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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Critical Miscellanies,  Vol. 1, Essay 5,
+Emerson, by John Morley
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Critical Miscellanies,  Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson
+
+Author: John Morley
+
+Release Date: November 27, 2006 [EBook #19935]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CRITICAL MISCELLANIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Paul Murray, Graeme Mackreth and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CRITICAL
+MISCELLANIES
+
+BY
+
+JOHN MORLEY
+
+VOL. I.
+
+Essay 5: Emerson
+
+London
+MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
+NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+1904
+
+
+
+
+Introductory                                                       293
+
+I.
+
+Early days                                                         296
+
+Takes charge of an Unitarian Church in Boston (1829)               297
+
+Resigns the charge in 1832                                         298
+
+Goes to Europe (1833)                                              299
+
+Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Carlyle                                 300
+
+Settles in Concord (1834)                                          301
+
+Description of Concord by Clough                                   301
+
+Death of his first wife                                            302
+
+Income                                                             303
+
+Hawthorne                                                          305
+
+Thoreau                                                            305
+
+Views on Solitude                                                  306
+
+Effect of his address in the Divinity School of Harvard
+(1838)                                                             307
+
+Contributes to the _Dial_ (1840)                                   309
+
+First series of his Essays published in 1841                       310
+
+Second series three years later                                    310
+
+Second visit to England (1847), and delivers lectures on
+'Representative Men,' collected and published in 1850              310
+
+Poems first collected in 1847; final version made in 1876          310
+
+Essays and Lectures published in 1860, under general title
+of _The Conduct of Life_                                           310
+
+And the Civil War                                                  310
+
+General retrospect of his life                                     312
+
+Died April 27, 1882                                                312
+
+
+II.
+
+Style of his writings                                              313
+
+Manner as a lecturer                                               314
+
+Dr. Holmes                                                         314
+
+His use of words                                                   314
+
+Sincerity                                                          316
+
+And Landor                                                         316
+
+Mr. Lowell                                                         316
+
+Description of his library                                         317
+
+A word or two about his verses                                     319
+
+
+III.
+
+Hawthorne                                                          322
+
+And Carlyle                                                        323
+
+The friends of Universal Progress in 1840                          323
+
+Bossuet                                                            324
+
+Remarks on New England                                             325
+
+One of the few moral reformers                                     327
+
+Essays on 'Domestic Life,' on 'Behaviour,' and on
+'Manners'                                                          329
+
+Compared to Franklin and Chesterfield                              330
+
+Is for faith before works                                          333
+
+A systematic reasoner                                              335
+
+The Emersonian faith abundantly justified                          337
+
+Carlyle's letter to (June 4, 1871)                                 337
+
+One remarkable result of his idealism                              341
+
+On Death and Sin                                              342, 344
+
+Conclusion                                                         346
+
+
+
+
+EMERSON.
+
+
+A great interpreter of life ought not himself to need interpretation,
+least of all can he need it for contemporaries. When time has wrought
+changes of fashion, mental and social, the critic serves a useful turn
+in giving to a poet or a teacher his true place, and in recovering ideas
+and points of view that are worth preserving. Interpretation of this
+kind Emerson cannot require. His books are no palimpsest, 'the prophet's
+holograph, defiled, erased, and covered by a monk's.' What he has
+written is fresh, legible, and in full conformity with the manners and
+the diction of the day, and those who are unable to understand him
+without gloss and comment are in fact not prepared to understand what it
+is that the original has to say. Scarcely any literature is so entirely
+unprofitable as the so-called criticism that overlays a pithy text with
+a windy sermon. For our time at least Emerson may best be left to be his
+own expositor.
+
+Nor is Emerson, either, in the case of those whom the world has failed
+to recognise, and whom therefore it is the business of the critic to
+make known and to define. It is too soon to say in what particular
+niche among the teachers of the race posterity will place him; enough
+that in our own generation he has already been accepted as one of the
+wise masters, who, being called to high thinking for generous ends, did
+not fall below his vocation, but, steadfastly pursuing the pure search
+for truth, without propounding a system or founding a school or
+cumbering himself overmuch about applications, lived the life of the
+spirit, and breathed into other men a strong desire after the right
+governance of the soul. All this is generally realised and understood,
+and men may now be left to find their way to the Emersonian doctrine
+without the critic's prompting. Though it is only the other day that
+Emerson walked the earth and was alive and among us, he is already one
+of the privileged few whom the reader approaches in the mood of settled
+respect, and whose names have surrounded themselves with an atmosphere
+of religion.
+
+It is not particularly profitable, again, to seek for Emerson one of the
+labels out of the philosophic handbooks. Was he the prince of
+Transcendentalists, or the prince of Idealists? Are we to look for the
+sources of his thought in Kant or Jacobi, in Fichte or Schelling? How
+does he stand towards Parmenides and Zeno, the Egotheism of the Sufis,
+or the position of the Megareans? Shall we put him on the shelf with the
+Stoics or the Mystics, with Quietist, Pantheist, Determinist? If life
+were long, it might be worth while to trace Emerson's affinities with
+the philosophic schools; to collect and infer his answers to the
+everlasting problems of psychology and metaphysics; to extract a set of
+coherent and reasoned opinions about knowledge and faculty, experience
+and consciousness, truth and necessity, the absolute and the relative.
+But such inquiries would only take us the further away from the essence
+and vitality of Emerson's mind and teaching. In philosophy proper
+Emerson made no contribution of his own, but accepted, apparently
+without much examination of the other side, from Coleridge after Kant,
+the intuitive, _à priori_ and realist theory respecting the sources of
+human knowledge, and the objects that are within the cognisance of the
+human faculties. This was his starting-point, and within its own sphere
+of thought he cannot be said to have carried it any further. What he did
+was to light up these doctrines with the rays of ethical and poetic
+imagination. As it has been justly put, though Emersonian
+transcendentalism is usually spoken of as a philosophy, it is more
+justly regarded as a gospel.[1] But before dwelling more on this, let us
+look into the record of his life, of which we may say in all truth that
+no purer, simpler, and more harmonious story can be found in the annals
+of far-shining men.
+
+[Footnote 1: Frothingham's _Transcendentalism in New England: a
+History_--a judicious, acute, and highly interesting piece of criticism.]
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+
+Ralph Waldo Emerson was born at Boston, May 25, 1803. He was of an
+ancient and honourable English stock, who had transplanted themselves,
+on one side from Cheshire and Bedfordshire, and on the other from Durham
+and York, a hundred and seventy years before. For seven or eight
+generations in a direct and unbroken line his forefathers had been
+preachers and divines, not without eminence in the Puritan tradition of
+New England. His second name came into the family with Rebecca Waldo,
+with whom at the end of the seventeenth century one Edward Emerson had
+intermarried, and whose family had fled from the Waldensian valleys and
+that slaughter of the saints which Milton called on Heaven to avenge.
+Every tributary, then, that made Emerson what he was, flowed not only
+from Protestantism, but from 'the Protestantism of the Protestant
+religion.' When we are told that Puritanism inexorably locked up the
+intelligence of its votaries in a dark and straitened chamber, it is
+worthy to be remembered that the genial, open, lucid, and most
+comprehensive mind of Emerson was the ripened product of a genealogical
+tree that at every stage of its growth had been vivified by Puritan sap.
+
+Not many years after his birth, Emerson's mother was left a widow with
+narrow means, and he underwent the wholesome training of frugality in
+youth. When the time came, he was sent to Harvard. When Clough visited
+America a generation later, the collegiate training does not appear to
+have struck him very favourably. 'They learn French and history and
+German, and a great many more things than in England, but only
+imperfectly.' This was said from the standard of Rugby and Balliol, and
+the method that Clough calls imperfect had merits of its own. The pupil
+lost much in a curriculum that had a certain rawness about it, compared
+with the traditional culture that was at that moment (1820) just
+beginning to acquire a fresh hold within the old gray quadrangles of
+Oxford. On the other hand, the training at Harvard struck fewer of those
+superfluous roots in the mind, which are only planted that they may be
+presently cast out again with infinite distraction and waste.
+
+When his schooling was over, Emerson began to prepare himself for the
+ministrations of the pulpit, and in 1826 and 1827 he preached in divers
+places. Two years later he was ordained, and undertook the charge of an
+important Unitarian Church in Boston. It was not very long before the
+strain of forms, comparatively moderate as it was in the Unitarian body,
+became too heavy to be borne. Emerson found that he could no longer
+accept the usual view of the Communion Service, even in its least
+sacramental interpretation. To him the rite was purely spiritual in
+origin and intent, and at the best only to be retained as a
+commemoration. The whole world, he said, had been full of idols and
+ordinances and forms, when 'the Almighty God was pleased to qualify and
+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 he has told the world how
+these illustrious men in their several fashions and degrees impressed
+him.[2] It was Carlyle who struck him most. 'Many a time upon the sea,
+in my homeward voyage, I remembered with joy the favoured condition of
+my lonely philosopher,' cherishing visions more than divine 'in his
+stern and blessed solitude.' So Carlyle, with no less cordiality,
+declares that among the figures that he could recollect as visiting his
+Nithsdale hermitage--'all like Apparitions now, bringing with them airs
+from Heaven, or the blasts from the other region, there is not one of a
+more undoubtedly supernal character than yourself; so pure and still,
+with intents so charitable; and then vanishing too so soon into the
+azure Inane, as an Apparition should.'
+
+[Footnote 2: _English Traits_, 7-18. _Ireland_, 143-152. Froude's
+_Carlyle_, ii. 355-359.]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In external incident Emerson's life was uneventful. Nothing could be
+simpler, of more perfect unity, or more free from disturbing episodes
+that leaves scars on men. In 1834 he settled in old Concord, the home of
+his ancestors, then in its third century. 'Concord is very bare,' wrote
+Clough, who made some sojourn there in 1852, 'and so is the country in
+general; it is a small sort of village, almost entirely of wood houses,
+painted white, with Venetian blinds, green outside, with two white
+wooden churches. There are some American elms of a weeping kind, and
+sycamores, i.e. planes; but the wood is mostly pine--white pine and
+yellow pine--somewhat scrubby, occupying the tops of the low banks, and
+marshy hay-land between, very brown now. A little brook runs through to
+the Concord River.'[3] The brook flowed across the few acres that were
+Emerson's first modest homestead. 'The whole external appearance of the
+place,' says one who visited him, 'suggests old-fashioned comfort and
+hospitality. Within the house the flavour of antiquity is still more
+noticeable. Old pictures look down from the walls; quaint blue-and-white
+china holds the simple dinner; old furniture brings to mind the
+generations of the past. At the right as you enter is Mr. Emerson's
+library, a large square room, plainly furnished, but made pleasant by
+pictures and sunshine. The homely shelves that line the walls are well
+filled with books. There is a lack of showy covers or rich bindings, and
+each volume seems to have soberly grown old in constant service. Mr.
+Emerson's study is a quiet room upstairs.'
+
+[Footnote 3: Clough's _Life and Letters_, i. 185.]
+
+Fate did not spare him the strokes of the common lot. His first wife
+died after three short years of wedded happiness. He lost a little son,
+who was the light of his eyes. But others were born to him, and in all
+the relations and circumstances of domestic life he was one of the best
+and most beloved of men. He long carried in his mind the picture of
+Carlyle's life at Craigenputtock as the ideal for the sage, but his own
+choice was far wiser and happier, 'not wholly in the busy world, nor
+quite beyond it.'
+
+'Besides my house,' he told Carlyle in 1838, 'I have, I believe, 22,000
+dollars, whose income in ordinary years is six per cent. I have no other
+tithe or glebe except the income of my winter lectures, which was last
+winter 800 dollars. Well, with this income, here at home, I am a rich
+man. I stay at home and go abroad at my own instance, I have food,
+warmth, leisure, books, friends. Go away from home, I am rich no longer.
+I never have a dollar to spend on a fancy. As no wise man, I suppose,
+ever was rich in the sense of _freedom to spend_, because of the
+inundation of claims, so neither am I, who am not wise. But at home I am
+rich--rich enough for ten brothers. My wife Lidian is an incarnation of
+Christianity,--I call her Asia,--and keeps my philosophy from
+Antinomianism; my mother, whitest, mildest, most conservative of ladies,
+whose only exception to her universal preference for old things is her
+son; my boy, a piece of love and sunshine, well worth my watching from
+morning to night;--these, and three domestic women, who cook and sew and
+run for us, make all my household. Here I sit and read and write, with
+very little system, and, as far as regards composition, with the most
+fragmentary result: paragraphs incompressible, each sentence an
+infinitely repellent particle.
+
+'In summer, with the aid of a neighbour, I manage my garden; and a week
+ago I set out on the west side of my house forty young pine trees to
+protect me or my son from the wind of January. The ornament of the place
+is the occasional presence of some ten or twelve persons, good and wise,
+who visit us in the course of the year.'
+
+As time went on he was able to buy himself 'a new plaything'--a piece of
+woodland, of more than forty acres, on the border of a little lake half
+a mile wide or more, called Walden Pond. 'In these May days,' he told
+Carlyle, then passionately struggling with his _Cromwell_, with the
+slums of Chelsea at his back, 'when maples, poplars, oaks, birches,
+walnut, and pine, are in their spring glory, I go thither every
+afternoon, and cut with my hatchet an Indian path through the thicket,
+all along the bold shore, and open the finest pictures' (1845).
+
+He loved to write at 'large leisure in noble mornings, opened by prayer
+or by readings of Plato, or whatsoever else is dearest to the Morning
+Muse.' Yet he could not wholly escape the recluse's malady. He confesses
+that he sometimes craves 'that stimulation which every capricious,
+languid, and languescent study needs.' Carlyle's potent concentration
+stirs his envy. The work of the garden and the orchard he found very
+fascinating, eating up days and weeks; 'nay, a brave scholar should shun
+it like gambling, and take refuge in cities and hotels from these
+pernicious enchantments.'
+
+In the doings of his neighbourhood he bore his part; he took a manly
+interest in civil affairs, and was sensible, shrewd, and helpful in
+matters of practical judgment. Pilgrims, sane and insane, the beardless
+and the gray-headed, flocked to his door, far beyond the dozen persons
+good and wise whom he had mentioned to Carlyle. 'Uncertain, troubled,
+earnest wanderers through the midnight of the moral world beheld his
+intellectual fire as a beacon burning on a hill-top, and climbing the
+difficult ascent, looked forth into the surrounding obscurity more
+hopefully than hitherto' (_Hawthorne_). To the most intractable of
+Transcendental bores, worst species of the genus, he was never
+impatient, nor denied himself; nor did he ever refuse counsel where the
+case was not yet beyond hope. Hawthorne was for a time his neighbour
+(1842-45). 'It was good,' says Hawthorne, 'to meet him in the
+wood-paths, or sometimes in our avenue, with that pure intellectual
+gleam diffused about his presence like the garment of a shining one; and
+he so quiet, so simple, so without pretension, encountering each man
+alive as if expecting to receive more than he could impart.'
+
+The most remarkable of all his neighbours was Thoreau, who for a couple
+of years lived in a hut which he had built for himself on the shore of
+Walden Pond. If he had not written some things with a considerable charm
+of style, Thoreau might have been wisely neglected as one of the crazy.
+But Emerson was struck by the originality of his life, and thought it
+well in time to edit the writings of one 'who was bred to no profession;
+never married; lived alone; never went to Church; never voted; refused
+to pay a tax to the State; ate no flesh, drank no wine, never knew the
+use of tobacco; had no temptations to fight against, no appetites, no
+passions, refused all invitations, preferred a good Indian to highly
+cultivated people, and said he would rather go to Oregon than to
+London.' The world has room for every type, so that it be not actively
+noxious, and this whimsical egotist may well have his place in the
+catalogue. He was, after all, in his life only a compendium, on a scale
+large enough to show their absurdity, of all those unsocial notions
+which Emerson in other manifestations found it needful to rebuke. Yet we
+may agree that many of his paradoxes strike home with Socratic force to
+the heart of a civilisation that wise men know to be too purely
+material, too artificial, and too capriciously diffused.
+
+Emerson himself was too sane ever to fall into the hermit's trap of
+banishment to the rocks and echoes. 'Solitude,' he said, 'is
+impracticable, and society fatal.' He steered his way as best he could
+between these two irreconcilable necessities. He had, as we have seen,
+the good sense to make for himself a calling which brought him into
+healthy contact with bodies of men, and made it essential that he should
+have his listeners in some degree in his mind, even when they were not
+actually present to the eye. As a preacher Emerson has been described as
+making a deep impression on susceptible hearers of a quiet mind, by 'the
+calm dignity of his bearing, the absence of all oratorical effort, and
+the singular simplicity and directness of a manner free from the least
+trace of dogmatic assumption.' 'Not long before,' says this witness, 'I
+had listened to a wonderful sermon by Chalmers, whose force and energy,
+and vehement but rather turgid eloquence, carried for the moment all
+before him--his audience becoming like clay in the hands of the potter.
+But I must confess that the pregnant thoughts and serene self-possession
+of the young Boston minister had a greater charm for me than all the
+rhetorical splendours of Chalmers' (_Ireland_, 141).
+
+At the lecturer's desk the same attraction made itself still more
+effectually felt. 'I have heard some great speakers and some
+accomplished orators,' Mr. Lowell says, 'but never any that so moved and
+persuaded men as he. There is a kind of undertone in that rich barytone
+of his that sweeps our minds from their foothold into deep waters with a
+drift that we cannot and would not resist. Search for his eloquence in
+his books and you will perchance miss it, but meanwhile you will find
+that it has kindled all your thoughts.' The same effect was felt in its
+degree wherever he went, and he took pains not to miss it. He had made a
+study of his art, and was so skilful in his mastery of it that it seemed
+as if anybody might do all that he did and do it as well--if only a
+hundred failures had not proved the mistake.
+
+In 1838 Emerson delivered an address in the Divinity School of Harvard,
+which produced a gusty shower of articles, sermons, and pamphlets, and
+raised him without will or further act of his to the high place of the
+heresiarch. With admirable singleness of mind, he held modestly aloof.
+'There is no scholar,' he wrote to a friend, 'less willing or less able
+to be a polemic. I could not give account of myself if challenged. I
+delight in telling what I think, but if you ask me how I dare say so, or
+why it is so, I am the most helpless of men,' The year before, his
+oration on the American Scholar had filled Carlyle with delight. It was
+the first clear utterance, after long decades of years, in which he had
+'heard nothing but infinite jangling and jabbering, and inarticulate
+twittering and screeching.' Then Carlyle enjoined on his American friend
+for rule of life, 'Give no ear to any man's praise or censure; know that
+that is _not_ it; on the one side is as Heaven, if you have strength to
+keep silent and climb unseen; yet on the other side, yawning always at
+one's right hand and one's left, is the frightfullest Abyss and
+Pandemonium' (Dec. 8, 1837). Emerson's temperament and his whole method
+made the warning needless, and, as before, while 'vociferous platitude
+was dinning his ears on all sides,' a whole world of thought was
+'silently building itself in these calm depths.' But what would those
+two divinities of his, Plato and Socrates, have said of a man who 'could
+not give an account of himself if challenged'? Assuredly not every one
+who saith Plato, Plato, is admitted to that ideal kingdom.
