Chapter XXI: The Cutting Edge

“_It (courage) gives the cutting edge to every profession._”

The virtue which Emerson insisted upon as essential was courage. In the ruder contacts of life it is common enough, but it is needed equally in time of peace.

“There is a courage of the cabinet as well as a courage of the field, a courage of manners in private assemblies that enables one man to speak masterly to a hostile company whilst another man who can easily face a cannon’s mouth does not open his own.

“There is the courage of the merchant in dealing with his trade, by which dangerous turns of affairs are met and prevailed over. Merchants recognize as much gallantry, well judged too, in the conduct of a wise and upright man of business in difficult times, as soldiers in a soldier.

“There is a courage in the treatment of every art by a master in architecture, in sculpture, in painting and in poetry, cheering the mind of spectator or receiver as by true strokes of genius, which yet no wise implies the presence of physical valor in the artist. This is the courage of genius in every kind. A certain quantity of power belongs to a certain quantity of faculty. The beautiful voice in church goes sounding on, and covers up in its volume, as in a cloak, all the defects in the choir. The singers I observe all yield to it, and so the fair singer indulges her instinct, _and dares and dares because she knows she can_.”

There could not be a more perfect illustration of the kind of courage which Emerson admired than the voice of the singer directed by a sure sense of power. It does not domineer and yet it dominates.

Emerson felt that the America of his day exhibited courage in many directions. It faced the material problems with an indomitable energy. But he felt a lack of the cutting edge in dealing with intellectual problems. The American scholars seemed to him tame-spirited. They were not sure of themselves, and were followers rather than leaders.

In his oration before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard in 1837, he made a bold attack on the education of the day and ended with a plea for the courage of the intellect. The scholar must develop a heroism of his own.

“In self trust are all the virtues comprehended. Free should the scholar be,--free and brave. Free even to the definition of freedom--without any hindrance which does not arise from his own constitution. Brave; for fear is a thing which a scholar by his very function puts behind him. Fear always springs from ignorance.”

He does not belong to a protected class.

“If he seeks a temporary peace by the diversion of his thoughts from politics or vexed questions, hiding his head like an ostrich in the flowering bushes, peeping into microscopes and turning rhymes, as a boy whistles to keep his courage up. So is the danger a danger still; so is the fear worse. Manlike let him turn and face it. Let him look into its eye, and search its nature, inspect its origin--see the whelping of this lion--which lies no great way back; he will then find in himself a perfect comprehension of its nature and extent; he will have made his hands meet on the other side, and can henceforth defy it and pass on superior. The world is his who can see through its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you behold is there only by sufferance,--by your sufferance. See it to be a lie and you have already dealt it a mortal blow.”

In 1876, in an address at the University of Virginia, Emerson returns to the same theme.

“The scholar is the right hero. He is brave because he sees the omnipotence of that which inspires him. Is there only one courage and one warfare? I cannot manage sword and rifle: can I not therefore be brave? I thought there were as many courages as men. Is an armed man the only hero? Is a man only the breach of a gun or the haft of a bowie knife? Men of thought fail in fighting down malignity, because they wear other armor than their own. Let them decline henceforward foreign methods and foreign courages. Let them do that which they _can_ do. Let them fight by their strength and not by their weakness....

“We have many revivals of religion. We have had once what was called a revival of Letters. I wish to see a revival of the human mind. To see men’s sense of duty extend to the cherishing and use of their intellectual powers: their religion should go with their thought and hallow it.”

In his celebrated address to the Cambridge Divinity School, Emerson insisted on a spiritual courage which makes of religion an independent force.

“Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone, to refuse the good models, even those which are sacred to the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil. Friends enough you will find who will hold up to your emulation, Wesleys and Oberlins, saints and prophets. Thank God for these good men, but say, ‘I also am a man.’...

“Yourself a new-born bard of the Holy Ghost,--cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity. Look to it first only, that fashion, custom, authority, pleasure and money are nothing to you,--are not bandages over your eyes, that you cannot see,--but live with the privilege of the immeasurable mind.

“Let us study the grand strokes of rectitude; a bold benevolence, an independence of friends, so that not the unjust wishes of those who love us shall impair our freedom, but we shall resist for truth’s sake the freest flow of kindness, and appeal to sympathies far in advance; and what is the highest form in which we know this beautiful element, that it is taken for granted, that the right, the brave, the generous step will be taken by it, and nobody thinks of commending it.”

In the lines entitled “Worship” he returns to the same theme. The essence of real worship is spiritual courage. It is the “sword of the spirit,” and it has a cutting edge.

“This is he, who, felled by foes,
Sprung harmless up, refreshed by blows:
He to captivity was sold,
But him no prison-bars would hold:
Though they sealed him in a rock,
Mountain chains he can unlock:
Thrown to lions for their meat,
The crouching lion kissed his feet:
Bound to the stake, no flames appalled,
But arched o’er him an honouring vault.
This is he men miscall Fate,
Threading dark ways, arriving late,
But ever coming in time to crown
The truth, and hurl wrong-doers down.
He is the oldest, and best known,
More near than aught thou call’st thy own,
Yet, greeted in another’s eyes,
Disconcerts with glad surprise.
This is Jove, who, deaf to prayers,
Floods with blessings unawares.
Draw, if thou canst, the mystic line
Severing rightly his from thine,
Which is human, which divine.”