Emerson | Page 3

send forth a man to teach men that they must serve him with the

heart; that only that life was religious which was thoroughly good; that
sacrifice was smoke and forms were shadows. This man lived and died
true to that purpose; and now with his blessed word and life before us,
Christians must contend that it is a matter of vital importance, really a
duty, to commemorate him by a certain form, whether that form be
agreeable to their understandings or not. Is not this to make vain the
gift of God? Is not this to make men forget that not forms but
duties--not names but righteousness and love--are enjoined?'
He was willing to continue the service with that explanation, and on
condition that he should not himself partake of the bread and wine. The
congregation would fain have kept one whose transparent purity of soul
had attached more than his heresy had alienated. But the innovation
was too great, and Emerson resigned his charge (1832). For some five
or six years longer he continued occasionally to preach, and more than
one congregation would have accepted him. But doubts on the subject
of public prayer began to weigh upon his mind. He suspected the
practice by which one man offered up prayer vicariously and
collectively for the assembled congregation. Was not that too, like the
Communion Service, a form that tended to deaden the spirit? Under the
influence of this and other scruples he finally ceased to preach (1838),
and told his friends that henceforth he must find his pulpit in the
platform of the lecturer. 'I see not,' he said, 'why this is not the most
flexible of all organs of opinion, from its popularity and from its
newness, permitting you to say what you think, without any shackles of
proscription. The pulpit in our age certainly gives forth an obstructed
and uncertain sound; and the faith of those in it, if men of genius, may
differ so much from that of those under it as to embarrass the
conscience of the speaker, because so much is attributed to him from
the fact of standing there.' The lecture was an important discovery, and
it has had many consequences in American culture. Among the more
undesirable of them has been (certainly not in Emerson's own case) the
importation of the pulpit accent into subjects where one would be
happier with out it.
Earlier in the same year in which he retired from his church at Boston,
Emerson had lost his young wife. Though we may well believe that he

bore these agitations with self-control, his health suffered, and in the
spring of 1833 he started for Europe. He came to be accused of saying
captious things about travelling. There are three wants, he said, that can
never be satisfied: that of the rich who want something more; that of
the sick who want something different; and that of the traveller who
says, Anywhere but here. Their restlessness, he told his countrymen,
argued want of character. They were infatuated with 'the rococo toy of
Italy.' As if what was true anywhere were not true everywhere; and as if
a man, go where he will, can find more beauty or worth than he carries.
All this was said, as we shall see that much else was said by Emerson,
by way of reaction and protest against instability of soul in the people
around him. 'Here or nowhere,' said Goethe inversely to unstable
Europeans yearning vaguely westwards, 'here or nowhere is thine
America.' To the use of travel for its own ends, Emerson was of course
as much alive as other people. 'There is in every constitution a certain
solstice when the stars stand still in our inward firmament, and when
there is required some foreign force, some diversion or alteration, to
prevent stagnation. And as a medical remedy, travel seems one of the
best.' He found it so in 1833. But this and his two other voyages to
Europe make no Odyssey. When Voltaire was pressed to visit Rome,
he declared that he would be better pleased with some new and free
English book than with all the glories of amphitheatre and of arch.
Emerson in like manner seems to have thought more of the great
writers whom he saw in Europe than of buildings or of landscapes. 'Am
I,' he said, 'who have hung over their works in my chamber at home,
not to see these men in the flesh, and thank them, and interchange some
thoughts with them?' The two Englishmen to whom he owed most were
Coleridge and Wordsworth; and the younger writer, some eight years
older than himself, in whom his liveliest interest had been kindled, was
Carlyle. He was fortunate enough to have converse with all three, and