+
+It was soon after this that the _Dial_ was projected. It had its origin
+in the Transcendental Club, a little knot of speculative students at
+Boston, who met four or five times a year at one another's houses to
+discuss questions mainly theological, from more liberal points of view
+than was at that time common, 'the air then in America getting a little
+too close and stagnant.' The Club was first formed in 1836. The _Dial_
+appeared in 1840, and went on for four years at quarterly intervals.
+Emerson was a constant contributor, and for the last half of its
+existence he acted as editor. 'I submitted,' he told Carlyle, 'to what
+seemed a necessity of petty literary patriotism--I know not what else to
+call it--and took charge of our thankless little _Dial_ here, without
+subscribers enough to pay even a publisher, much less any labourer; it
+has no penny for editor or contributor, nothing but abuse in the
+newspapers, or, at best, silence; but it serves as a sort of portfolio,
+to carry about a few poems or sentences which would otherwise be
+transcribed or circulated, and we always are waiting until somebody
+shall come and make it good. But I took it, and it took me and a great
+deal of good time to a small purpose' (July 1, 1842). On the whole one
+must agree that it was to small purpose. Emerson's name has reflected
+lustre on the _Dial_, but when his contributions are taken out, and,
+say, half a dozen besides, the residuum is in the main very poor stuff,
+and some of it has a droll resemblance to the talk between Mrs. Hominy
+and the Literary Ladies and the Honourable Elijah Pogram. Margaret
+Fuller--the Miranda, Zenobia, Hypatia, Minerva of her time, and a truly
+remarkable figure in the gallery of wonderful women--edited it for two
+years, and contributed many a vivid, dashing, exuberant, ebullient page.
+Her criticism of Goethe, for example, contains no final or valid word,
+but it is fresh, cordial, and frank, and no other prose contributor,
+again saving the one great name, has anything to say that is so
+readable. Nearly all the rest is extinct, and the _Dial_ now finds
+itself far away from the sunshine of human interest.
+
+In 1841 the first series of Emerson's Essays was published, and three
+years later the second. The Poems were first collected in 1847, but the
+final version was not made until 1876. In 1847 Emerson paid his second
+visit to England, and delivered his lectures on Representative Men,
+collected and published in 1850. The books are said to have had a very
+slow sale, but the essays and lectures published in 1860, with the
+general title of _The Conduct of Life_, started with a sale of 2,500
+copies, though that volume has never been considered by the Emersonian
+adept to contain most of the pure milk of the Word.
+
+Then came that great event in the history of men and institutions, the
+Civil War. We look with anxiety for the part played by the serene
+thinker when the hour had struck for violent and heroic action. Emerson
+had hitherto been a Free Soiler; he had opposed the extension of
+slavery; and he favoured its compulsory extinction, with compensation on
+the plan of our own policy in the West Indies. He had never joined the
+active Abolitionists, nor did he see 'that there was any particular
+thing for him to do in it then.' 'Though I sometimes accept a popular
+call, and preach on Temperance or the Abolition of Slavery, I am sure to
+feel, before I have done with it, what an intrusion it is into another
+sphere, and so much loss of virtue in my own' (_To Carlyle_, 1844). But
+he missed no occasion of showing that in conviction and aim he was with
+good men. The infirmities of fanatics never hid from him either the
+transcendent purity of their motives or the grandeur of their cause.
+This is ever the test of the scholar: whether he allows intellectual
+fastidiousness to stand between him and the great issues of his time.
+'Cannot the English,' he cried out to Carlyle, 'leave cavilling at petty
+failures and bad manners and at the dunce part, and leap to the
+suggestions and finger-pointings of the gods, which, above the
+understanding, feed the hopes and guide the wills of men?' These
+finger-pointings Emerson did not mistake. He spoke up for Garrison. John
+Brown was several times in Concord, and found a hearty welcome in
+Emerson's house. When Brown made his raid at Harper's Ferry, and the
+crisis became gradually sharper, Emerson felt that the time had come,
+and his voice was raised in clear tones. After the sword is drawn, it is
+deeds not words that interest and decide; but whenever the word of the
+student was needed Emerson was ready to give the highest expression to
+all that was best in his countrymen's mood during that greatest ordeal
+of our time. The inward regeneration of the individual had ever been the
+key to his teaching, and this teaching had been one of the forces that,
+like central fire in men's minds, nourished the heroism of the North in
+its immortal battle.
+
+The exaltation of national character produced by the Civil War opened
+new and wider acceptance for a great moral and spiritual teacher, and
+from the close of the war until his death in 1882, Emerson's ascendency
+within his own sphere of action was complete, and the public recognition
+of him universal. Of story, there is no more to tell. He pursued his old
+way of reading, meditating, conversing, and public lecturing, almost to
+the end. The afternoon of his life was cloudless as the earlier day, and
+the shades of twilight fell in unbroken serenity. In his last years
+there was a partial failure of his memory, and more than one pathetic
+story is told of this tranquil and gradual eclipse. But 'to the last,
+even when the events of yesterday were occasionally obscured, his memory
+of the remote past was unclouded; he would tell about the friends of his
+early and middle life with unbroken vigour.' So, tended in his home by
+warm filial devotion, and surrounded by the reverent kindness of his
+village neighbours, this wise and benign man slowly passed away (April
+27, 1882).[4]
+
+[Footnote 4: The reader who seeks full information about Emerson's life
+will find it scattered in various volumes: among them are--
+
+_Ralph Waldo Emerson_; by George Willis Cooke (Sampson Low & Co.,
+1882)--a very diligent and instructive work.
+
+_R.W.E._; by Alexander Ireland (Simpkin, Marshall, & Co. 1882),
+described by Carlyle, and known by others, as 'full of energy and broad
+sagacity and practicality; infinitely well affected to the man Emerson
+too,'--and full moreover of that intellectual enthusiasm which in his
+Scotch countrymen goes so often with their practicalities.
+
+_Emerson, at Home and Abroad_; by Moncure D. Conway (Trübner & Co.,
+1883): the work of a faithful disciple, who knew Emerson well, and has
+here recorded many interesting anecdotes and traits.]
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+
+It cannot be truly said that Emerson is one of the writers who make
+their way more easily into our minds by virtue of style. That his
+writing has quality and flavour none but a pure pedant would deny. His
+more fervent votaries, however, provoke us with a challenge that goes
+far beyond this. They declare that the finish, charm, and beauty of the
+writing are as worthy of remark as the truth and depth of the thought.
+It is even 'unmatchable and radiant,' says one. Such exaggerations can
+have no reference to any accepted standard. It would in truth, have been
+a marvel if Emerson had excelled in the virtues of the written page, for
+most of his published work was originally composed and used for the
+platform. Everybody knows how different are the speaker's devices for
+gaining possession of his audience, from the writer's means of winning,
+persuading, and impressing the attention of his reader. The key to the
+difference may be that in the speech the personality of the orator
+before our eyes gives of itself that oneness and continuity of
+communication, which the writer has to seek in the orderly sequence and
+array of marshalled sentence and well-sustained period. One of the
+traits that every critic notes in Emerson's writing, is that it is so
+abrupt, so sudden in its transitions, so discontinuous, so
+inconsecutive. Dislike of a sentence that drags made him unconscious of
+the quality, that French critics name _coulant_. Everything is thrown in
+just as it comes, and sometimes the pell-mell is enough to persuade us
+that Pope did not exaggerate when he said that no one qualification is
+so likely to make a good writer, as the power of rejecting his own
+thoughts.
+
+His manner as a lecturer, says Dr. Holmes, was an illustration of his
+way of thinking. 'He would lose his place just as his mind would drop
+its thought and pick up another, twentieth cousin or no relation at all
+to it.' The same manner, whether we liken it to mosaic or to
+kaleidoscope, marks his writing. It makes him hard to follow, oracular,
+and enigmatical. 'Can you tell me,' asked one of his neighbour, while
+Emerson was lecturing, 'what connection there is between that last
+sentence and the one that went before, and what connection it all has
+with Plato?' 'None, my friend, save in God!' This is excellent in a
+seer, but less so in the writer.
+
+Apart from his difficult staccato, Emerson is not free from secondary
+faults. He uses words that are not only odd, but vicious in
+construction; he is not always grammatically correct; he is sometimes
+oblique, and he is often clumsy; and there is a visible feeling after
+epigrams that do not always come. When people say that Emerson's style
+must be good and admirable because it fits his thought, they forget that
+though it is well that a robe should fit, there is still something to be
+said about its cut and fashion.
+
+No doubt, to borrow Carlyle's expression, 'the talent is not the chief
+question here: the idea--that is the chief question.' We do not profess
+to be of those to whom mere style is as dear as it was to Plutarch; of
+him it was said that he would have made Pompey win the battle of
+Pharsalia, if it could have given a better turn to a phrase. It would
+not be worth while to speak of form in a thinker to whom our debt is so
+large for his matter, if there were not so much bad literary imitation
+of Emerson. Dr. Holmes mournfully admits that 'one who talks like
+Emerson or like Carlyle soon finds himself surrounded by a crowd of
+walking phonographs, who mechanically reproduce his mental and oral
+accents. Emerson was before long talking in the midst of a babbling
+Simonetta of echoes.' Inferior writers have copied the tones of the
+oracle without first making sure of the inspiration. They forget that a
+platitude is not turned into a profundity by being dressed up as a
+conundrum. Pithiness in him dwindles into tenuity in them; honest
+discontinuity in the master is made an excuse for finical incoherencies
+in the disciples; the quaint, ingenious, and unexpected collocations of
+the original degenerate in the imitators into a trick of unmeaning
+surprise and vapid antithesis; and his pregnant sententiousness set the
+fashion of a sententiousness that is not fertility but only hydropsy.
+This curious infection, which has spread into divers forms of American
+literature that are far removed from philosophy, would have been
+impossible if the teacher had been as perfect in expression as he was
+pure, diligent, and harmonious in his thinking.
+
+Yet, as happens to all fine minds, there came to Emerson ways of
+expression deeply marked with character. On every page there is set the
+strong stamp of sincerity, and the attraction of a certain artlessness;
+the most awkward sentence rings true; and there is often a pure and
+simple note that touches us more than if it were the perfection of
+elaborated melody. The uncouth procession of the periods discloses the
+travail of the thought, and that too is a kind of eloquence. An honest
+reader easily forgives the rude jolt or unexpected start, when it shows
+a thinker faithfully working his way along arduous and unworn tracks.
+Even at the roughest, Emerson often interjects a delightful cadence. As
+he says of Landor, his sentences are cubes which will stand firm, place
+them how or where you will. He criticised Swedenborg for being
+superfluously explanatory, and having an exaggerated feeling of the
+ignorance of men. 'Men take truths of this nature,' said Emerson, 'very
+fast;' and his own style does no doubt very boldly take this capacity
+for granted in us. In 'choice and pith of diction,' again, of which Mr.
+Lowell speaks, he hits the mark with a felicity that is almost his own
+in this generation. He is terse, concentrated, and free from the
+important blunder of mistaking intellectual dawdling for meditation. Nor
+in fine does his abruptness ever impede a true urbanity. The accent is
+homely and the apparel plain, but his bearing has a friendliness, a
+courtesy, a hospitable humanity, which goes nearer to our hearts than
+either literary decoration or rhetorical unction. That modest and
+lenient fellow-feeling which gave such charm to his companionship
+breathes in his gravest writing, and prevents us from finding any page
+of it cold or hard or dry.
+
+Though Emerson was always urgent for 'the soul of the world, clean from
+all vestige of tradition,' yet his work is full of literature. He at
+least lends no support to the comforting fallacy of the indolent, that
+originating power does not go with assimilating power. Few thinkers on
+his level display such breadth of literary reference. Unlike Wordsworth,
+who was content with a few tattered volumes on a kitchen shelf, Emerson
+worked among books. When he was a boy he found a volume of Montaigne,
+and he never forgot the delight and wonder in which he lived with it.
+His library is described as filled with well-selected authors, with
+curious works from the eastern world, with many editions in both Greek
+and English of his favourite Plato; while portraits of Shakespeare,
+Montaigne, Goethe, Dante, looked down upon him from the walls. Produce a
+volume of Plato or of Shakespeare, he says somewhere, or '_only remind
+us of their names_,' and instantly we come into a feeling of longevity.
+That is the scholar's speech. Opening a single essay at random, we find
+in it citations from Montesquieu, Schiller, Milton, Herodotus, Shelley,
+Plutarch, Franklin, Bacon, Van Helmont, Goethe. So little does Emerson
+lend himself to the idle vanity of seeking all the treasures of wisdom
+in his own head, or neglecting the hoarded authority of the ages. It is
+true that he held the unholy opinion that a translation is as good as
+the original, or better. Nor need we suppose that he knew that pious
+sensation of the book-lover, the feel of a library; that he had any of
+the collector's amiable foolishness about rare editions; or that he
+nourished festive thoughts of 'that company of honest old fellows in
+their leathern jackets in his study,' as comrades in a sober old-world
+conviviality. His books were for spiritual use, like maps and charts of
+the mind of man, and not much for 'excellence of divertisement.' He had
+the gift of bringing his reading to bear easily upon the tenor of his
+musings, and knew how to use books as an aid to thinking, instead of
+letting them take the edge off thought. There was assuredly nothing of
+the compiler or the erudite collegian in him. It is a graver defect that
+he introduces the great names of literature without regard for true
+historical perspective in their place, either in relation to one
+another, or to the special phases of social change and shifting time.
+Still let his admirers not forget that Emerson was in his own way
+Scholar no less than Sage.
+
+A word or two must be said of Emerson's verses. He disclaimed, for his
+own part, any belief that they were poems. Enthusiasts, however, have
+been found to declare that Emerson 'moves more constantly than any
+recent poet in the atmosphere of poesy. Since Milton and Spenser no
+man--not even Goethe--has equalled Emerson in this trait.' _The
+Problem_, according to another, 'is wholly unique, and transcends all
+contemporary verse in grandeur of style.' Such poetry, they say, is like
+Westminster Abbey, 'though the Abbey is inferior in boldness.' Yet,
+strangely enough, while Emerson's poetic form is symbolised by the
+flowing lines of Gothic architecture, it is also 'akin to Doric
+severity.' With all the good will in the world, I do not find myself
+able to rise to these heights; in fact, they rather seem to deserve
+Wordsworth's description, as mere obliquities of admiration.
+
+Taken as a whole, Emerson's poetry is of that kind which springs, not
+from excitement of passion or feeling, but from an intellectual demand
+for intense and sublimated expression. We see the step that lifts him
+straight from prose to verse, and that step is the shortest possible.
+The flight is awkward and even uncouth, as if nature had intended feet
+rather than wings. It is hard to feel of Emerson, any more than
+Wordsworth could feel of Goethe, that his poetry is inevitable. The
+measure, the colour, the imaginative figures, are the product of search,
+not of spontaneous movements of sensation and reflection combining in a
+harmony that is delightful to the ear. They are the outcome of a
+discontent with prose, not of that high-strung sensibility which compels
+the true poet into verse. This must not be said without exception. _The
+Threnody_, written after the death of a deeply loved child, is a
+beautiful and impressive lament. Pieces like _Musquetaquid_, the
+_Adirondacs_, the _Snowstorm_, _The Humble-Bee_, are pretty and pleasant
+bits of pastoral. In all we feel the pure breath of nature, and
+
+                     The primal mind,
+   That flows in streams, that breathes in wind.
+
+There is a certain charm of _naiveté_, that recalls the unvarnished
+simplicity of the Italian painters before Raphael. But who shall say
+that he discovers that 'spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling,' which
+a great poet has made the fundamental element of poetry? There are too
+few melodious progressions; the melting of the thought with natural
+images and with human feeling is incomplete; we miss the charm of
+perfect assimilation, fusion, and incorporation; and in the midst of all
+the vigour and courage of his work, Emerson has almost forgotten that it
+is part of the poet's business to give pleasure. It is true that
+pleasure is sometimes undoubtedly to be had from verse that is not above
+mediocrity, and Wordsworth once designed to write an essay examining why
+bad poetry pleases. Poetry that pleases may be bad, but it is equally
+true that no poetry which fails to please can be really good. Some one
+says that gems of expression make Emerson's essays oracular and his
+verse prophetic. But, to borrow Horace's well-known phrase, 'tis not
+enough that poems should be sublime; _dulcia sunto_,--they must be
+touching and sympathetic. Only a bold critic will say that this is a
+mark of Emerson's poems. They are too naked, unrelated, and cosmic; too
+little clad with the vesture of human associations. Light and shade do
+not alternate in winning and rich relief, and as Carlyle found it, the
+radiance is 'thin piercing,' leaving none of the sweet and dim recesses
+so dear to the lover of nature. We may, however, well be content to
+leave a man of Emerson's calibre to choose his own exercises. It is best
+to suppose that he knew what he was about when he wandered into the
+fairyland of verse, and that in such moments he found nothing better to
+his hand. Yet if we are bidden to place him among the poets, it is
+enough to open Keats at the _Ode to a Nightingale_, or Shelley at _The
+Cloud_, the _Skylark_, or the _Sensitive Plant_, or Wordsworth at
+_Tintern Abbey_, or Goethe at _Das Göttliche_, or Victor Hugo in the
+_Contemplations_. Then in spite of occasional formality of rhythm and
+artifice in ornament, we cannot choose but perceive how tuneful is their
+music, how opulent the resources of their imagination, how various,
+subtle, and penetrating their affinity for the fortunes and sympathies
+of men, and next how modest a portion of all these rare and exquisite
+qualifications reveals itself in the verse of Emerson.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+
+Few minds of the first order that have busied themselves in
+contemplating the march of human fortunes, have marched forward in a
+straight line of philosophic speculation unbroken to the end. Like
+Burke, like Coleridge, like Wordsworth, at a given point they have a
+return upon themselves. Having mastered the truths of one side, their
+eyes open to what is true on the other; the work of revolution finished
+or begun, they experience fatigue and reaction. In Hawthorne's romance,
+after Miles Coverdale had passed his spring and summer among the
+Utopians of Blithedale, he felt that the time had come when he must for
+sheer sanity's sake go and hold a little talk with the Conservatives,
+the merchants, the politicians, 'and all those respectable old
+blockheads, who still in this intangibility and mistiness of affairs
+kept a death-grip on one or two ideas which had not come into vogue
+since yesterday morning.' 'No sagacious man,' says Hawthorne, 'will long
+retain his sagacity if he lives exclusively among reformers and
+progressive people, without periodically returning into the settled
+system of things, to correct himself by a new observation from that old
+stand-point.' Yet good men rightly hoped that 'out of the very thoughts
+that were wildest and most destructive might grow a wisdom, holy, calm,
+and pure, and that should incarnate itself with the substance of a noble
+and happy life.' Now that we are able to look back on the crisis of the
+times that Hawthorne describes, we perceive that it was as he expected,
+and that in the person of Emerson the ferment and dissolvency of thought
+worked itself out in a strain of wisdom of the highest and purest.
