Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

And when a hush settled over the crowd and Mr. Emerson in utter simplicity and with no introduction came forward and began to speak, Father, poor Father, seemed even smaller than before, to the point of disappearing altogether from my ken, which almost never happened in a public place, for I was rarely able to ignore him or his reactions to a speech or sermon. Busily fashioning my own reaction around what I supposed was his, I seldom heard clearly the speech or sermon itself.

This occasion was different, however. To me, Mr. Emerson was every inch the ideal poet and sage, and if a man may be said to be beautiful, he was that. Slender, but strong and supple-looking, like a man used to outdoor exercise, of medium height with a noble carriage and easy, natural gestures, he stood before us and spoke in a voice that, while intimate and almost conversational in tone, carried to the furthest reaches of the hall, for his every word seemed raptly attended to, even by the last few fellows to squeeze in at the door in back. From his first sentence to his last, there was not a whisper or a rustle from the audience. He relied on none of the usual rhetorical flourishes of the arm and mighty brow that were then so popular with public speakers; none of the tricks of voice and variations of pace and volume to surprise the audience and gain its attention cheaply. Instead, he spoke simply, directly, in a way that made you feel that he was speaking to you alone and to no one else in the hall. His bright eyes were the color of bluebells and did not fix on any single person but fixed on the space just above one’s own head, as if he were contemplating one’s thoughts as they rose in the air. Now and again, he would glance down at the text before him, as if to take in a new paragraph or sometimes an entire page, and then his large, handsome head would lift, and he would go on, with no hesitation or break in the flow of his speech. He was at that time in his mid-forties, I suppose, in the prime of his manhood, although he seemed both younger — in the clarity and openness of his expression — and older — in the wise self-assurance of his delivery.

Awed and rapt as I was, especially at the start, I did not make out much of what he said, as he was at first speaking of figures and literary works I had never heard of — a playwright named Beaumont Fletcher was one, and various characters from the plays. But I did catch that he was indeed speaking of heroism and how it had been misunderstood in the past, as much misunderstood by poets and playwrights as by politicians. He intended here, he declared, to understand it freshly. And he seemed, as Dr. Howe and his wife had promised, to be applying that new understanding of heroism to our present dilemma with regard to the issue of slavery generally and the abolitionist movement in particular.

In the work of the elder British dramatists, he said, there was a constant, obsessive recognition of gentility, just as skin color is recognized in our society today. A marvelous and original reversal, I thought, of how we normally think of those two aspects of society — gentility, or the classes of men, and race. Opposites are made to seem apposite. Yes, this was a freshened way of looking at things.

Then, after a while, he began to isolate and examine the various manifestations of heroism, as if, on the surface, he were discussing merely the literary heros, but all the same, with hints and subtle asides, indicating that our present national crisis over slavery was the necessary field for such a person. He was calling for the arrival of a man out of Plutarch, one of Father’s favorite authors also, I noted with pleasure, a man who could refute the despondency and cowardice of our religious and political theorists with “a wild courage, a stoicism not of the schools, but of the blood!” Mr. Emerson wanted a “tart cathartic virtue!’ he said, that could contend with the violations of the laws of nature committed by our predecessors and by our contemporaries. And here he lapsed into language — or I should say, he rose to language — that, although not once uttering the word itself, excoriated slavery horribly and with great originality. It is a lock-jaw, he said, that bends a man’s head back to his heels. It is a hydrophobia that makes him bark at his wife and babes, an insanity that makes him eat grass.

A man must confront and confound all this external evil, he explained, with a military attitude of the soul. This is the beginnings of heroism, this attitude. The hero advances to his own music, and there is somewhat that is not philosophical in heroism, he noted, somewhat not holy in it. “Heroism seems not to know that other souls are of one texture with it. It has pride. It is the extreme of individual nature,” he declared. These words struck fire with me, for, of course, they described my father perfectly, and I wondered if the Old Man himself realized it. Or was that, too, characteristic of heroism — that the hero does not recognize himself as heroic?

There was more, much more, that put me in mind of Father, as Mr. Emerson continued. Heroism, he told us, is almost ashamed of its body.

And this: that the stoical temperance of the hero is loved by him for its elegance, not for its austerity. “A great man scarcely knows how he dines, how he dresses, but without railing or precision, his living is natural and poetic.”

Mr. Emerson spoke in an aphoristic style that, no matter how obscure or abstract his thought and language, made it easy for me to understand his ideas and remember his words and quote them afterwards to those who were not so lucky as to have heard them in person. I remember, years later, spouting, as if they were my own, Mr. Emerson’s words that night in Boston. My companions were humble men, Negro and white men, huddled with me around a campfire in Kansas or holed up in a freezing cabin in Iowa or a farmhouse in Maryland, and I would try to inspire them by saying things like, “The characteristic of heroism is its persistency.” And, “If you would serve your brother, because it is fit for you to serve him, do not take back your words when you find that prudent people do not commend you.” And this, which became thereafter my personal motto: “Always do what you are most afraid to do.”

High counsel was how I took Mr. Emerson’s talk on heroism. High counsel, and prophecy, too. “Times of heroism!” he explained, “are generally times of terror.” And then he recalled for us the martyrdom of the brave Lovejoy who, in the name of the Bill of Rights and his right to shout against the sin of slavery, gave himself over to the rage of the mob. We now are living in a time of terror, was Mr. Emerson’s point, and thus are we likewise about to see the arrival of our heroes. They are coming soon. And we must be prepared to recognize them when they appear in our midst, and Mr. Emerson was bending all his considerable, all his incomparable, talents and wisdom to that end. Who could not be grateful?

Well, Father, for one. Perhaps Father alone. In the midst of the applause at the end of Mr. Emerson’s lecture, Father rose from his seat, to applaud the more enthusiastically, I first thought. But, no, it was to leave the hall, and with a glower on his face, he made his way past the laps of his neighbors and hurriedly, pointedly, stalked up the aisle to the exit at the rear. Shocked and more than slightly embarrassed by his rude departure, I followed, head down, and joined him on the street.

For a few moments, we walked in silence. “That man’s truly a boob!” Father blurted. “For the life of me, I can’t understand his fame. Unless the whole world is just as foolish as he is. Godless? He’s not even rational! You’d think, given his godlessness, his sec-u-laahr-ity, he’d be at least rational” he said, and gave a sardonic laugh.