.

“As long as our people quote English standards, they dwarf their own proportions. A Western lawyer of eminence said to me he wished it were a penal offence to bring an English lawbook into court in this country, so pernicious had he found in his experience our deference to English precedent. The very word commerce has only an English meaning and is pinched to the cramp exigencies of English experience. The commerce of rivers, the commerce of railroads, and who knows but the commerce of air balloons must give an American extension to the pond-hole of admiralty. As long as our people quote English standards, they will miss the sovereignty of power.”

Even before the Civil War Emerson discerned clearly the significance of the Middle West and the great part it was destined to play in the development of civilization. The old thirteen states had a tradition that was essentially British. The great states which had been established in the Mississippi valley were in their origin purely American. There was no colonial background to their history. Here the pioneer spirit had developed freely. It was the spirit of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett and Peter Cartwright.

Emerson reminds his fastidious friends that there is an explosive energy in young America.

“Men of this surcharge of arterial blood cannot live on nuts and herb tea and elegies, cannot read novels and play whist, cannot satisfy all their wants at the Thursday lecture or the Boston Athenæum. They pine for adventure, and must go to Pikes Peak, had rather die of the hatchet of a Pawnee than sit all day and every day at a counting-room desk. They are made for war, for the sea, for mining, hunting and clearing, for hairbreadth adventures, huge risks and adventurous living.... Their friends and governors must see that some vent for their explosive complexion is provided. The roisterers who are destined for infamy at home will cover you with glory and come back heroes and generals. There are Oregons, Californias and exploring expeditions enough appertaining to America to find them in files to gnaw and crocodiles to eat.”

Emerson could not satisfy all his wants in the Boston Athenæum or the Saturday Club. Every year he escaped from his neighbors for a lecture tour in the West. It was before the days of the Pullman car, and traveling in interior America meant roughing it.

He did not put on any airs as a missionary of culture. He could not make a living as a writer of books. He must earn something as an itinerant lecturer.

“It comes to this. I’ll bet you fifty dollars a day for three weeks that you will not leave your library and wade and freeze and ride and run, and suffer all manner of indignities, and stand up for an hour every night reading in a hall! I bet I will. I do it and win the nine hundred dollars.”

The ways of the lecturer were not always pleasant. “Two nights in a rail car and a third on the floor of a canal boat, where the cushion allowed me for a bed was crossed at the knees by another tier of sleepers as long-limbed as I, so that the air was a wreath of legs.”

In 1853 he writes from Springfield, Illinois, “Here I am in the deep mud of the prairies. It rains and thaws incessantly and if we step off a short street we go up to the shoulders perhaps in mud. My chamber is a cabin, my fellow-boarders are legislators. Two or three governors or ex-governors live in the house. But in the prairie we are all new men, and must not stand on trifles.”

In mid-winter he makes this entry in his journal: “My chief adventure was the necessity of riding in a buggy forty-eight miles to Grand Rapids; then after lecture twenty more in return, and the next morning back to Kalamazoo in time for the train hither at twelve.” This was at a time when Kalamazoo was a name strange to Bostonian ears.

It was not comfortable traveling through blizzards to discourse to audiences which gathered in chilly or stuffy halls, but it was interesting. “Here is America in the making, America in the raw. But it does not want much to go to lecture, and ’tis a pity to drive it.”

It is only fair to add that Emerson’s appreciation of the new West was intellectual rather than intimately social. He saw it in the large, and treated it in a symbolic way. He saw the significance of the western man’s boastfulness over the growth of the country. He liked to watch towns grow. He would have delighted in the Chicago man’s remark that when Chicago turned to culture it would make culture hum. That was after Emerson’s own heart, and it was that spirit which he wished to infuse into his well-beloved Boston.

In 1839 he writes, “It is a sort of maxim with me never to harp on the omnipotence of limitations. Least of all do we need any suggestion of checks and measures, as if New England were anything else.... Our virtue runs in a narrow rill, we have never a freshet. One would like to see Boston and Massachusetts agitated like a wave with some generosity, mad for learning, for music, for philanthropy, for freedom, for art. We have insight and sensibility enough if we had constitution enough.”

The old Puritan capital of Massachusetts has become a great cosmopolitan city, and what were then raw towns of the West are to-day making culture hum, but it is interesting to read Emerson’s judgments. He insisted that the rough work which the pioneers were doing, clearing the forest, building railroads, laying out cities and incidentally speculating in corner lots did not indicate that they were materialistic. They were idealists of an heroic sort. They were big men doing big things. The amenities would come in time. The fierce energy with which they did their work would be turned at length to the finer arts. He greeted them as the makers of a new civilization. The men of the West knew all this before. But they were glad to have Mr. Emerson come out and confirm them in their splendid anticipations.