+
+In 1842 Emerson told Carlyle, in vindication of the _Dial_ and its
+transcendentalisms, that if the direction of their speculations was as
+deplorable as Carlyle declared, it was yet a remarkable fact for history
+that all the bright young men and young women in New England, 'quite
+ignorant of each other, take the world so, and come and make confession
+to fathers and mothers--the boys, that they do not wish to go into
+trade; the girls, that they do not like morning calls and evening
+parties. They are all religious, but hate the churches; they reject all
+the ways of living of other men, but have none to offer in their stead.'
+
+It is worth while to transcribe from the _Dial_ itself the scene at one
+of the many Bostonian Conventions of that date--the Friends of Universal
+Progress, in 1840:--'The composition of the Assembly was rich and
+various. The singularity and latitude of the summons drew together, from
+all parts of New England, and also from the Middle States, men of every
+shade of opinion, from the straightest orthodoxy to the wildest heresy,
+and many persons whose church was a church of one member only. A great
+variety of dialect and of costume was noticed; a great deal of
+confusion, eccentricity, and freak appeared, as well as of zeal and
+enthusiasm. If the Assembly was disorderly, it was picturesque. Madmen,
+madwomen, men with beards, Dunkers, Muggletonians, Come-outers,
+Groaners, Agrarians, Seventh-day Baptists, Quakers, Abolitionists,
+Calvinists, Unitarians, and philosophers, all came successively to the
+top, and seized their moment, if not their _hour_, wherein to chide or
+pray or preach or protest. The faces were a study. The most daring
+innovators, and the champions-until-death of the old cause, sat side by
+side. The still living merit of the oldest New England families, glowing
+yet after several generations, encountered the founders of families,
+fresh merit emerging and expanding the brows to a new breadth, and
+lighting a clownish face with sacred fire. The Assembly was
+characterised by the predominance of a certain plain sylvan strength and
+earnestness' (_Dial_, iii. 101).
+
+If the shade of Bossuet could have looked down upon the scene, he would
+have found fresh material for the sarcasms which a hundred and fifty
+years before he had lavished on the Variations of the Protestant
+Churches. Yet this curious movement, bleak and squalid as it may seem to
+men nurtured in the venerable decorum of ecclesiastical tradition, was
+at bottom identical with the yearning for stronger spiritual emotions,
+and the cravings of religious zeal, that had in older times filled
+monasteries, manned the great orders, and sent wave upon wave of
+pilgrims and crusaders to holy places. 'It is really amazing,' as was
+said by Franklin or somebody else of his fashion of utilitarianism,
+'that one of the passions which it is hardest to develop in man is the
+passion for his own material comfort and temporal well-being.'
+
+Emerson has put on record this mental intoxication of the progressive
+people around him, with a pungency that might satisfy the Philistines
+themselves.[5] From 1820 to 1844, he said, New England witnessed a
+general criticism and attack on institutions, and in all practical
+activities a gradual withdrawal of tender consciences from the social
+organisations. Calvinists and Quakers began to split into old school and
+new school. Goethe and the Germans became known. Swedenborg, in spite of
+his taint of craziness, by the mere prodigy of his speculations, began
+'to spread himself into the minds of thousands'--including in no
+unimportant degree the mind of Emerson himself.[6] Literary criticism
+counted for something in the universal thaw, and even the genial
+humanity of Dickens helped to break up the indurations of old theology.
+Most powerful of all was the indirect influence of science. Geology
+disclosed law in an unsuspected region, and astronomy caused men to
+apprehend that 'as the earth is not the centre of the Universe, so it is
+not the special scene or stage on which the drama of divine justice is
+played before the assembled angels of heaven.'
+
+[Footnote 5: _New England Reformers: Essays_, ii. 511-519.]
+
+[Footnote 6: The Swedenborgians--'a sect which, I think, must contribute
+more than all other sects to the new faith, which must come out of
+all.'--_To Carlyle_, 1834.]
+
+A temper of scrutiny and dissent broke out in every direction. In
+almost every relation men and women asked themselves by what right
+Conformity levied its tax, and whether they were not false to their own
+consciences in paying it. 'What a fertility of projects for the
+salvation of the world! One apostle thought that all men should go to
+farming; and another thought that no man should buy or sell--that use of
+money was the cardinal evil; another thought the mischief was in our
+diet--that we eat and drink damnation. These made unleavened bread, and
+were foes to the death to fermentation. Others attacked the system of
+agriculture, the use of animal manures in farming, and the tyranny of
+man over brute instinct. These abuses polluted his food. The ox must be
+taken from the plough, and the horse from the cart; the hundred acres of
+the farm must be spaded, and the man must walk wherever boats and
+locomotives will not carry him.... Others assailed particular
+vocations.... Others attacked the institution of marriage as the
+fountain of social evils.... Who gave me the money with which I bought
+my coat? Why should professional labour and that of the counting-house
+be paid so disproportionately to the labour of the porter and the
+woodsawer? Am I not too protected a person? Is there not a wide
+disparity between the lot of me and the lot of thee, my poor brother, my
+poor sister?'
+
+One of Emerson's glories is, that while wise enough to discern the peril
+and folly of these excesses, he was under no temptation to fall back. It
+was giddy work, but he kept his eye on the fixed stars. Certainly
+Emerson was not assailed by the stress of mighty and violent events, as
+Burke and Wordsworth were in some sense turned into reactionaries by the
+calamities of revolution in France. The 'distemper of enthusiasm,' as
+Shaftesbury would have called it, took a mild and harmless form in New
+England: there the work in hand was not the break-up of a social system,
+but only the mental evolution of new ideals, the struggle of an ethical
+revival, and the satisfaction of a livelier spirit of scruple. In face
+of all delirations, Emerson kept on his way of radiant sanity and
+perfect poise. Do not, he warned his enthusiasts, expend all energy on
+some accidental evil, and so lose sanity and power of benefit. '_It is
+of little moment that one or two or twenty errors of our social system
+be corrected, but of much that the man be in his senses._ Society gains
+nothing whilst a man, not himself renovated, attempts to renovate things
+around him; he has become tediously good in some particular, but
+negligent or narrow in the rest, and hypocrisy and vanity are often the
+disgusting result. It is handsomer to remain in the establishment,
+better than the establishment, and conduct that in the best manner, than
+to make a sally against evil by some single improvement, without
+supporting it by a total regeneration.'
+
+Emerson, then, is one of the few moral reformers whose mission lay in
+calming men rather than in rousing them, and in the inculcation of
+serenity rather than in the spread of excitement. Though he had been
+ardent in protest against the life conventional, as soon as the protest
+ran off into extravagance, instead of either following or withstanding
+it with rueful petulancies, he delicately and successfully turned a
+passing agitation into an enduring revival. The last password given by
+the dying Antonine to the officer of the watch was _Ĉquanimitas_. In a
+brighter, wider, and more living sense than was possible even to the
+noblest in the middle of the second century, this, too, was the
+watchword of the Emersonian teaching. Instead of cultivating the
+tormenting and enfeebling spirit of scruple, instead of multiplying
+precepts, he bade men not to crush their souls out under the burden of
+Duty; they are to remember that a wise life is not wholly filled up by
+commandments to do and to abstain from doing. Hence, we have in Emerson
+the teaching of a vigorous morality without the formality of dogma and
+the deadly tedium of didactics. If not laughter, of which only
+Shakespeare among the immortals has a copious and unfailing spring,
+there is at least gaiety in every piece, and a cordial injunction to men
+to find joy in their existence to the full. Happiness is with him an aim
+that we are at liberty to seek directly and without periphrasis.
+Provided men do not lose their balance by immersing themselves in their
+pleasures, they are right, according to Emerson, in pursuing them. But
+joy is no neighbour to artificial ecstasy. What Emerson counsels the
+poet, he intended in its own way and degree for all men. The poet's
+habit of living, he says beautifully, should be set on a key so low
+that the commonest influences should delight him. 'That spirit which
+suffices quiet hearts, which seems to come forth to such from every dry
+knoll of sere grass, from every pine-stump and half-embedded stone on
+which the dull March sun shines, comes forth to the poor and hungry, and
+such as are of simple taste. If thou fill thy brain with Boston and New
+York, with fashion and covetousness, and wilt stimulate thy jaded senses
+with wine and French coffee, thou shalt find no radiance of wisdom in
+the lonely waste of the pinewoods' (ii. 328).
+
+It was perhaps the same necessity of having to guide men away from the
+danger of transcendental aberrations, while yet holding up lofty ideals
+of conduct, that made Emerson say something about many traits of conduct
+to which the ordinary high-flying moralist of the treatise or the pulpit
+seldom deigns to stoop. The essays on Domestic Life, on Behaviour, on
+Manners, are examples of the attention that Emerson paid to the right
+handling of the outer conditions of a wise and brave life. With him
+small circumstances are the occasions of great qualities. The parlour
+and the counting-house are as fit scenes for fortitude, self-control,
+considerateness, and vision, as the senate or the battlefield. He
+re-classifies the virtues. No modern, for example, has given so
+remarkable a place to Friendship among the sacred necessities of
+well-endowed character. Neither Plato nor Cicero, least of all Bacon,
+has risen to so noble and profound a conception of this most strangely
+commingled of all human affections. There is no modern thinker, again,
+who makes Beauty--all that is gracious, seemly, and becoming--so
+conspicuous and essential a part of life. It would be inexact to say
+that Emerson blended the beautiful with the precepts of duty or of
+prudence into one complex sentiment, as the Greeks did, but his theory
+of excellence might be better described than any other of modern times
+by the [Greek: kalokagathia], the virtue of the true gentleman, as set
+down in Plato and Aristotle.
+
+So untrue is it that in his quality of Sage Emerson always haunted the
+perilous altitudes of Transcendentalism, 'seeing nothing under him but
+the everlasting snows of Himalaya, the Earth shrinking to a Planet, and
+the indigo Firmament sowing itself with daylight stars.' He never thinks
+it beneath his dignity to touch a point of minor morals, or to say a
+good word for what he somewhere calls subterranean prudence. Emerson
+values mundane circumspection as highly as Franklin, and gives to
+manners and rules of daily behaviour an importance that might have
+satisfied Chesterfield. In fact, the worldly and the selfish are
+mistaken when they assume that Common Sense is their special and
+exclusive portion. The small Transcendentalist goes in search of truth
+with the meshes of his net so large that he takes no fish. His
+landscapes are all horizon. It is only the great idealists, like
+Emerson, who take care not to miss the real.
+
+The remedy for the break-down of the old churches would, in the mind of
+the egotist, have been to found a new one. But Emerson knew well before
+Carlyle told him, that 'no truly great man, from Jesus Christ downwards,
+ever founded a sect--I mean wilfully intended founding one.' Not only
+did he establish no sect, but he preached a doctrine that was positively
+incompatible with the erection of any sect upon its base. His whole hope
+for the world lies in the internal and independent resources of the
+individual. If mankind is to be raised to a higher plane of happiness
+and worth, it can only be by the resolution of each to live his own life
+with fidelity and courage. The spectacle of one liberated from the
+malign obstructions to free human character, is a stronger incentive to
+others than exhortation, admonition, or any sum of philanthropical
+association. If I, in my own person and daily walk, quietly resist
+heaviness of custom, coldness of hope, timidity of faith, then without
+wishing, contriving, or even knowing it, I am a light silently drawing
+as many as have vision and are fit to walk in the same path. Whether I
+do that or not, I am at least obeying the highest law of my own being.
+
+In the appeal to the individual to be true to himself, Emerson does not
+stand apart from other great moral reformers. His distinction lies in
+the peculiar direction that he gives to his appeal. All those
+regenerators of the individual, from Rousseau down to J.S. Mill, who
+derived their first principles, whether directly or indirectly, from
+Locke and the philosophy of sensation, experience, and acquisition,
+began operations with the will. They laid all their stress on the
+shaping of motives by education, institutions, and action, and placed
+virtue in deliberateness and in exercise. Emerson, on the contrary,
+coming from the intuitional camp, holds that our moral nature is
+vitiated by any interference of our will. Translated into the language
+of theology, his doctrine makes regeneration to be a result of grace,
+and the guide of conscience to be the indwelling light; though, unlike
+the theologians, he does not trace either of these mysterious gifts to
+the special choice and intervention of a personal Deity. Impulsive and
+spontaneous innocence is higher than the strength to conquer temptation.
+The natural motions of the soul are so much better than the voluntary
+ones. 'There is no such thing as manufacturing a strong will,' for all
+great force is real and elemental. In all this Emerson suffers from the
+limitations that are inseparable from pure spiritualism in all its
+forms. As if the spiritual constitution were ever independent of the
+material organisation bestowed upon the individual at the moment when he
+is conceived, or of the social conditions that close about him from the
+instant of his birth. The reaction, however, against what was
+superficial in the school of the eighteenth century went to its extreme
+length in Emerson, and blinded his eyes to the wisdom, the profundity,
+and the fruitfulness of their leading speculations. It is enough for us
+to note the fact in passing, without plunging into contention on the
+merits. All thoughts are always ready, potentially if not actually. Each
+age selects and assimilates the philosophy that is most apt for its
+wants. Institutions needed regeneration in France, and so those thinkers
+came into vogue and power who laid most stress on the efficacy of good
+institutions. In Emerson's America, the fortunes of the country made
+external circumstances safe for a man, and his chance was assured; so a
+philosophy was welcomed which turned the individual inwards upon
+himself, and taught him to consider his own character and spiritual
+faculty as something higher than anything external could ever be.
+
+Again to make a use which is not uninstructive of the old tongue,
+Emerson is for faith before works. Nature, he says, will not have us
+fret and fume. She does not like our benevolences, our churches, our
+pauper-societies, much better than she likes our frauds and wars. They
+are but so many yokes to the neck. Our painful labours are unnecessary
+and fruitless. A higher law than that of our will regulates events. If
+we look wider, things are all alike: laws and creeds and modes of living
+are a travesty of truth. Only in our easy, simple, spontaneous action
+are we strong, and by contenting ourselves with obedience we become
+strong. Our real action is in our silent moments. Why should we be awed
+by the name of Action? 'Tis a trick of the senses.[7]
+
+[Footnote 7: _Essays_: Spiritual Laws, etc.]
+
+Justification by faith has had a savour of antinomianism and
+indifferency ever since the day when Saint Paul so emphatically denied
+that he made void the law through faith, and said of certain
+calumniators that their damnation was just. Emerson was open to the same
+charge, and he knew it. In a passage already quoted, Emerson says
+good-humouredly that his wife keeps his philosophy from running to
+antinomianism He could not mistake the tendency of saying that, if you
+look wider, things are all alike, and that we are in the grasp of a
+higher law than our own will. On that side he only paints over in
+rainbow colours the grim doctrine which the High Calvinist and the
+Materialistic Necessarian hold in common.
+
+All great minds perceive all things; the only difference lies in the
+order in which they shall choose to place them. Emerson, for good reason
+of his own, dwelt most on fate, character, and the unconscious and
+hidden sources, but he writes many a page of vigorous corrective. It is
+wholesome, he says, to man to look not at Fate, but the other way; the
+practical view is the other. As Mill says of his wish to disbelieve the
+doctrine of the formation of character by circumstances--'Remembering
+the wish of Fox respecting the doctrine of resistance to governments,
+that it might never be forgotten by Kings nor remembered by subjects, I
+said that it would be a blessing if the doctrine of necessity could be
+believed by all _quoad_ the characters of others, and disbelieved in
+regard to their own.' So Emerson knew well enough that man's
+consciousness of freedom, action, and power over outer circumstances
+might be left to take care of itself, as the practical view generally
+can. The world did not need him to tell it that a man's fortunes are a
+part of his character. His task was the more far-reaching one of drawing
+them to recognise that love is the important thing, not benevolent
+works; that only impure men consider life as it is reflected in events,
+opinions, and persons; that they fail to see the action until it is
+done, whereas what is far better worth considering is that its moral
+element prĉ-existed in the actor.
+
+It would be easy to show that Emerson has not worked out his answers to
+these eternal enigmas, for ever reproducing themselves in all ages, in
+such a form as to defy the logician's challenge. He never shrinks from
+inconsistent propositions. He was unsystematic on principle. 'He thought
+that truth has so many facets that the best we can do is to notice each
+in turn, without troubling ourselves whether they agree.' When we
+remember the inadequateness of human language, the infirmities of our
+vision, and all the imperfections of mental apparatus, the wise men will
+not disdain even partial glimpses of a scene too vast and intricate to
+be comprehended in a single map. To complain that Emerson is no
+systematic reasoner is to miss the secret of most of those who have
+given powerful impulses to the spiritual ethics of an age. It is not a
+syllogism that turns the heart towards purification of life and aim; it
+is not the logically enchained propositions of a _sorites_, but the
+flash of illumination, the indefinable accent, that attracts masses of
+men to a new teacher and a high doctrine. The teasing _ergoteur_ is
+always right, but he never leads nor improves nor inspires.
+
+Any one can see how this side of the Emersonian gospel harmonised with
+the prepossessions of a new democracy. Trust, he said, to leading
+instincts, not to traditional institutions, nor social ordering, nor the
+formulĉ of books and schools for the formation of character; the great
+force is real and elemental. In art, Mr. Ruskin has explained the
+palpable truth that semi-civilised nations can colour better than we do,
+and that an Indian shawl and China vase are inimitable by us. 'It is
+their glorious ignorance of all rules that does it; the pure and true
+instincts have play, and do their work; and the moment we begin teaching
+people any rules about colour, and make them do this or that, we crush
+the instinct, generally for ever' (_Modern Painters_, iii. 91). Emerson
+said what comes to the same thing about morals. The philosophy of
+democracy, or the government of a great mixed community by itself, rests
+on a similar assumption in politics. The foundations of a self-governed
+society on a great scale are laid in leading instincts. Emerson was
+never tired of saying that we are wiser than we know. The path of
+science and of letters is not the way to nature. What was done in a
+remote age by men whose names have resounded far, has no deeper sense
+than what you and I do to-day. What food, or experience, or succour have
+Olympiads and Consulates for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, for the Kanáka
+in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter? When he is
+in this vein Emerson often approaches curiously near to Rousseau's
+memorable and most potent paradox of 1750, that the sciences corrupt
+manners.[8]
+
+[Footnote 8: What so good, asks Rousseau, 'as a sweet and precious
+ignorance, the treasure of a pure soul at peace with itself, which
+finds all its blessedness in inward retreat, in testifying to itself
+its own innocence, and which feels no need of seeking a warped and
+hollow happiness in the opinion of other people as to its
+enlightenment?']
