Emerson in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, F

Rebecca Harding Davis, “A Little Gossip” (1900)

[] In this reminiscence of her first journey to New England, Rebecca Harding Davis describes her early desire to become a writer and her first meetings with the Hawthornes, Bronson and Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Emerson, among others. The year was 1862, and since she hailed from Virginia, Davis’s experience of the Civil War was a topic of interest wherever she went. In Concord, which she visited at Nathaniel Hawthorne ’s invitation, Davis was impressed with the character, integrity, and friendliness of some of her new acquaintances; she was especially fond of Hawthorne and Louisa May Alcott, but she had no patience with the “seers”—Bronson Alcott and Emerson. She is quite severe with Emerson, criticizing him for his aloofness and egotism and for his tendency to use people, including his friends, as objects of study; indeed, nearly forty years after first meeting him, Davis remained completely resistant to Emerson as a person and to his philosophy . Rebecca Harding Davis “A Little Gossip” () I remember listening during one long summer morning to Louisa Alcott’s father as he chanted pæans to the war,the “armed angel which was wakening the nation to a lofty life unknown before.” We were in the little parlor of the Wayside, Mr. Hawthorne’s house. . . . Mr. Alcott stood in front of the fireplace, . . . his pale eyes turning quickly from one listener to another to hold them quiet, his hands waving to keep time with the orotund sentences which had a stale, familiar ring. . . . Mr. Emerson stood listening, his head sunk on his breast, with profound submissive attention, but Hawthorne sat astride of a chair, his arms folded on the back, . . . and his laughing, sagacious eyes watching us, full of mockery. I had just come up from a border State where I had seen the actual war; the filthy spewings of it; the political jobbery in Union and Confederate camps; the malignant personal hatreds wearing patriotic masks, and glutted by burning homes and outraged women. . . . War may be an armed angel with a mission, but she has the personal habits of the slums. This would-be emerson in his own time Seer who was talking of it, and the real Seer who listened, knew no more of war as it was than I had done ...when I dreamed of bannered legions of crusaders debouching in misty fields. . . . Of the group of famous people in Concord in   Mr. Emerson was best known to the country at large.He was the typical Yankee in appearance.The tall, gaunt man with the watchful, patient face and slightly dazed eyes, his hands clasped behind his back, that came slowly down the shady village street toward the Wayside that summer day was Uncle Sam himself in ill-fitting brown clothes. I often have wondered that none of his biographers have noticed the likeness. Voice and look and manner were full of the most exquisite courtesy, yet I doubt whether he was conscious of his courtesy or meant to be deferential. Emerson, first of all, was a student of man, an explorer into the dim,obscure regions of human intelligence.He studied souls as a philologist does words or an entomologist beetles. He approached each man with bent head and eager eyes. “What new thing shall I find here?” they said. I went to Concord,a young woman from the backwoods,firm in the belief that Emerson was the first of living men.He was the modern Moses who had talked with God apart and could interpret Him to us. When I heard him coming into the parlor at the Wayside my body literally grew stiff and my tongue dry with awe. And in ten minutes I was telling him all that I had seen of the war, the words tumbling over each other, so convinced was I of his eagerness to hear. He was eager. If Edison had been there he would have been just as eager to wrench out of him the secret of electricity , or if it had been a freed slave he would have compelled him to show the scars on his back and lay bare his rejoicing, ignorant, half-animal soul, and an hour later he would have forgotten that Edison or the negro or I were in the World—having taken from each what he wanted. Naturally Mr. Emerson valued the abnormal freaks among human souls most highly, just as the unclassable word or the mongrel beetle are dearest...