+
+Most men will now agree that when the great fiery trial came, the
+Emersonian faith and the democratic assumption abundantly justified
+themselves. Even Carlyle wrote to Emerson at last (June 4, 1871): 'In my
+occasional explosions against Anarchy, and my inextinguishable hatred of
+_it_, I privately whisper to myself, "Could any Friedrich Wilhelm now,
+or Friedrich, or most perfect Governor you could hope to realise, guide
+forward what is America's essential task at present, faster or more
+completely than 'Anarchic America' is now doing?" Such "Anarchy" has a
+great deal to say for itself.'
+
+The traits of comparison between Carlyle and Emerson may be regarded as
+having been pretty nearly exhausted for the present, until time has
+changed the point of view. In wit, humour, pathos, penetration, poetic
+grandeur, and fervid sublimity of imagination, Carlyle is the superior
+beyond measure. But Emerson is as much his superior in that high and
+transparent sanity, which is not further removed from midsummer madness
+than it is from a terrene and grovelling mediocrity. This sanity, among
+other things, kept Emerson in line with the ruling tendencies of his
+age, and his teaching brings all the aid that abstract teaching can,
+towards the solution of the moral problems of modern societies. Carlyle
+chose to fling himself headlong and blindfold athwart the great currents
+of things, against all the forces and elements that are pushing modern
+societies forward. Beginning in his earlier work with the same faith as
+Emerson in leading instincts, he came to dream that the only leading
+instinct worth thinking about is that of self-will, mastery, force, and
+violent strength. Emerson was for basing the health of a modern
+commonwealth on the only real strength, and the only kind of force that
+can be relied upon, namely, the honest, manly, simple, and emancipated
+character of the citizen. This gives to his doctrine a hold and a prize
+on the work of the day, and makes him our helper. Carlyle's perverse
+reaction had wrecked and stranded him when the world came to ask him for
+direction. In spite of his resplendent genius, he had no direction to
+give, and was only able in vague and turbid torrents of words to hide a
+shallow and obsolete lesson. His confession to Emerson, quoted above,
+looks as if at last he had found this out for himself.
+
+If Emerson stood thus well towards the social and political drift of
+events, his teaching was no less harmoniously related to the new and
+most memorable drift of science which set in by his side. It is a
+misconception to pretend that he was a precursor of the Darwinian
+theory. Evolution, as a possible explanation of the ordering of the
+universe, is a great deal older than either Emerson or Darwin. What
+Darwin did was to work out in detail and with masses of minute evidence
+a definite hypothesis of the specific conditions under which new forms
+are evolved. Emerson, of course, had no definite hypothesis of this
+sort, nor did he possess any of the knowledge necessary to give it
+value. But it was his good fortune that some of his strongest
+propositions harmonise with the scientific theory of the survival of the
+fittest in the struggle for material existence. He connects his
+exhortation to self-reliance with the law working in nature for
+conservation and growth,--to wit, that 'Power is in nature the essential
+measure of right,' and that 'Nature suffers nothing to remain in her
+kingdom which cannot help itself.' The same strain is constantly
+audible. Nature on every side, within us and without, is for ever
+throwing out new forms and fresh varieties of living and thinking. To
+her experiments in every region there is no end. Those succeed which
+prove to have the best adaptation to the conditions. Let, therefore,
+neither society nor the individual check experiment, originality, and
+infinite variation. Such language, we may see, fits in equally well with
+democracy in politics and with evolution in science. If, moreover,
+modern science gives more prominence to one conception than another, it
+is to that of the natural universe of force and energy, as One and a
+Whole. This too is the great central idea with Emerson, repeated a
+thousand times in prose and in verse, and lying at the very heart of his
+philosophy. Newton's saying that 'the world was made at one cast'
+delights him. 'The secret of the world is that its energies are
+_solidaires_.' Nature 'publishes itself in creatures, reaching from
+particles and spicula, through transformation on transformation to the
+highest symmetries. A little heat, that is, a little motion, is all that
+differences the bald dazzling white and deadly cold poles of the earth
+from the prolific tropical climates.' Not only, as Professor Tyndall
+says, is Emerson's religious sense entirely undaunted by the discoveries
+of science; all such discoveries he comprehends and assimilates. 'By
+Emerson scientific conceptions are continually transmuted into the finer
+forms and warmer lines of an ideal world.'
+
+That these transmutations are often carried by Emerson to the extent of
+vain and empty self-mystifications is hard to deny, even for those who
+have most sympathy with the general scope of his teaching. There are
+pages that to the present writer, at least, after reasonably diligent
+meditation, remain mere abracadabra, incomprehensible and worthless.
+For much of this in Emerson, the influence of Plato is mainly
+responsible, and it may be noted in passing that his account of Plato
+(_Representative Men_) is one of his most unsatisfactory performances.
+'The title of Platonist,' says Mill, 'belongs by far better right to
+those who have been nourished in, and have endeavoured to practise
+Plato's mode of investigation, than to those who are distinguished only
+by the adoption of certain dogmatical conclusions, drawn mostly from the
+least intelligible of his works.' Nothing is gained by concealing that
+not every part of Emerson's work will stand the test of the Elenchus,
+nor bear reduction into honest and intelligible English.
+
+One remarkable result of Emerson's idealism ought not to be passed over.
+'The visible becomes the Bestial,' said Carlyle, 'when it rests not on
+the invisible.' To Emerson all rested on the invisible, and was summed
+up in terms of the invisible, and hence the Bestial was almost unknown
+in his philosophic scheme. Nay, we may say that some mighty phenomena in
+our universe were kept studiously absent from his mind. Here is one of
+the profoundest differences between Emerson and most of those who, on as
+high an altitude, have pondered the same great themes. A small trait
+will serve for illustration. It was well known in his household that he
+could not bear to hear of ailments. 'There is one topic,' he writes,
+'peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational mortals,
+namely, their distempers. If you have not slept, or if you have slept,
+or if you have headache, sciatica, or leprosy, or thunder-stroke, I
+beseech you by all angels to hold your peace, and not pollute the
+morning, to which all the housemates bring serene and pleasant thoughts,
+by corruption and groans. Come out of the azure. Love the
+day'--(_Conduct of Life_, 159).
+
+If he could not endure these minor perturbations of the fair and smiling
+face of daily life, far less did he willingly think of Death. Of nothing
+in all the wide range of universal topics does Emerson say so little as
+of that which has lain in sombre mystery at the very core of most
+meditations on life, from Job and Solon down to Bacon and Montaigne.
+Except in two beautiful poems, already mentioned, Death is almost
+banished from his page. It is not the title or the subject of one of his
+essays, only secondarily even of that on Immortality. Love, Friendship,
+Prudence, Heroism, Experience, Manners, Nature, Greatness, and a score
+of other matters--but none to show that he ever sat down to gather into
+separate and concentrated shape his reflections on the terrifying
+phantom that has haunted the mind of man from the very birth of time.
+
+Pascal bade us imagine a number of men in chains and doomed to death;
+some of them each day butchered in sight of the others; those who
+remained watching their own lot in that of their fellows, and awaiting
+their turn in anguish and helplessness. Such, he cried, is the pitiful
+and desperate condition of man. But nature has other cruelties more
+stinging than death. Mill, himself an optimist, yet declares the course
+of natural phenomena to be replete with everything which, when committed
+by human beings is most worthy of abhorrence, so that 'one who
+endeavoured in his actions to imitate the natural course of things would
+be universally seen and acknowledged to be the wickedest of men.' To man
+himself, moreover, 'the most criminal actions are not more unnatural
+than most of the virtues.' We need not multiply from poets and divines,
+from moralists and sages, these grim pictures. The sombre melancholy,
+the savage moral indignation, the passionate intellectual scorn, with
+which life and the universe have filled strong souls, some with one
+emotion and some with another, were all to Emerson in his habitual
+thinking unintelligible and remote. He admits, indeed, that 'the disease
+and deformity around us certify that infraction of natural,
+intellectual, and moral laws, and often violation on violation to breed
+such compound misery.' The way of Providence, he says in another place,
+is a little rude, through earthquakes, fever, the sword of climate, and
+a thousand other hints of ferocity in the interiors of nature.
+Providence has a wild rough incalculable road to its end, and 'it is of
+no use to try to white-wash its huge mixed instrumentalities, or to
+dress up that terrific benefactor in a clean shirt and white neckcloth
+of a student of divinity.' But he only drew from the thought of these
+cruelties of the universe the practical moral that 'our culture must
+not omit the arming of the man.' He is born into the state of war, and
+will therefore do well to acquire a military attitude of soul. There is
+perhaps no better moral than this of the Stoic, but greater
+impressiveness might have marked the lesson, if our teacher had been
+more indulgent to the man's sense of tragedy in that vast drama in which
+he plays his piteous part.
+
+In like manner, Emerson has little to say of that horrid burden and
+impediment on the soul, which the churches call Sin, and which, by
+whatever name we call it, is a very real catastrophe in the moral nature
+of man. He had no eye, like Dante's, for the vileness, the cruelty, the
+utter despicableness to which humanity may be moulded. If he saw them at
+all, it was through the softening and illusive medium of generalised
+phrases. Nor was he ever shocked and driven into himself by 'the immoral
+thoughtlessness' of men. The courses of nature, and the prodigious
+injustices of man in society, affect him with neither horror nor awe. He
+will see no monster if he can help it. For the fatal Nemesis or terrible
+Erinnyes, daughters of Erebus and Night, Emerson substitutes a
+fair-weather abstraction named Compensation. One radical tragedy in
+nature he admits--'the distinction of More and Less.' If I am poor in
+faculty, dim in vision, shut out from opportunity, in every sense an
+outcast from the inheritance of the earth, that seems indeed to be a
+tragedy. 'But see the facts clearly and these mountainous inequalities
+vanish. Love reduces them, as the sun melts the iceberg in the sea. The
+heart and soul of all men being one, this bitterness of His and Mine
+ceases. His is mine.' Surely words, words, words! What can be more idle,
+when one of the world's bitter puzzles is pressed on the teacher, than
+that he should betake himself to an altitude whence it is not visible,
+and then assure us that it is not only invisible, but non-existent? This
+is not to see the facts clearly, but to pour the fumes of obscuration
+round them. When he comforts us by saying 'Love, and you shall be
+loved,' who does not recall cases which make the Jean Valjean of Victor
+Hugo's noble romance not a figment of the theatre, but an all too actual
+type? The believer who looks to another world to redress the wrongs and
+horrors of this; the sage who warns us that the law of life is
+resignation, renunciation, and doing-without (_entbehren sollst
+du_)--each of these has a foothold in common language. But to say that
+all infractions of love and equity are speedily punished--punished by
+fear--and then to talk of the perfect compensation of the universe, is
+mere playing with words, for it does not solve the problem in the terms
+in which men propound it. Emerson, as we have said, held the spirit of
+System in aversion as fettering the liberal play of thought, just as in
+morals, with greater boldness, he rebelled against a minute and cramping
+interpretation of Duty. We are not sure that his own optimistic doctrine
+did not play him the same tyrannical trick, by sealing his eyes to at
+least one half of the actualities of nature and the gruesome
+possibilities of things. It had no unimportant effect on Emerson's
+thought that he was born in a new world that had cut itself loose from
+old history. The black and devious ways through which the race has
+marched are not real in North America, as they are to us in old Europe,
+who live on the very site of secular iniquities, are surrounded by
+monuments of historic crime, and find present and future entangled,
+embittered, inextricably loaded both in blood and in institutions with
+desperate inheritances from the past.
+
+There are many topics, and those no mean topics, on which the best
+authority is not the moralist by profession, as Emerson was, but the man
+of the world. The world hardens, narrows, desiccates common natures, but
+nothing so enriches generous ones. For knowledge of the heart of man, we
+must go to those who were closer to the passions and interests of actual
+and varied life than Emerson ever could have been--to Horace, Montaigne,
+La Bruyère, Swift, Molière, even to Pope. If a hostile critic were to
+say that Emerson looked at life too much from the outside, as the
+clergyman is apt to do, we should condemn such a remark as a
+disparagement, but we should understand what it is in Emerson that the
+critic means. He has not the temperament of the great humorists, under
+whatever planet they may have been born, jovial, mercurial, or
+saturnine. Even his revolt against formalism is only a new fashion of
+composure, and sometimes comes dangerously near to moral dilettantism.
+The persistent identification of everything in nature with everything
+else sometimes bewilders, fatigues, and almost afflicts us. Though he
+warns us that our civilisation is not near its meridian, but as yet only
+in the cock-crowing and the morning star, still all ages are much alike
+with him: man is always man, 'society never advances,' and he does
+almost as little as Carlyle himself to fire men with faith in social
+progress as the crown of wise endeavour. But when all these deductions
+have been made and amply allowed for, Emerson remains among the most
+persuasive and inspiring of those who by word and example rebuke our
+despondency, purify our sight, awaken us from the deadening slumbers of
+convention and conformity, exorcise the pestering imps of vanity, and
+lift men up from low thoughts and sullen moods of helplessness and
+impiety.
+
+
+
+
+END OF VOL. I.
+
+_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Critical Miscellanies,  Vol. 1, Essay
+5, Emerson, by John Morley
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+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of Critical Miscellanies, Vol 1, Essay 5,  Emerson, by John Morley.
+    </title>
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Critical Miscellanies,  Vol. 1, Essay 5,
+Emerson, by John Morley
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Critical Miscellanies,  Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson
+
+Author: John Morley
+
+Release Date: November 27, 2006 [EBook #19935]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CRITICAL MISCELLANIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Paul Murray, Graeme Mackreth and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+<h1>CRITICAL<br />
+MISCELLANIES</h1>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h2>JOHN MORLEY</h2>
+
+<h3>VOL. I.</h3>
+
+<h2>Essay 5: Emerson</h2>
+
+<p class='center' style="margin-top: 15em; margin-bottom: 5em;"><small>London<br />
+MACMILLAN AND CO., <span class="smcap">Limited</span><br />
+NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY<br />
+1904</small>
+</p>
+
+<h3>EMERSON</h3>
+
+
+<p>
+Introductory <span style="margin-left: 25em;"> <a href="#Page_293">293</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 24em;"><a href="#I"><b>I.</b></a></span><br />
+<br />
+Early days <span style="margin-left: 25.8em;">    <a href="#Page_296">296</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Takes charge of an Unitarian Church in Boston (1829)<span style="margin-left: 9.3em;">  <a href="#Page_297">297</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Resigns the charge in 1832 <span style="margin-left: 19.6em;">  <a href="#Page_298">298</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Goes to Europe (1833) <span style="margin-left: 20.9em;">      <a href="#Page_299">299</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Carlyle <span style="margin-left: 16em;">    <a href="#Page_300">300</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Settles in Concord (1834)<span style="margin-left: 20em;">   <a href="#Page_301">301</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Description of Concord by Clough <span style="margin-left: 16.9em;">   <a href="#Page_301">301</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Death of his first wife<span style="margin-left: 22em;">    <a href="#Page_302">302</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Income <span style="margin-left: 27.2em;">        <a href="#Page_303">303</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Hawthorne <span style="margin-left: 25.8em;">      <a href="#Page_305">305</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Thoreau   <span style="margin-left: 26.9em;">       <a href="#Page_305">305</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Views on Solitude  <span style="margin-left: 23.2em;">    <a href="#Page_306">306</a></span><br />
+<br />
+
+Effect of his address in the Divinity School of Harvard<br />
+(1838) <span style="margin-left: 27.5em;">       <a href="#Page_307">307</a></span><br />
+
+<br />
+Contributes to the <i>Dial</i> (1840) <span style="margin-left: 18.6em;">       <a href="#Page_309">309</a></span><br />
+<br />
+First series of his Essays published in 1841<span style="margin-left: 14.2em;">  <a href="#Page_310">310</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Second series three years later<span style="margin-left: 18.7em;">        <a href="#Page_310">310</a></span><br />
+<br />
+
+Second visit to England (1847), and delivers lectures on<br />
+'Representative Men,' collected and published in 1850 <span style="margin-left: 9.9em;"> <a href="#Page_310">310</a></span><br />
+
+<br />
+Poems first collected in 1847; final version made in 1876 <span style="margin-left: 9em;">  <a href="#Page_310">310</a></span><br />
+<br />
+
+Essays and Lectures published in 1860, under general title<br />
+of <i>The Conduct of Life</i> <span style="margin-left: 21.4em;">     <a href="#Page_310">310</a></span><br />
+
+<br />
+And the Civil War  <span style="margin-left: 23.6em;">        <a href="#Page_310">310</a></span><br />
+<br />
+General retrospect of his life <span style="margin-left: 19.9em;">   <a href="#Page_312">312</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Died April 27, 1882 <span style="margin-left: 22.8em;">     <a href="#Page_312">312</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 24em;"><a href="#II"><b>II.</b></a></span><br />
+<br />
+Style of his writings    <span style="margin-left: 23.2em;">            <a href="#Page_313">313</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Manner as a lecturer     <span style="margin-left: 22.7em;">     <a href="#Page_314">314</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Dr. Holmes     <span style="margin-left: 26.1em;">          <a href="#Page_314">314</a></span><br />
+<br />
+His use of words <span style="margin-left: 24.1em;">          <a href="#Page_314">314</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Sincerity       <span style="margin-left: 27.3em;">        <a href="#Page_316">316</a></span><br />
+<br />
+And Landor   <span style="margin-left: 25.9em;">               <a href="#Page_316">316</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Mr. Lowell   <span style="margin-left: 26.3em;">       <a href="#Page_316">316</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Description of his library   <span style="margin-left: 21.4em;"> <a href="#Page_317">317</a></span><br />
+<br />
+A word or two about his verses <span style="margin-left: 18.6em;">  <a href="#Page_319">319</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 24em;"><a href="#III"><b>III.</b></a></span><br />
+<br />
+Hawthorne    <span style="margin-left: 26.3em;">          <a href="#Page_322">322</a></span><br />
+<br />
+And Carlyle    <span style="margin-left: 25.9em;">   <a href="#Page_323">323</a></span><br />
+<br />
+The friends of Universal Progress in 1840  <span style="margin-left: 14.9em;">   <a href="#Page_323">323</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Bossuet   <span style="margin-left: 27.5em;">    <a href="#Page_324">324</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Remarks on New England    <span style="margin-left: 20.6em;">      <a href="#Page_325">325</a></span><br />
+<br />
+One of the few moral reformers <span style="margin-left: 18.7em;">       <a href="#Page_327">327</a></span><br />
+<br />
+
+Essays on 'Domestic Life,' on 'Behaviour,' and on<br />
+'Manners'     <span style="margin-left: 26.9em;">                   <a href="#Page_329">329</a></span><br />
+
+<br />
+Compared to Franklin and Chesterfield <span style="margin-left: 15.9em;">       <a href="#Page_330">330</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Is for faith before works   <span style="margin-left: 21.5em;">     <a href="#Page_333">333</a></span><br />
+<br />
+A systematic reasoner   <span style="margin-left: 22.4em;">     <a href="#Page_335">335</a></span><br />
+<br />
+The Emersonian faith abundantly justified   <span style="margin-left: 15.4em;">    <a href="#Page_337">337</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Carlyle's letter to (June 4, 1871)   <span style="margin-left: 18.5em;">      <a href="#Page_337">337</a></span><br />
+<br />
+One remarkable result of his idealism   <span style="margin-left: 16.8em;">    <a href="#Page_341">341</a></span><br />
+<br />
+On Death and Sin    <span style="margin-left: 23.8em;">  <a href="#Page_342">342</a>, <a href="#Page_344">344</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Conclusion   <span style="margin-left: 26.4em;">  <a href="#Page_346">346</a></span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>EMERSON.</h2>
+
+
+<p>A great interpreter of life ought not himself to need interpretation,
+least of all can he need it for contemporaries. When time has wrought
+changes of fashion, mental and social, the critic serves a useful turn
+in giving to a poet or a teacher his true place, and in recovering ideas
+and points of view that are worth preserving. Interpretation of this
+kind Emerson cannot require. His books are no palimpsest, 'the prophet's
+holograph, defiled, erased, and covered by a monk's.' What he has
+written is fresh, legible, and in full conformity with the manners and
+the diction of the day, and those who are unable to understand him
+without gloss and comment are in fact not prepared to understand what it
+is that the original has to say. Scarcely any literature is so entirely
+unprofitable as the so-called criticism that overlays a pithy text with
+a windy sermon. For our time at least Emerson may best be left to be his
+own expositor.</p>
+
+<p>Nor is Emerson, either, in the case of those whom the world has failed
+to recognise, and whom therefore it is the business of the critic to
+make known and to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span> define. It is too soon to say in what particular
+niche among the teachers of the race posterity will place him; enough
+that in our own generation he has already been accepted as one of the
+wise masters, who, being called to high thinking for generous ends, did
+not fall below his vocation, but, steadfastly pursuing the pure search
+for truth, without propounding a system or founding a school or
+cumbering himself overmuch about applications, lived the life of the
+spirit, and breathed into other men a strong desire after the right
+governance of the soul. All this is generally realised and understood,
+and men may now be left to find their way to the Emersonian doctrine
+without the critic's prompting. Though it is only the other day that
+Emerson walked the earth and was alive and among us, he is already one
+of the privileged few whom the reader approaches in the mood of settled
+respect, and whose names have surrounded themselves with an atmosphere
+of religion.</p>
+
+<p>It is not particularly profitable, again, to seek for Emerson one of the
+labels out of the philosophic handbooks. Was he the prince of
+Transcendentalists, or the prince of Idealists? Are we to look for the
+sources of his thought in Kant or Jacobi, in Fichte or Schelling? How
+does he stand towards Parmenides and Zeno, the Egotheism of the Sufis,
+or the position of the Megareans? Shall we put him on the shelf with the
+Stoics or the Mystics, with Quietist, Pantheist, Determinist? If life
+were long, it might be worth while to trace Emerson's affinities with
+the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span> philosophic schools; to collect and infer his answers to the
+everlasting problems of psychology and metaphysics; to extract a set of
+coherent and reasoned opinions about knowledge and faculty, experience
+and consciousness, truth and necessity, the absolute and the relative.
+But such inquiries would only take us the further away from the essence
+and vitality of Emerson's mind and teaching. In philosophy proper
+Emerson made no contribution of his own, but accepted, apparently
+without much examination of the other side, from Coleridge after Kant,
+the intuitive, <i>&agrave; priori</i> and realist theory respecting the sources of
+human knowledge, and the objects that are within the cognisance of the
+human faculties. This was his starting-point, and within its own sphere
+of thought he cannot be said to have carried it any further. What he did
+was to light up these doctrines with the rays of ethical and poetic
+imagination. As it has been justly put, though Emersonian
+transcendentalism is usually spoken of as a philosophy, it is more
+justly regarded as a gospel.<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> But before dwelling more on this, let us
+look into the record of his life, of which we may say in all truth that
+no purer, simpler, and more harmonious story can be found in the annals
+of far-shining men.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="I" id="I"></a>I.</h2>
+
+
+<p>Ralph Waldo Emerson was born at Boston, May 25, 1803. He was of an
+ancient and honourable English stock, who had transplanted themselves,
+on one side from Cheshire and Bedfordshire, and on the other from Durham
+and York, a hundred and seventy years before. For seven or eight
+generations in a direct and unbroken line his forefathers had been
+preachers and divines, not without eminence in the Puritan tradition of
+New England. His second name came into the family with Rebecca Waldo,
+with whom at the end of the seventeenth century one Edward Emerson had
+intermarried, and whose family had fled from the Waldensian valleys and
+that slaughter of the saints which Milton called on Heaven to avenge.
+Every tributary, then, that made Emerson what he was, flowed not only
+from Protestantism, but from 'the Protestantism of the Protestant
+religion.' When we are told that Puritanism inexorably locked up the
+intelligence of its votaries in a dark and straitened chamber, it is
+worthy to be remembered that the genial, open, lucid, and most
+comprehensive mind of Emerson was the ripened product of a genealogical
+tree that at every stage of its growth had been vivified by Puritan sap.</p>
+
+<p>Not many years after his birth, Emerson's mother was left a widow with
+narrow means, and he underwent the wholesome training of frugality in
+youth. When the time came, he was sent to Harvard. When<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span> Clough visited
+America a generation later, the collegiate training does not appear to
+have struck him very favourably. 'They learn French and history and
+German, and a great many more things than in England, but only
+imperfectly.' This was said from the standard of Rugby and Balliol, and
+the method that Clough calls imperfect had merits of its own. The pupil
+lost much in a curriculum that had a certain rawness about it, compared
+with the traditional culture that was at that moment (1820) just
+beginning to acquire a fresh hold within the old gray quadrangles of
+Oxford. On the other hand, the training at Harvard struck fewer of those
+superfluous roots in the mind, which are only planted that they may be
+presently cast out again with infinite distraction and waste.</p>
+
+<p>When his schooling was over, Emerson began to prepare himself for the
+ministrations of the pulpit, and in 1826 and 1827 he preached in divers
+places. Two years later he was ordained, and undertook the charge of an
+important Unitarian Church in Boston. It was not very long before the
+strain of forms, comparatively moderate as it was in the Unitarian body,
+became too heavy to be borne. Emerson found that he could no longer
+accept the usual view of the Communion Service, even in its least
+sacramental interpretation. To him the rite was purely spiritual in
+origin and intent, and at the best only to be retained as a
+commemoration. The whole world, he said, had been full of idols and
+ordinances and forms,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span> when 'the Almighty God was pleased to qualify and
+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&mdash;not names but righteousness and love&mdash;are enjoined?'</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span>
+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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span> have converse with all three, and he has told the world how
+these illustrious men in their several fashions and degrees impressed
+him.<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> It was Carlyle who struck him most. 'Many a time upon the sea,
+in my homeward voyage, I remembered with joy the favoured condition of
+my lonely philosopher,' cherishing visions more than divine 'in his
+stern and blessed solitude.' So Carlyle, with no less cordiality,
+declares that among the figures that he could recollect as visiting his
+Nithsdale hermitage&mdash;'all like Apparitions now, bringing with them airs
+from Heaven, or the blasts from the other region, there is not one of a
+more undoubtedly supernal character than yourself; so pure and still,
+with intents so charitable; and then vanishing too so soon into the
+azure Inane, as an Apparition should.'</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>In external incident Emerson's life was uneventful. Nothing could be
+simpler, of more perfect unity, or more free from disturbing episodes
+that leaves scars on men. In 1834 he settled in old Concord, the home of
+his ancestors, then in its third century. 'Concord is very bare,' wrote
+Clough, who made some sojourn there in 1852, 'and so is the country in
+general; it is a small sort of village, almost entirely of wood houses,
+painted white, with Venetian blinds, green outside, with two white
+wooden churches. There are some American elms of a weeping kind, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span>
+sycamores, i.e. planes; but the wood is mostly pine&mdash;white pine and
+yellow pine&mdash;somewhat scrubby, occupying the tops of the low banks, and
+marshy hay-land between, very brown now. A little brook runs through to
+the Concord River.'<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> The brook flowed across the few acres that were
+Emerson's first modest homestead. 'The whole external appearance of the
+place,' says one who visited him, 'suggests old-fashioned comfort and
+hospitality. Within the house the flavour of antiquity is still more
+noticeable. Old pictures look down from the walls; quaint blue-and-white
+china holds the simple dinner; old furniture brings to mind the
+generations of the past. At the right as you enter is Mr. Emerson's
+library, a large square room, plainly furnished, but made pleasant by
+pictures and sunshine. The homely shelves that line the walls are well
+filled with books. There is a lack of showy covers or rich bindings, and
+each volume seems to have soberly grown old in constant service. Mr.
+Emerson's study is a quiet room upstairs.'</p>
+
+
+
+<p>Fate did not spare him the strokes of the common lot. His first wife
+died after three short years of wedded happiness. He lost a little son,
+who was the light of his eyes. But others were born to him, and in all
+the relations and circumstances of domestic life he was one of the best
+and most beloved of men. He long carried in his mind the picture of
+Carlyle's life at Craigenputtock as the ideal for the sage, but his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span> own
+choice was far wiser and happier, 'not wholly in the busy world, nor
+quite beyond it.'</p>
+
+<p>'Besides my house,' he told Carlyle in 1838, 'I have, I believe, 22,000
+dollars, whose income in ordinary years is six per cent. I have no other
+tithe or glebe except the income of my winter lectures, which was last
+winter 800 dollars. Well, with this income, here at home, I am a rich
+man. I stay at home and go abroad at my own instance, I have food,
+warmth, leisure, books, friends. Go away from home, I am rich no longer.
+I never have a dollar to spend on a fancy. As no wise man, I suppose,
+ever was rich in the sense of <i>freedom to spend</i>, because of the
+inundation of claims, so neither am I, who am not wise. But at home I am
+rich&mdash;rich enough for ten brothers. My wife Lidian is an incarnation of
+Christianity,&mdash;I call her Asia,&mdash;and keeps my philosophy from
+Antinomianism; my mother, whitest, mildest, most conservative of ladies,
+whose only exception to her universal preference for old things is her
+son; my boy, a piece of love and sunshine, well worth my watching from
+morning to night;&mdash;these, and three domestic women, who cook and sew and
+run for us, make all my household. Here I sit and read and write, with
+very little system, and, as far as regards composition, with the most
+fragmentary result: paragraphs incompressible, each sentence an
+infinitely repellent particle.</p>
+
+<p>'In summer, with the aid of a neighbour, I manage my garden; and a week
+ago I set out on the west<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span> side of my house forty young pine trees to
+protect me or my son from the wind of January. The ornament of the place
+is the occasional presence of some ten or twelve persons, good and wise,
+who visit us in the course of the year.'</p>
+
+<p>As time went on he was able to buy himself 'a new plaything'&mdash;a piece of
+woodland, of more than forty acres, on the border of a little lake half
+a mile wide or more, called Walden Pond. 'In these May days,' he told
+Carlyle, then passionately struggling with his <i>Cromwell</i>, with the
+slums of Chelsea at his back, 'when maples, poplars, oaks, birches,
+walnut, and pine, are in their spring glory, I go thither every
+afternoon, and cut with my hatchet an Indian path through the thicket,
+all along the bold shore, and open the finest pictures' (1845).</p>
+
+<p>He loved to write at 'large leisure in noble mornings, opened by prayer
+or by readings of Plato, or whatsoever else is dearest to the Morning
+Muse.' Yet he could not wholly escape the recluse's malady. He confesses
+that he sometimes craves 'that stimulation which every capricious,
+languid, and languescent study needs.' Carlyle's potent concentration
+stirs his envy. The work of the garden and the orchard he found very
+fascinating, eating up days and weeks; 'nay, a brave scholar should shun
+it like gambling, and take refuge in cities and hotels from these
+pernicious enchantments.'</p>
+
+<p>In the doings of his neighbourhood he bore his part; he took a manly
+interest in civil affairs, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span> was sensible, shrewd, and helpful in
+matters of practical judgment. Pilgrims, sane and insane, the beardless
+and the gray-headed, flocked to his door, far beyond the dozen persons
+good and wise whom he had mentioned to Carlyle. 'Uncertain, troubled,
+earnest wanderers through the midnight of the moral world beheld his
+intellectual fire as a beacon burning on a hill-top, and climbing the
+difficult ascent, looked forth into the surrounding obscurity more
+hopefully than hitherto' (<i>Hawthorne</i>). To the most intractable of
+Transcendental bores, worst species of the genus, he was never
+impatient, nor denied himself; nor did he ever refuse counsel where the
+case was not yet beyond hope. Hawthorne was for a time his neighbour
+(1842-45). 'It was good,' says Hawthorne, 'to meet him in the
+wood-paths, or sometimes in our avenue, with that pure intellectual
+gleam diffused about his presence like the garment of a shining one; and
+he so quiet, so simple, so without pretension, encountering each man
+alive as if expecting to receive more than he could impart.'</p>
+
+<p>The most remarkable of all his neighbours was Thoreau, who for a couple
+of years lived in a hut which he had built for himself on the shore of
+Walden Pond. If he had not written some things with a considerable charm
+of style, Thoreau might have been wisely neglected as one of the crazy.
+But Emerson was struck by the originality of his life, and thought it
+well in time to edit the writings of one 'who was bred to no profession;
+never married; lived alone; never<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span> went to Church; never voted; refused
+to pay a tax to the State; ate no flesh, drank no wine, never knew the
+use of tobacco; had no temptations to fight against, no appetites, no
+passions, refused all invitations, preferred a good Indian to highly
+cultivated people, and said he would rather go to Oregon than to
+London.' The world has room for every type, so that it be not actively
+noxious, and this whimsical egotist may well have his place in the
+catalogue. He was, after all, in his life only a compendium, on a scale
+large enough to show their absurdity, of all those unsocial notions
+which Emerson in other manifestations found it needful to rebuke. Yet we
+may agree that many of his paradoxes strike home with Socratic force to
+the heart of a civilisation that wise men know to be too purely
+material, too artificial, and too capriciously diffused.</p>
+
+<p>Emerson himself was too sane ever to fall into the hermit's trap of
+banishment to the rocks and echoes. 'Solitude,' he said, 'is
+impracticable, and society fatal.' He steered his way as best he could
+between these two irreconcilable necessities. He had, as we have seen,
+the good sense to make for himself a calling which brought him into
+healthy contact with bodies of men, and made it essential that he should
+have his listeners in some degree in his mind, even when they were not
+actually present to the eye. As a preacher Emerson has been described as
+making a deep impression on susceptible hearers of a quiet mind, by 'the
+calm dignity of his bearing, the absence of all oratorical effort, and
+the singular simplicity and directness of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span> a manner free from the least
+trace of dogmatic assumption.' 'Not long before,' says this witness, 'I
+had listened to a wonderful sermon by Chalmers, whose force and energy,
+and vehement but rather turgid eloquence, carried for the moment all
+before him&mdash;his audience becoming like clay in the hands of the potter.
+But I must confess that the pregnant thoughts and serene self-possession
+of the young Boston minister had a greater charm for me than all the
+rhetorical splendours of Chalmers' (<i>Ireland</i>, 141).</p>
+
+<p>At the lecturer's desk the same attraction made itself still more
+effectually felt. 'I have heard some great speakers and some
+accomplished orators,' Mr. Lowell says, 'but never any that so moved and
+persuaded men as he. There is a kind of undertone in that rich barytone
+of his that sweeps our minds from their foothold into deep waters with a
+drift that we cannot and would not resist. Search for his eloquence in
+his books and you will perchance miss it, but meanwhile you will find
+that it has kindled all your thoughts.' The same effect was felt in its
+degree wherever he went, and he took pains not to miss it. He had made a
+study of his art, and was so skilful in his mastery of it that it seemed
+as if anybody might do all that he did and do it as well&mdash;if only a
+hundred failures had not proved the mistake.</p>
+
+<p>In 1838 Emerson delivered an address in the Divinity School of Harvard,
+which produced a gusty shower of articles, sermons, and pamphlets, and
+raised him without will or further act of his to the high<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span> place of the
+heresiarch. With admirable singleness of mind, he held modestly aloof.
+'There is no scholar,' he wrote to a friend, 'less willing or less able
+to be a polemic. I could not give account of myself if challenged. I
+delight in telling what I think, but if you ask me how I dare say so, or
+why it is so, I am the most helpless of men,' The year before, his
+oration on the American Scholar had filled Carlyle with delight. It was
+the first clear utterance, after long decades of years, in which he had
+'heard nothing but infinite jangling and jabbering, and inarticulate
+twittering and screeching.' Then Carlyle enjoined on his American friend
+for rule of life, 'Give no ear to any man's praise or censure; know that
+that is <i>not</i> it; on the one side is as Heaven, if you have strength to
+keep silent and climb unseen; yet on the other side, yawning always at
+one's right hand and one's left, is the frightfullest Abyss and
+Pandemonium' (Dec. 8, 1837). Emerson's temperament and his whole method
+made the warning needless, and, as before, while 'vociferous platitude
+was dinning his ears on all sides,' a whole world of thought was
+'silently building itself in these calm depths.' But what would those
+two divinities of his, Plato and Socrates, have said of a man who 'could
+not give an account of himself if challenged'? Assuredly not every one
+who saith Plato, Plato, is admitted to that ideal kingdom.</p>
+
+<p>It was soon after this that the <i>Dial</i> was projected. It had its origin
+in the Transcendental Club, a little<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span> knot of speculative students at
+Boston, who met four or five times a year at one another's houses to
+discuss questions mainly theological, from more liberal points of view
+than was at that time common, 'the air then in America getting a little
+too close and stagnant.' The Club was first formed in 1836. The <i>Dial</i>
+appeared in 1840, and went on for four years at quarterly intervals.
+Emerson was a constant contributor, and for the last half of its
+existence he acted as editor. 'I submitted,' he told Carlyle, 'to what
+seemed a necessity of petty literary patriotism&mdash;I know not what else to
+call it&mdash;and took charge of our thankless little <i>Dial</i> here, without
+subscribers enough to pay even a publisher, much less any labourer; it
+has no penny for editor or contributor, nothing but abuse in the
+newspapers, or, at best, silence; but it serves as a sort of portfolio,
+to carry about a few poems or sentences which would otherwise be
+transcribed or circulated, and we always are waiting until somebody
+shall come and make it good. But I took it, and it took me and a great
+deal of good time to a small purpose' (July 1, 1842). On the whole one
+must agree that it was to small purpose. Emerson's name has reflected
+lustre on the <i>Dial</i>, but when his contributions are taken out, and,
+say, half a dozen besides, the residuum is in the main very poor stuff,
+and some of it has a droll resemblance to the talk between Mrs. Hominy
+and the Literary Ladies and the Honourable Elijah Pogram. Margaret
+Fuller&mdash;the Miranda, Zenobia, Hypatia, Minerva of her time, and a truly
+remark<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span>able figure in the gallery of wonderful women&mdash;edited it for two
+years, and contributed many a vivid, dashing, exuberant, ebullient page.
+Her criticism of Goethe, for example, contains no final or valid word,
+but it is fresh, cordial, and frank, and no other prose contributor,
+again saving the one great name, has anything to say that is so
+readable. Nearly all the rest is extinct, and the <i>Dial</i> now finds
+itself far away from the sunshine of human interest.</p>
+
+<p>In 1841 the first series of Emerson's Essays was published, and three
+years later the second. The Poems were first collected in 1847, but the
+final version was not made until 1876. In 1847 Emerson paid his second
+visit to England, and delivered his lectures on Representative Men,
+collected and published in 1850. The books are said to have had a very
+slow sale, but the essays and lectures published in 1860, with the
+general title of <i>The Conduct of Life</i>, started with a sale of 2,500
+copies, though that volume has never been considered by the Emersonian
+adept to contain most of the pure milk of the Word.</p>
+
+<p>Then came that great event in the history of men and institutions, the
+Civil War. We look with anxiety for the part played by the serene
+thinker when the hour had struck for violent and heroic action. Emerson
+had hitherto been a Free Soiler; he had opposed the extension of
+slavery; and he favoured its compulsory extinction, with compensation on
+the plan of our own policy in the West Indies. He had never joined the
+active Abolitionists, nor did he see 'that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span> there was any particular
+thing for him to do in it then.' 'Though I sometimes accept a popular
+call, and preach on Temperance or the Abolition of Slavery, I am sure to
+feel, before I have done with it, what an intrusion it is into another
+sphere, and so much loss of virtue in my own' (<i>To Carlyle</i>, 1844). But
+he missed no occasion of showing that in conviction and aim he was with
+good men. The infirmities of fanatics never hid from him either the
+transcendent purity of their motives or the grandeur of their cause.
+This is ever the test of the scholar: whether he allows intellectual
+fastidiousness to stand between him and the great issues of his time.
+'Cannot the English,' he cried out to Carlyle, 'leave cavilling at petty
+failures and bad manners and at the dunce part, and leap to the
+suggestions and finger-pointings of the gods, which, above the
+understanding, feed the hopes and guide the wills of men?' These
+finger-pointings Emerson did not mistake. He spoke up for Garrison. John
+Brown was several times in Concord, and found a hearty welcome in
+Emerson's house. When Brown made his raid at Harper's Ferry, and the
+crisis became gradually sharper, Emerson felt that the time had come,
+and his voice was raised in clear tones. After the sword is drawn, it is
+deeds not words that interest and decide; but whenever the word of the
+student was needed Emerson was ready to give the highest expression to
+all that was best in his countrymen's mood during that greatest ordeal
+of our time. The inward regeneration of the individual had ever been the
+key<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span> to his teaching, and this teaching had been one of the forces that,
+like central fire in men's minds, nourished the heroism of the North in
+its immortal battle.</p>
+
+<p>The exaltation of national character produced by the Civil War opened
+new and wider acceptance for a great moral and spiritual teacher, and
+from the close of the war until his death in 1882, Emerson's ascendency
+within his own sphere of action was complete, and the public recognition
+of him universal. Of story, there is no more to tell. He pursued his old
+way of reading, meditating, conversing, and public lecturing, almost to
+the end. The afternoon of his life was cloudless as the earlier day, and
+the shades of twilight fell in unbroken serenity. In his last years
+there was a partial failure of his memory, and more than one pathetic
+story is told of this tranquil and gradual eclipse. But 'to the last,
+even when the events of yesterday were occasionally obscured, his memory
+of the remote past was unclouded; he would tell about the friends of his
+early and middle life with unbroken vigour.' So, tended in his home by
+warm filial devotion, and surrounded by the reverent kindness of his
+village neighbours, this wise and benign man slowly passed away (April
+27, 1882).<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a></p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="II" id="II"></a>II.</h2>
+
+
+<p>It cannot be truly said that Emerson is one of the writers who make
+their way more easily into our minds by virtue of style. That his
+writing has quality and flavour none but a pure pedant would deny. His
+more fervent votaries, however, provoke us with a challenge that goes
+far beyond this. They declare that the finish, charm, and beauty of the
+writing are as worthy of remark as the truth and depth of the thought.
+It is even 'unmatchable and radiant,' says one. Such exaggerations can
+have no reference to any accepted standard. It would in truth, have been
+a marvel if Emerson had excelled in the virtues of the written page, for
+most of his published work was originally composed and used for the
+platform. Everybody knows how different are the speaker's devices for
+gaining possession of his audience, from the writer's means of winning,
+persuading, and impressing the attention of his reader. The key to the
+difference may be that in the speech the personality of the orator
+before our eyes gives of itself that oneness and continuity of
+communication, which the writer has to seek in the orderly sequence and
+array of marshalled<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span> sentence and well-sustained period. One of the
+traits that every critic notes in Emerson's writing, is that it is so
+abrupt, so sudden in its transitions, so discontinuous, so
+inconsecutive. Dislike of a sentence that drags made him unconscious of
+the quality, that French critics name <i>coulant</i>. Everything is thrown in
+just as it comes, and sometimes the pell-mell is enough to persuade us
+that Pope did not exaggerate when he said that no one qualification is
+so likely to make a good writer, as the power of rejecting his own
+thoughts.</p>
+
+<p>His manner as a lecturer, says Dr. Holmes, was an illustration of his
+way of thinking. 'He would lose his place just as his mind would drop
+its thought and pick up another, twentieth cousin or no relation at all
+to it.' The same manner, whether we liken it to mosaic or to
+kaleidoscope, marks his writing. It makes him hard to follow, oracular,
+and enigmatical. 'Can you tell me,' asked one of his neighbour, while
+Emerson was lecturing, 'what connection there is between that last
+sentence and the one that went before, and what connection it all has
+with Plato?' 'None, my friend, save in God!' This is excellent in a
+seer, but less so in the writer.</p>
+
+<p>Apart from his difficult staccato, Emerson is not free from secondary
+faults. He uses words that are not only odd, but vicious in
+construction; he is not always grammatically correct; he is sometimes
+oblique, and he is often clumsy; and there is a visible feeling after
+epigrams that do not always come. When people say<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span> that Emerson's style
+must be good and admirable because it fits his thought, they forget that
+though it is well that a robe should fit, there is still something to be
+said about its cut and fashion.</p>
+
+<p>No doubt, to borrow Carlyle's expression, 'the talent is not the chief
+question here: the idea&mdash;that is the chief question.' We do not profess
+to be of those to whom mere style is as dear as it was to Plutarch; of
+him it was said that he would have made Pompey win the battle of
+Pharsalia, if it could have given a better turn to a phrase. It would
+not be worth while to speak of form in a thinker to whom our debt is so
+large for his matter, if there were not so much bad literary imitation
+of Emerson. Dr. Holmes mournfully admits that 'one who talks like
+Emerson or like Carlyle soon finds himself surrounded by a crowd of
+walking phonographs, who mechanically reproduce his mental and oral
+accents. Emerson was before long talking in the midst of a babbling
+Simonetta of echoes.' Inferior writers have copied the tones of the
+oracle without first making sure of the inspiration. They forget that a
+platitude is not turned into a profundity by being dressed up as a
+conundrum. Pithiness in him dwindles into tenuity in them; honest
+discontinuity in the master is made an excuse for finical incoherencies
+in the disciples; the quaint, ingenious, and unexpected collocations of
+the original degenerate in the imitators into a trick of unmeaning
+surprise and vapid antithesis; and his pregnant sententiousness set the
+fashion of a sententiousness that is not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span> fertility but only hydropsy.
+This curious infection, which has spread into divers forms of American
+literature that are far removed from philosophy, would have been
+impossible if the teacher had been as perfect in expression as he was
+pure, diligent, and harmonious in his thinking.</p>
+
+<p>Yet, as happens to all fine minds, there came to Emerson ways of
+expression deeply marked with character. On every page there is set the
+strong stamp of sincerity, and the attraction of a certain artlessness;
+the most awkward sentence rings true; and there is often a pure and
+simple note that touches us more than if it were the perfection of
+elaborated melody. The uncouth procession of the periods discloses the
+travail of the thought, and that too is a kind of eloquence. An honest
+reader easily forgives the rude jolt or unexpected start, when it shows
+a thinker faithfully working his way along arduous and unworn tracks.
+Even at the roughest, Emerson often interjects a delightful cadence. As
+he says of Landor, his sentences are cubes which will stand firm, place
+them how or where you will. He criticised Swedenborg for being
+superfluously explanatory, and having an exaggerated feeling of the
+ignorance of men. 'Men take truths of this nature,' said Emerson, 'very
+fast;' and his own style does no doubt very boldly take this capacity
+for granted in us. In 'choice and pith of diction,' again, of which Mr.
+Lowell speaks, he hits the mark with a felicity that is almost his own
+in this generation. He is terse, concentrated, and free<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span> from the
+important blunder of mistaking intellectual dawdling for meditation. Nor
+in fine does his abruptness ever impede a true urbanity. The accent is
+homely and the apparel plain, but his bearing has a friendliness, a
+courtesy, a hospitable humanity, which goes nearer to our hearts than
+either literary decoration or rhetorical unction. That modest and
+lenient fellow-feeling which gave such charm to his companionship
+breathes in his gravest writing, and prevents us from finding any page
+of it cold or hard or dry.</p>
+
+<p>Though Emerson was always urgent for 'the soul of the world, clean from
+all vestige of tradition,' yet his work is full of literature. He at
+least lends no support to the comforting fallacy of the indolent, that
+originating power does not go with assimilating power. Few thinkers on
+his level display such breadth of literary reference. Unlike Wordsworth,
+who was content with a few tattered volumes on a kitchen shelf, Emerson
+worked among books. When he was a boy he found a volume of Montaigne,
+and he never forgot the delight and wonder in which he lived with it.
+His library is described as filled with well-selected authors, with
+curious works from the eastern world, with many editions in both Greek
+and English of his favourite Plato; while portraits of Shakespeare,
+Montaigne, Goethe, Dante, looked down upon him from the walls. Produce a
+volume of Plato or of Shakespeare, he says somewhere, or '<i>only remind
+us of their names</i>,' and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span> instantly we come into a feeling of longevity.
+That is the scholar's speech. Opening a single essay at random, we find
+in it citations from Montesquieu, Schiller, Milton, Herodotus, Shelley,
+Plutarch, Franklin, Bacon, Van Helmont, Goethe. So little does Emerson
+lend himself to the idle vanity of seeking all the treasures of wisdom
+in his own head, or neglecting the hoarded authority of the ages. It is
+true that he held the unholy opinion that a translation is as good as
+the original, or better. Nor need we suppose that he knew that pious
+sensation of the book-lover, the feel of a library; that he had any of
+the collector's amiable foolishness about rare editions; or that he
+nourished festive thoughts of 'that company of honest old fellows in
+their leathern jackets in his study,' as comrades in a sober old-world
+conviviality. His books were for spiritual use, like maps and charts of
+the mind of man, and not much for 'excellence of divertisement.' He had
+the gift of bringing his reading to bear easily upon the tenor of his
+musings, and knew how to use books as an aid to thinking, instead of
+letting them take the edge off thought. There was assuredly nothing of
+the compiler or the erudite collegian in him. It is a graver defect that
+he introduces the great names of literature without regard for true
+historical perspective in their place, either in relation to one
+another, or to the special phases of social change and shifting time.
+Still let his admirers not forget that Emerson was in his own way
+Scholar no less than Sage.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>A word or two must be said of Emerson's verses. He disclaimed, for his
+own part, any belief that they were poems. Enthusiasts, however, have
+been found to declare that Emerson 'moves more constantly than any
+recent poet in the atmosphere of poesy. Since Milton and Spenser no
+man&mdash;not even Goethe&mdash;has equalled Emerson in this trait.' <i>The
+Problem</i>, according to another, 'is wholly unique, and transcends all
+contemporary verse in grandeur of style.' Such poetry, they say, is like
+Westminster Abbey, 'though the Abbey is inferior in boldness.' Yet,
+strangely enough, while Emerson's poetic form is symbolised by the
+flowing lines of Gothic architecture, it is also 'akin to Doric
+severity.' With all the good will in the world, I do not find myself
+able to rise to these heights; in fact, they rather seem to deserve
+Wordsworth's description, as mere obliquities of admiration.</p>
+
+<p>Taken as a whole, Emerson's poetry is of that kind which springs, not
+from excitement of passion or feeling, but from an intellectual demand
+for intense and sublimated expression. We see the step that lifts him
+straight from prose to verse, and that step is the shortest possible.
+The flight is awkward and even uncouth, as if nature had intended feet
+rather than wings. It is hard to feel of Emerson, any more than
+Wordsworth could feel of Goethe, that his poetry is inevitable. The
+measure, the colour, the imaginative figures, are the product of search,
+not of spontaneous movements of sensation and reflection combining in a
+harmony that is delightful to the ear. They are the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span> outcome of a
+discontent with prose, not of that high-strung sensibility which compels
+the true poet into verse. This must not be said without exception. <i>The
+Threnody</i>, written after the death of a deeply loved child, is a
+beautiful and impressive lament. Pieces like <i>Musquetaquid</i>, the
+<i>Adirondacs</i>, the <i>Snowstorm</i>, <i>The Humble-Bee</i>, are pretty and pleasant
+bits of pastoral. In all we feel the pure breath of nature, and</p>
+
+<p style="margin-left: 12em;">
+<span style="margin-left: 9em;">The primal mind,</span><br />
+That flows in streams, that breathes in wind.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>There is a certain charm of <i>naivet&eacute;</i>, that recalls the unvarnished
+simplicity of the Italian painters before Raphael. But who shall say
+that he discovers that 'spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling,' which
+a great poet has made the fundamental element of poetry? There are too
+few melodious progressions; the melting of the thought with natural
+images and with human feeling is incomplete; we miss the charm of
+perfect assimilation, fusion, and incorporation; and in the midst of all
+the vigour and courage of his work, Emerson has almost forgotten that it
+is part of the poet's business to give pleasure. It is true that
+pleasure is sometimes undoubtedly to be had from verse that is not above
+mediocrity, and Wordsworth once designed to write an essay examining why
+bad poetry pleases. Poetry that pleases may be bad, but it is equally
+true that no poetry which fails to please can be really good. Some one
+says that gems of expression make Emerson's essays oracular and his
+verse<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span> prophetic. But, to borrow Horace's well-known phrase, 'tis not
+enough that poems should be sublime; <i>dulcia sunto</i>,&mdash;they must be
+touching and sympathetic. Only a bold critic will say that this is a
+mark of Emerson's poems. They are too naked, unrelated, and cosmic; too
+little clad with the vesture of human associations. Light and shade do
+not alternate in winning and rich relief, and as Carlyle found it, the
+radiance is 'thin piercing,' leaving none of the sweet and dim recesses
+so dear to the lover of nature. We may, however, well be content to
+leave a man of Emerson's calibre to choose his own exercises. It is best
+to suppose that he knew what he was about when he wandered into the
+fairyland of verse, and that in such moments he found nothing better to
+his hand. Yet if we are bidden to place him among the poets, it is
+enough to open Keats at the <i>Ode to a Nightingale</i>, or Shelley at <i>The
+Cloud</i>, the <i>Skylark</i>, or the <i>Sensitive Plant</i>, or Wordsworth at
+<i>Tintern Abbey</i>, or Goethe at <i>Das G&ouml;ttliche</i>, or Victor Hugo in the
+<i>Contemplations</i>. Then in spite of occasional formality of rhythm and
+artifice in ornament, we cannot choose but perceive how tuneful is their
+music, how opulent the resources of their imagination, how various,
+subtle, and penetrating their affinity for the fortunes and sympathies
+of men, and next how modest a portion of all these rare and exquisite
+qualifications reveals itself in the verse of Emerson.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[Pg 322]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="III" id="III"></a>III.</h2>
+
+
+<p>Few minds of the first order that have busied themselves in
+contemplating the march of human fortunes, have marched forward in a
+straight line of philosophic speculation unbroken to the end. Like
+Burke, like Coleridge, like Wordsworth, at a given point they have a
+return upon themselves. Having mastered the truths of one side, their
+eyes open to what is true on the other; the work of revolution finished
+or begun, they experience fatigue and reaction. In Hawthorne's romance,
+after Miles Coverdale had passed his spring and summer among the
+Utopians of Blithedale, he felt that the time had come when he must for
+sheer sanity's sake go and hold a little talk with the Conservatives,
+the merchants, the politicians, 'and all those respectable old
+blockheads, who still in this intangibility and mistiness of affairs
+kept a death-grip on one or two ideas which had not come into vogue
+since yesterday morning.' 'No sagacious man,' says Hawthorne, 'will long
+retain his sagacity if he lives exclusively among reformers and
+progressive people, without periodically returning into the settled
+system of things, to correct himself by a new observation from that old
+stand-point.' Yet good men rightly hoped that 'out of the very thoughts
+that were wildest and most destructive might grow a wisdom, holy, calm,
+and pure, and that should incarnate itself with the substance of a noble
+and happy life.' Now that we are able to look back on the crisis of the
+times that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[Pg 323]</a></span> Hawthorne describes, we perceive that it was as he expected,
+and that in the person of Emerson the ferment and dissolvency of thought
+worked itself out in a strain of wisdom of the highest and purest.</p>
+
+<p>In 1842 Emerson told Carlyle, in vindication of the <i>Dial</i> and its
+transcendentalisms, that if the direction of their speculations was as
+deplorable as Carlyle declared, it was yet a remarkable fact for history
+that all the bright young men and young women in New England, 'quite
+ignorant of each other, take the world so, and come and make confession
+to fathers and mothers&mdash;the boys, that they do not wish to go into
+trade; the girls, that they do not like morning calls and evening
+parties. They are all religious, but hate the churches; they reject all
+the ways of living of other men, but have none to offer in their stead.'</p>
+
+<p>It is worth while to transcribe from the <i>Dial</i> itself the scene at one
+of the many Bostonian Conventions of that date&mdash;the Friends of Universal
+Progress, in 1840:&mdash;'The composition of the Assembly was rich and
+various. The singularity and latitude of the summons drew together, from
+all parts of New England, and also from the Middle States, men of every
+shade of opinion, from the straightest orthodoxy to the wildest heresy,
+and many persons whose church was a church of one member only. A great
+variety of dialect and of costume was noticed; a great deal of
+confusion, eccentricity, and freak appeared, as well as of zeal and
+enthusiasm. If the Assembly was disorderly, it was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[Pg 324]</a></span> picturesque. Madmen,
+madwomen, men with beards, Dunkers, Muggletonians, Come-outers,
+Groaners, Agrarians, Seventh-day Baptists, Quakers, Abolitionists,
+Calvinists, Unitarians, and philosophers, all came successively to the
+top, and seized their moment, if not their <i>hour</i>, wherein to chide or
+pray or preach or protest. The faces were a study. The most daring
+innovators, and the champions-until-death of the old cause, sat side by
+side. The still living merit of the oldest New England families, glowing
+yet after several generations, encountered the founders of families,
+fresh merit emerging and expanding the brows to a new breadth, and
+lighting a clownish face with sacred fire. The Assembly was
+characterised by the predominance of a certain plain sylvan strength and
+earnestness' (<i>Dial</i>, iii. 101).</p>
+
+<p>If the shade of Bossuet could have looked down upon the scene, he would
+have found fresh material for the sarcasms which a hundred and fifty
+years before he had lavished on the Variations of the Protestant
+Churches. Yet this curious movement, bleak and squalid as it may seem to
+men nurtured in the venerable decorum of ecclesiastical tradition, was
+at bottom identical with the yearning for stronger spiritual emotions,
+and the cravings of religious zeal, that had in older times filled
+monasteries, manned the great orders, and sent wave upon wave of
+pilgrims and crusaders to holy places. 'It is really amazing,' as was
+said by Franklin or somebody else of his fashion of utilitarianism,
+'that one of the passions which it is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[Pg 325]</a></span> hardest to develop in man is the
+passion for his own material comfort and temporal well-being.'</p>
+
+<p>Emerson has put on record this mental intoxication of the progressive
+people around him, with a pungency that might satisfy the Philistines
+themselves.<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> From 1820 to 1844, he said, New England witnessed a
+general criticism and attack on institutions, and in all practical
+activities a gradual withdrawal of tender consciences from the social
+organisations. Calvinists and Quakers began to split into old school and
+new school. Goethe and the Germans became known. Swedenborg, in spite of
+his taint of craziness, by the mere prodigy of his speculations, began
+'to spread himself into the minds of thousands'&mdash;including in no
+unimportant degree the mind of Emerson himself.<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a> Literary criticism
+counted for something in the universal thaw, and even the genial
+humanity of Dickens helped to break up the indurations of old theology.
+Most powerful of all was the indirect influence of science. Geology
+disclosed law in an unsuspected region, and astronomy caused men to
+apprehend that 'as the earth is not the centre of the Universe, so it is
+not the special scene or stage on which the drama of divine justice is
+played before the assembled angels of heaven.'</p>
+
+<p>A temper of scrutiny and dissent broke out in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[Pg 326]</a></span> every direction. In
+almost every relation men and women asked themselves by what right
+Conformity levied its tax, and whether they were not false to their own
+consciences in paying it. 'What a fertility of projects for the
+salvation of the world! One apostle thought that all men should go to
+farming; and another thought that no man should buy or sell&mdash;that use of
+money was the cardinal evil; another thought the mischief was in our
+diet&mdash;that we eat and drink damnation. These made unleavened bread, and
+were foes to the death to fermentation. Others attacked the system of
+agriculture, the use of animal manures in farming, and the tyranny of
+man over brute instinct. These abuses polluted his food. The ox must be
+taken from the plough, and the horse from the cart; the hundred acres of
+the farm must be spaded, and the man must walk wherever boats and
+locomotives will not carry him.... Others assailed particular
+vocations.... Others attacked the institution of marriage as the
+fountain of social evils.... Who gave me the money with which I bought
+my coat? Why should professional labour and that of the counting-house
+be paid so disproportionately to the labour of the porter and the
+woodsawer? Am I not too protected a person? Is there not a wide
+disparity between the lot of me and the lot of thee, my poor brother, my
+poor sister?'</p>
+
+<p>One of Emerson's glories is, that while wise enough to discern the peril
+and folly of these excesses, he was under no temptation to fall back. It
+was giddy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[Pg 327]</a></span> work, but he kept his eye on the fixed stars. Certainly
+Emerson was not assailed by the stress of mighty and violent events, as
+Burke and Wordsworth were in some sense turned into reactionaries by the
+calamities of revolution in France. The 'distemper of enthusiasm,' as
+Shaftesbury would have called it, took a mild and harmless form in New
+England: there the work in hand was not the break-up of a social system,
+but only the mental evolution of new ideals, the struggle of an ethical
+revival, and the satisfaction of a livelier spirit of scruple. In face
+of all delirations, Emerson kept on his way of radiant sanity and
+perfect poise. Do not, he warned his enthusiasts, expend all energy on
+some accidental evil, and so lose sanity and power of benefit. '<i>It is
+of little moment that one or two or twenty errors of our social system
+be corrected, but of much that the man be in his senses.</i> Society gains
+nothing whilst a man, not himself renovated, attempts to renovate things
+around him; he has become tediously good in some particular, but
+negligent or narrow in the rest, and hypocrisy and vanity are often the
+disgusting result. It is handsomer to remain in the establishment,
+better than the establishment, and conduct that in the best manner, than
+to make a sally against evil by some single improvement, without
+supporting it by a total regeneration.'</p>
+
+<p>Emerson, then, is one of the few moral reformers whose mission lay in
+calming men rather than in rousing them, and in the inculcation of
+serenity rather than in the spread of excitement. Though he had been<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[Pg 328]</a></span>
+ardent in protest against the life conventional, as soon as the protest
+ran off into extravagance, instead of either following or withstanding
+it with rueful petulancies, he delicately and successfully turned a
+passing agitation into an enduring revival. The last password given by
+the dying Antonine to the officer of the watch was <i>&AElig;quanimitas</i>. In a
+brighter, wider, and more living sense than was possible even to the
+noblest in the middle of the second century, this, too, was the
+watchword of the Emersonian teaching. Instead of cultivating the
+tormenting and enfeebling spirit of scruple, instead of multiplying
+precepts, he bade men not to crush their souls out under the burden of
+Duty; they are to remember that a wise life is not wholly filled up by
+commandments to do and to abstain from doing. Hence, we have in Emerson
+the teaching of a vigorous morality without the formality of dogma and
+the deadly tedium of didactics. If not laughter, of which only
+Shakespeare among the immortals has a copious and unfailing spring,
+there is at least gaiety in every piece, and a cordial injunction to men
+to find joy in their existence to the full. Happiness is with him an aim
+that we are at liberty to seek directly and without periphrasis.
+Provided men do not lose their balance by immersing themselves in their
+pleasures, they are right, according to Emerson, in pursuing them. But
+joy is no neighbour to artificial ecstasy. What Emerson counsels the
+poet, he intended in its own way and degree for all men. The poet's
+habit of living, he says beautifully, should be set on a key so<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[Pg 329]</a></span> low
+that the commonest influences should delight him. 'That spirit which
+suffices quiet hearts, which seems to come forth to such from every dry
+knoll of sere grass, from every pine-stump and half-embedded stone on
+which the dull March sun shines, comes forth to the poor and hungry, and
+such as are of simple taste. If thou fill thy brain with Boston and New
+York, with fashion and covetousness, and wilt stimulate thy jaded senses
+with wine and French coffee, thou shalt find no radiance of wisdom in
+the lonely waste of the pinewoods' (ii. 328).</p>
+
+<p>It was perhaps the same necessity of having to guide men away from the
+danger of transcendental aberrations, while yet holding up lofty ideals
+of conduct, that made Emerson say something about many traits of conduct
+to which the ordinary high-flying moralist of the treatise or the pulpit
+seldom deigns to stoop. The essays on Domestic Life, on Behaviour, on
+Manners, are examples of the attention that Emerson paid to the right
+handling of the outer conditions of a wise and brave life. With him
+small circumstances are the occasions of great qualities. The parlour
+and the counting-house are as fit scenes for fortitude, self-control,
+considerateness, and vision, as the senate or the battlefield. He
+re-classifies the virtues. No modern, for example, has given so
+remarkable a place to Friendship among the sacred necessities of
+well-endowed character. Neither Plato nor Cicero, least of all Bacon,
+has risen to so noble and profound a conception of this most strangely<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[Pg 330]</a></span>
+commingled of all human affections. There is no modern thinker, again,
+who makes Beauty&mdash;all that is gracious, seemly, and becoming&mdash;so
+conspicuous and essential a part of life. It would be inexact to say
+that Emerson blended the beautiful with the precepts of duty or of
+prudence into one complex sentiment, as the Greeks did, but his theory
+of excellence might be better described than any other of modern times
+by the &#954;&#945;&#955;&#959;&#954;&#945;&#947;&#945;&#952;&#953;&#945;, the virtue of the true gentleman, as set
+down in Plato and Aristotle.</p>
+
+<p>So untrue is it that in his quality of Sage Emerson always haunted the
+perilous altitudes of Transcendentalism, 'seeing nothing under him but
+the everlasting snows of Himalaya, the Earth shrinking to a Planet, and
+the indigo Firmament sowing itself with daylight stars.' He never thinks
+it beneath his dignity to touch a point of minor morals, or to say a
+good word for what he somewhere calls subterranean prudence. Emerson
+values mundane circumspection as highly as Franklin, and gives to
+manners and rules of daily behaviour an importance that might have
+satisfied Chesterfield. In fact, the worldly and the selfish are
+mistaken when they assume that Common Sense is their special and
+exclusive portion. The small Transcendentalist goes in search of truth
+with the meshes of his net so large that he takes no fish. His
+landscapes are all horizon. It is only the great idealists, like
+Emerson, who take care not to miss the real.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[Pg 331]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The remedy for the break-down of the old churches would, in the mind of
+the egotist, have been to found a new one. But Emerson knew well before
+Carlyle told him, that 'no truly great man, from Jesus Christ downwards,
+ever founded a sect&mdash;I mean wilfully intended founding one.' Not only
+did he establish no sect, but he preached a doctrine that was positively
+incompatible with the erection of any sect upon its base. His whole hope
+for the world lies in the internal and independent resources of the
+individual. If mankind is to be raised to a higher plane of happiness
+and worth, it can only be by the resolution of each to live his own life
+with fidelity and courage. The spectacle of one liberated from the
+malign obstructions to free human character, is a stronger incentive to
+others than exhortation, admonition, or any sum of philanthropical
+association. If I, in my own person and daily walk, quietly resist
+heaviness of custom, coldness of hope, timidity of faith, then without
+wishing, contriving, or even knowing it, I am a light silently drawing
+as many as have vision and are fit to walk in the same path. Whether I
+do that or not, I am at least obeying the highest law of my own being.</p>
+
+<p>In the appeal to the individual to be true to himself, Emerson does not
+stand apart from other great moral reformers. His distinction lies in
+the peculiar direction that he gives to his appeal. All those
+regenerators of the individual, from Rousseau down to J.S. Mill, who
+derived their first principles, whether<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[Pg 332]</a></span> directly or indirectly, from
+Locke and the philosophy of sensation, experience, and acquisition,
+began operations with the will. They laid all their stress on the
+shaping of motives by education, institutions, and action, and placed
+virtue in deliberateness and in exercise. Emerson, on the contrary,
+coming from the intuitional camp, holds that our moral nature is
+vitiated by any interference of our will. Translated into the language
+of theology, his doctrine makes regeneration to be a result of grace,
+and the guide of conscience to be the indwelling light; though, unlike
+the theologians, he does not trace either of these mysterious gifts to
+the special choice and intervention of a personal Deity. Impulsive and
+spontaneous innocence is higher than the strength to conquer temptation.
+The natural motions of the soul are so much better than the voluntary
+ones. 'There is no such thing as manufacturing a strong will,' for all
+great force is real and elemental. In all this Emerson suffers from the
+limitations that are inseparable from pure spiritualism in all its
+forms. As if the spiritual constitution were ever independent of the
+material organisation bestowed upon the individual at the moment when he
+is conceived, or of the social conditions that close about him from the
+instant of his birth. The reaction, however, against what was
+superficial in the school of the eighteenth century went to its extreme
+length in Emerson, and blinded his eyes to the wisdom, the profundity,
+and the fruitfulness of their leading speculations. It is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[Pg 333]</a></span> enough for us
+to note the fact in passing, without plunging into contention on the
+merits. All thoughts are always ready, potentially if not actually. Each
+age selects and assimilates the philosophy that is most apt for its
+wants. Institutions needed regeneration in France, and so those thinkers
+came into vogue and power who laid most stress on the efficacy of good
+institutions. In Emerson's America, the fortunes of the country made
+external circumstances safe for a man, and his chance was assured; so a
+philosophy was welcomed which turned the individual inwards upon
+himself, and taught him to consider his own character and spiritual
+faculty as something higher than anything external could ever be.</p>
+
+<p>Again to make a use which is not uninstructive of the old tongue,
+Emerson is for faith before works. Nature, he says, will not have us
+fret and fume. She does not like our benevolences, our churches, our
+pauper-societies, much better than she likes our frauds and wars. They
+are but so many yokes to the neck. Our painful labours are unnecessary
+and fruitless. A higher law than that of our will regulates events. If
+we look wider, things are all alike: laws and creeds and modes of living
+are a travesty of truth. Only in our easy, simple, spontaneous action
+are we strong, and by contenting ourselves with obedience we become
+strong. Our real action is in our silent moments. Why should we be awed
+by the name of Action? 'Tis a trick of the senses.<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a></p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[Pg 334]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Justification by faith has had a savour of antinomianism and
+indifferency ever since the day when Saint Paul so emphatically denied
+that he made void the law through faith, and said of certain
+calumniators that their damnation was just. Emerson was open to the same
+charge, and he knew it. In a passage already quoted, Emerson says
+good-humouredly that his wife keeps his philosophy from running to
+antinomianism He could not mistake the tendency of saying that, if you
+look wider, things are all alike, and that we are in the grasp of a
+higher law than our own will. On that side he only paints over in
+rainbow colours the grim doctrine which the High Calvinist and the
+Materialistic Necessarian hold in common.</p>
+
+<p>All great minds perceive all things; the only difference lies in the
+order in which they shall choose to place them. Emerson, for good reason
+of his own, dwelt most on fate, character, and the unconscious and
+hidden sources, but he writes many a page of vigorous corrective. It is
+wholesome, he says, to man to look not at Fate, but the other way; the
+practical view is the other. As Mill says of his wish to disbelieve the
+doctrine of the formation of character by circumstances&mdash;'Remembering
+the wish of Fox respecting the doctrine of resistance to governments,
+that it might never be forgotten by Kings nor remembered by subjects, I
+said that it would be a blessing if the doctrine of necessity could be
+believed by all <i>quoad</i> the characters of others, and disbelieved in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[Pg 335]</a></span>
+regard to their own.' So Emerson knew well enough that man's
+consciousness of freedom, action, and power over outer circumstances
+might be left to take care of itself, as the practical view generally
+can. The world did not need him to tell it that a man's fortunes are a
+part of his character. His task was the more far-reaching one of drawing
+them to recognise that love is the important thing, not benevolent
+works; that only impure men consider life as it is reflected in events,
+opinions, and persons; that they fail to see the action until it is
+done, whereas what is far better worth considering is that its moral
+element pr&aelig;-existed in the actor.</p>
+
+<p>It would be easy to show that Emerson has not worked out his answers to
+these eternal enigmas, for ever reproducing themselves in all ages, in
+such a form as to defy the logician's challenge. He never shrinks from
+inconsistent propositions. He was unsystematic on principle. 'He thought
+that truth has so many facets that the best we can do is to notice each
+in turn, without troubling ourselves whether they agree.' When we
+remember the inadequateness of human language, the infirmities of our
+vision, and all the imperfections of mental apparatus, the wise men will
+not disdain even partial glimpses of a scene too vast and intricate to
+be comprehended in a single map. To complain that Emerson is no
+systematic reasoner is to miss the secret of most of those who have
+given powerful impulses to the spiritual ethics of an age. It is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[Pg 336]</a></span> not a
+syllogism that turns the heart towards purification of life and aim; it
+is not the logically enchained propositions of a <i>sorites</i>, but the
+flash of illumination, the indefinable accent, that attracts masses of
+men to a new teacher and a high doctrine. The teasing <i>ergoteur</i> is
+always right, but he never leads nor improves nor inspires.</p>
+
+<p>Any one can see how this side of the Emersonian gospel harmonised with
+the prepossessions of a new democracy. Trust, he said, to leading
+instincts, not to traditional institutions, nor social ordering, nor the
+formul&aelig; of books and schools for the formation of character; the great
+force is real and elemental. In art, Mr. Ruskin has explained the
+palpable truth that semi-civilised nations can colour better than we do,
+and that an Indian shawl and China vase are inimitable by us. 'It is
+their glorious ignorance of all rules that does it; the pure and true
+instincts have play, and do their work; and the moment we begin teaching
+people any rules about colour, and make them do this or that, we crush
+the instinct, generally for ever' (<i>Modern Painters</i>, iii. 91). Emerson
+said what comes to the same thing about morals. The philosophy of
+democracy, or the government of a great mixed community by itself, rests
+on a similar assumption in politics. The foundations of a self-governed
+society on a great scale are laid in leading instincts. Emerson was
+never tired of saying that we are wiser than we know. The path of
+science and of letters is not the way<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[Pg 337]</a></span> to nature. What was done in a
+remote age by men whose names have resounded far, has no deeper sense
+than what you and I do to-day. What food, or experience, or succour have
+Olympiads and Consulates for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, for the Kan&aacute;ka
+in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter? When he is
+in this vein Emerson often approaches curiously near to Rousseau's
+memorable and most potent paradox of 1750, that the sciences corrupt
+manners.<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a></p>
+
+<p>Most men will now agree that when the great fiery trial came, the
+Emersonian faith and the democratic assumption abundantly justified
+themselves. Even Carlyle wrote to Emerson at last (June 4, 1871): 'In my
+occasional explosions against Anarchy, and my inextinguishable hatred of
+<i>it</i>, I privately whisper to myself, "Could any Friedrich Wilhelm now,
+or Friedrich, or most perfect Governor you could hope to realise, guide
+forward what is America's essential task at present, faster or more
+completely than 'Anarchic America' is now doing?" Such "Anarchy" has a
+great deal to say for itself.'</p>
+
+<p>The traits of comparison between Carlyle and Emerson may be regarded as
+having been pretty nearly exhausted for the present, until time has<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[Pg 338]</a></span>
+changed the point of view. In wit, humour, pathos, penetration, poetic
+grandeur, and fervid sublimity of imagination, Carlyle is the superior
+beyond measure. But Emerson is as much his superior in that high and
+transparent sanity, which is not further removed from midsummer madness
+than it is from a terrene and grovelling mediocrity. This sanity, among
+other things, kept Emerson in line with the ruling tendencies of his
+age, and his teaching brings all the aid that abstract teaching can,
+towards the solution of the moral problems of modern societies. Carlyle
+chose to fling himself headlong and blindfold athwart the great currents
+of things, against all the forces and elements that are pushing modern
+societies forward. Beginning in his earlier work with the same faith as
+Emerson in leading instincts, he came to dream that the only leading
+instinct worth thinking about is that of self-will, mastery, force, and
+violent strength. Emerson was for basing the health of a modern
+commonwealth on the only real strength, and the only kind of force that
+can be relied upon, namely, the honest, manly, simple, and emancipated
+character of the citizen. This gives to his doctrine a hold and a prize
+on the work of the day, and makes him our helper. Carlyle's perverse
+reaction had wrecked and stranded him when the world came to ask him for
+direction. In spite of his resplendent genius, he had no direction to
+give, and was only able in vague and turbid torrents of words to hide a
+shallow and obsolete lesson. His confession to Emerson, quoted above,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[Pg 339]</a></span>
+looks as if at last he had found this out for himself.</p>
+
+<p>If Emerson stood thus well towards the social and political drift of
+events, his teaching was no less harmoniously related to the new and
+most memorable drift of science which set in by his side. It is a
+misconception to pretend that he was a precursor of the Darwinian
+theory. Evolution, as a possible explanation of the ordering of the
+universe, is a great deal older than either Emerson or Darwin. What
+Darwin did was to work out in detail and with masses of minute evidence
+a definite hypothesis of the specific conditions under which new forms
+are evolved. Emerson, of course, had no definite hypothesis of this
+sort, nor did he possess any of the knowledge necessary to give it
+value. But it was his good fortune that some of his strongest
+propositions harmonise with the scientific theory of the survival of the
+fittest in the struggle for material existence. He connects his
+exhortation to self-reliance with the law working in nature for
+conservation and growth,&mdash;to wit, that 'Power is in nature the essential
+measure of right,' and that 'Nature suffers nothing to remain in her
+kingdom which cannot help itself.' The same strain is constantly
+audible. Nature on every side, within us and without, is for ever
+throwing out new forms and fresh varieties of living and thinking. To
+her experiments in every region there is no end. Those succeed which
+prove to have the best adaptation to the conditions. Let, therefore,
+neither society nor<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[Pg 340]</a></span> the individual check experiment, originality, and
+infinite variation. Such language, we may see, fits in equally well with
+democracy in politics and with evolution in science. If, moreover,
+modern science gives more prominence to one conception than another, it
+is to that of the natural universe of force and energy, as One and a
+Whole. This too is the great central idea with Emerson, repeated a
+thousand times in prose and in verse, and lying at the very heart of his
+philosophy. Newton's saying that 'the world was made at one cast'
+delights him. 'The secret of the world is that its energies are
+<i>solidaires</i>.' Nature 'publishes itself in creatures, reaching from
+particles and spicula, through transformation on transformation to the
+highest symmetries. A little heat, that is, a little motion, is all that
+differences the bald dazzling white and deadly cold poles of the earth
+from the prolific tropical climates.' Not only, as Professor Tyndall
+says, is Emerson's religious sense entirely undaunted by the discoveries
+of science; all such discoveries he comprehends and assimilates. 'By
+Emerson scientific conceptions are continually transmuted into the finer
+forms and warmer lines of an ideal world.'</p>
+
+<p>That these transmutations are often carried by Emerson to the extent of
+vain and empty self-mystifications is hard to deny, even for those who
+have most sympathy with the general scope of his teaching. There are
+pages that to the present writer, at least, after reasonably diligent
+meditation, remain mere abra<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[Pg 341]</a></span>cadabra, incomprehensible and worthless.
+For much of this in Emerson, the influence of Plato is mainly
+responsible, and it may be noted in passing that his account of Plato
+(<i>Representative Men</i>) is one of his most unsatisfactory performances.
+'The title of Platonist,' says Mill, 'belongs by far better right to
+those who have been nourished in, and have endeavoured to practise
+Plato's mode of investigation, than to those who are distinguished only
+by the adoption of certain dogmatical conclusions, drawn mostly from the
+least intelligible of his works.' Nothing is gained by concealing that
+not every part of Emerson's work will stand the test of the Elenchus,
+nor bear reduction into honest and intelligible English.</p>
+
+<p>One remarkable result of Emerson's idealism ought not to be passed over.
+'The visible becomes the Bestial,' said Carlyle, 'when it rests not on
+the invisible.' To Emerson all rested on the invisible, and was summed
+up in terms of the invisible, and hence the Bestial was almost unknown
+in his philosophic scheme. Nay, we may say that some mighty phenomena in
+our universe were kept studiously absent from his mind. Here is one of
+the profoundest differences between Emerson and most of those who, on as
+high an altitude, have pondered the same great themes. A small trait
+will serve for illustration. It was well known in his household that he
+could not bear to hear of ailments. 'There is one topic,' he writes,
+'peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational mortals,
+namely, their distempers. If you<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[Pg 342]</a></span> have not slept, or if you have slept,
+or if you have headache, sciatica, or leprosy, or thunder-stroke, I
+beseech you by all angels to hold your peace, and not pollute the
+morning, to which all the housemates bring serene and pleasant thoughts,
+by corruption and groans. Come out of the azure. Love the
+day'&mdash;(<i>Conduct of Life</i>, 159).</p>
+
+<p>If he could not endure these minor perturbations of the fair and smiling
+face of daily life, far less did he willingly think of Death. Of nothing
+in all the wide range of universal topics does Emerson say so little as
+of that which has lain in sombre mystery at the very core of most
+meditations on life, from Job and Solon down to Bacon and Montaigne.
+Except in two beautiful poems, already mentioned, Death is almost
+banished from his page. It is not the title or the subject of one of his
+essays, only secondarily even of that on Immortality. Love, Friendship,
+Prudence, Heroism, Experience, Manners, Nature, Greatness, and a score
+of other matters&mdash;but none to show that he ever sat down to gather into
+separate and concentrated shape his reflections on the terrifying
+phantom that has haunted the mind of man from the very birth of time.</p>
+
+<p>Pascal bade us imagine a number of men in chains and doomed to death;
+some of them each day butchered in sight of the others; those who
+remained watching their own lot in that of their fellows, and awaiting
+their turn in anguish and helplessness. Such, he cried, is the pitiful
+and desperate condition of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[Pg 343]</a></span> man. But nature has other cruelties more
+stinging than death. Mill, himself an optimist, yet declares the course
+of natural phenomena to be replete with everything which, when committed
+by human beings is most worthy of abhorrence, so that 'one who
+endeavoured in his actions to imitate the natural course of things would
+be universally seen and acknowledged to be the wickedest of men.' To man
+himself, moreover, 'the most criminal actions are not more unnatural
+than most of the virtues.' We need not multiply from poets and divines,
+from moralists and sages, these grim pictures. The sombre melancholy,
+the savage moral indignation, the passionate intellectual scorn, with
+which life and the universe have filled strong souls, some with one
+emotion and some with another, were all to Emerson in his habitual
+thinking unintelligible and remote. He admits, indeed, that 'the disease
+and deformity around us certify that infraction of natural,
+intellectual, and moral laws, and often violation on violation to breed
+such compound misery.' The way of Providence, he says in another place,
+is a little rude, through earthquakes, fever, the sword of climate, and
+a thousand other hints of ferocity in the interiors of nature.
+Providence has a wild rough incalculable road to its end, and 'it is of
+no use to try to white-wash its huge mixed instrumentalities, or to
+dress up that terrific benefactor in a clean shirt and white neckcloth
+of a student of divinity.' But he only drew from the thought of these
+cruelties of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[Pg 344]</a></span> universe the practical moral that 'our culture must
+not omit the arming of the man.' He is born into the state of war, and
+will therefore do well to acquire a military attitude of soul. There is
+perhaps no better moral than this of the Stoic, but greater
+impressiveness might have marked the lesson, if our teacher had been
+more indulgent to the man's sense of tragedy in that vast drama in which
+he plays his piteous part.</p>
+
+<p>In like manner, Emerson has little to say of that horrid burden and
+impediment on the soul, which the churches call Sin, and which, by
+whatever name we call it, is a very real catastrophe in the moral nature
+of man. He had no eye, like Dante's, for the vileness, the cruelty, the
+utter despicableness to which humanity may be moulded. If he saw them at
+all, it was through the softening and illusive medium of generalised
+phrases. Nor was he ever shocked and driven into himself by 'the immoral
+thoughtlessness' of men. The courses of nature, and the prodigious
+injustices of man in society, affect him with neither horror nor awe. He
+will see no monster if he can help it. For the fatal Nemesis or terrible
+Erinnyes, daughters of Erebus and Night, Emerson substitutes a
+fair-weather abstraction named Compensation. One radical tragedy in
+nature he admits&mdash;'the distinction of More and Less.' If I am poor in
+faculty, dim in vision, shut out from opportunity, in every sense an
+outcast from the inheritance of the earth, that seems indeed to be a
+tragedy. 'But see the facts clearly and these moun<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">[Pg 345]</a></span>tainous inequalities
+vanish. Love reduces them, as the sun melts the iceberg in the sea. The
+heart and soul of all men being one, this bitterness of His and Mine
+ceases. His is mine.' Surely words, words, words! What can be more idle,
+when one of the world's bitter puzzles is pressed on the teacher, than
+that he should betake himself to an altitude whence it is not visible,
+and then assure us that it is not only invisible, but non-existent? This
+is not to see the facts clearly, but to pour the fumes of obscuration
+round them. When he comforts us by saying 'Love, and you shall be
+loved,' who does not recall cases which make the Jean Valjean of Victor
+Hugo's noble romance not a figment of the theatre, but an all too actual
+type? The believer who looks to another world to redress the wrongs and
+horrors of this; the sage who warns us that the law of life is
+resignation, renunciation, and doing-without (<i>entbehren sollst
+du</i>)&mdash;each of these has a foothold in common language. But to say that
+all infractions of love and equity are speedily punished&mdash;punished by
+fear&mdash;and then to talk of the perfect compensation of the universe, is
+mere playing with words, for it does not solve the problem in the terms
+in which men propound it. Emerson, as we have said, held the spirit of
+System in aversion as fettering the liberal play of thought, just as in
+morals, with greater boldness, he rebelled against a minute and cramping
+interpretation of Duty. We are not sure that his own optimistic doctrine
+did not play him the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">[Pg 346]</a></span> same tyrannical trick, by sealing his eyes to at
+least one half of the actualities of nature and the gruesome
+possibilities of things. It had no unimportant effect on Emerson's
+thought that he was born in a new world that had cut itself loose from
+old history. The black and devious ways through which the race has
+marched are not real in North America, as they are to us in old Europe,
+who live on the very site of secular iniquities, are surrounded by
+monuments of historic crime, and find present and future entangled,
+embittered, inextricably loaded both in blood and in institutions with
+desperate inheritances from the past.</p>
+
+<p>There are many topics, and those no mean topics, on which the best
+authority is not the moralist by profession, as Emerson was, but the man
+of the world. The world hardens, narrows, desiccates common natures, but
+nothing so enriches generous ones. For knowledge of the heart of man, we
+must go to those who were closer to the passions and interests of actual
+and varied life than Emerson ever could have been&mdash;to Horace, Montaigne,
+La Bruy&egrave;re, Swift, Moli&egrave;re, even to Pope. If a hostile critic were to
+say that Emerson looked at life too much from the outside, as the
+clergyman is apt to do, we should condemn such a remark as a
+disparagement, but we should understand what it is in Emerson that the
+critic means. He has not the temperament of the great humorists, under
+whatever planet they may have been born, jovial, mercurial, or
+saturnine. Even his revolt against formalism is only a new fashion of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[Pg 347]</a></span>
+composure, and sometimes comes dangerously near to moral dilettantism.
+The persistent identification of everything in nature with everything
+else sometimes bewilders, fatigues, and almost afflicts us. Though he
+warns us that our civilisation is not near its meridian, but as yet only
+in the cock-crowing and the morning star, still all ages are much alike
+with him: man is always man, 'society never advances,' and he does
+almost as little as Carlyle himself to fire men with faith in social
+progress as the crown of wise endeavour. But when all these deductions
+have been made and amply allowed for, Emerson remains among the most
+persuasive and inspiring of those who by word and example rebuke our
+despondency, purify our sight, awaken us from the deadening slumbers of
+convention and conformity, exorcise the pestering imps of vanity, and
+lift men up from low thoughts and sullen moods of helplessness and
+impiety.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<div class="footnotes">
+<h4>FOOTNOTES</h4>
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> Frothingham's <i>Transcendentalism in New England: a
+History</i>&mdash;a judicious, acute, and highly interesting piece of
+criticism.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> <i>English Traits</i>, 7-18. <i>Ireland</i>, 143-152. Froude's
+<i>Carlyle</i>, ii. 355-359.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> Clough's <i>Life and Letters</i>, i. 185.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> The reader who seeks full information about Emerson's life
+will find it scattered in various volumes: among them are&mdash;
+</p><p>
+<i>Ralph Waldo Emerson</i>; by George Willis Cooke (Sampson Low &amp; Co.,
+1882)&mdash;a very diligent and instructive work.
+</p><p>
+<i>R.W.E.</i>; by Alexander Ireland (Simpkin, Marshall, &amp; Co. 1882),
+described by Carlyle, and known by others, as 'full of energy and broad
+sagacity and practicality; infinitely well affected to the man Emerson
+too,'&mdash;and full moreover of that intellectual enthusiasm which in his
+Scotch countrymen goes so often with their practicalities.
+</p><p>
+<i>Emerson, at Home and Abroad</i>; by Moncure D. Conway (Tr&uuml;bner &amp; Co.,
+1883): the work of a faithful disciple, who knew Emerson well, and has
+here recorded many interesting anecdotes and traits.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> <i>New England Reformers: Essays</i>, ii. 511-519.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> The Swedenborgians&mdash;'a sect which, I think, must contribute
+more than all other sects to the new faith, which must come out of
+all.'&mdash;<i>To Carlyle</i>, 1834.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> <i>Essays</i>: Spiritual Laws, etc.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> What so good, asks Rousseau, 'as a sweet and precious
+ignorance, the treasure of a pure soul at peace with itself, which finds
+all its blessedness in inward retreat, in testifying to itself its own
+innocence, and which feels no need of seeking a warped and hollow
+happiness in the opinion of other people as to its enlightenment?'</p></div></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h4><a name="END_OF_VOL_I" id="END_OF_VOL_I"></a>END OF VOL. I.</h4>
+
+<p class="center"><small><i>Printed by</i> <span class="smcap">R. &amp; R. Clark, Limited</span>, <i>Edinburgh</i>.</small></p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Critical Miscellanies,  Vol. 1, Essay 5,
+Emerson, by John Morley
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Critical Miscellanies,  Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson
+
+Author: John Morley
+
+Release Date: November 27, 2006 [EBook #19935]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CRITICAL MISCELLANIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Paul Murray, Graeme Mackreth and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CRITICAL
+MISCELLANIES
+
+BY
+
+JOHN MORLEY
+
+VOL. I.
+
+Essay 5: Emerson
+
+London
+MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
+NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+1904
+
+
+
+
+Introductory                                                       293
+
+I.
+
+Early days                                                         296
+
+Takes charge of an Unitarian Church in Boston (1829)               297
+
+Resigns the charge in 1832                                         298
+
+Goes to Europe (1833)                                              299
+
+Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Carlyle                                 300
+
+Settles in Concord (1834)                                          301
+
+Description of Concord by Clough                                   301
+
+Death of his first wife                                            302
+
+Income                                                             303
+
+Hawthorne                                                          305
+
+Thoreau                                                            305
+
+Views on Solitude                                                  306
+
+Effect of his address in the Divinity School of Harvard
+(1838)                                                             307
+
+Contributes to the _Dial_ (1840)                                   309
+
+First series of his Essays published in 1841                       310
+
+Second series three years later                                    310
+
+Second visit to England (1847), and delivers lectures on
+'Representative Men,' collected and published in 1850              310
+
+Poems first collected in 1847; final version made in 1876          310
+
+Essays and Lectures published in 1860, under general title
+of _The Conduct of Life_                                           310
+
+And the Civil War                                                  310
+
+General retrospect of his life                                     312
+
+Died April 27, 1882                                                312
+
+
+II.
+
+Style of his writings                                              313
+
+Manner as a lecturer                                               314
+
+Dr. Holmes                                                         314
+
+His use of words                                                   314
+
+Sincerity                                                          316
+
+And Landor                                                         316
+
+Mr. Lowell                                                         316
+
+Description of his library                                         317
+
+A word or two about his verses                                     319
+
+
+III.
+
+Hawthorne                                                          322
+
+And Carlyle                                                        323
+
+The friends of Universal Progress in 1840                          323
+
+Bossuet                                                            324
+
+Remarks on New England                                             325
+
+One of the few moral reformers                                     327
+
+Essays on 'Domestic Life,' on 'Behaviour,' and on
+'Manners'                                                          329
+
+Compared to Franklin and Chesterfield                              330
+
+Is for faith before works                                          333
+
+A systematic reasoner                                              335
+
+The Emersonian faith abundantly justified                          337
+
+Carlyle's letter to (June 4, 1871)                                 337
+
+One remarkable result of his idealism                              341
+
+On Death and Sin                                              342, 344
+
+Conclusion                                                         346
+
+
+
+
+EMERSON.
+
+
+A great interpreter of life ought not himself to need interpretation,
+least of all can he need it for contemporaries. When time has wrought
+changes of fashion, mental and social, the critic serves a useful turn
+in giving to a poet or a teacher his true place, and in recovering ideas
+and points of view that are worth preserving. Interpretation of this
+kind Emerson cannot require. His books are no palimpsest, 'the prophet's
+holograph, defiled, erased, and covered by a monk's.' What he has
+written is fresh, legible, and in full conformity with the manners and
+the diction of the day, and those who are unable to understand him
+without gloss and comment are in fact not prepared to understand what it
+is that the original has to say. Scarcely any literature is so entirely
+unprofitable as the so-called criticism that overlays a pithy text with
+a windy sermon. For our time at least Emerson may best be left to be his
+own expositor.
+
+Nor is Emerson, either, in the case of those whom the world has failed
+to recognise, and whom therefore it is the business of the critic to
+make known and to define. It is too soon to say in what particular
+niche among the teachers of the race posterity will place him; enough
+that in our own generation he has already been accepted as one of the
+wise masters, who, being called to high thinking for generous ends, did
+not fall below his vocation, but, steadfastly pursuing the pure search
+for truth, without propounding a system or founding a school or
+cumbering himself overmuch about applications, lived the life of the
+spirit, and breathed into other men a strong desire after the right
+governance of the soul. All this is generally realised and understood,
+and men may now be left to find their way to the Emersonian doctrine
+without the critic's prompting. Though it is only the other day that
+Emerson walked the earth and was alive and among us, he is already one
+of the privileged few whom the reader approaches in the mood of settled
+respect, and whose names have surrounded themselves with an atmosphere
+of religion.
+
+It is not particularly profitable, again, to seek for Emerson one of the
+labels out of the philosophic handbooks. Was he the prince of
+Transcendentalists, or the prince of Idealists? Are we to look for the
+sources of his thought in Kant or Jacobi, in Fichte or Schelling? How
+does he stand towards Parmenides and Zeno, the Egotheism of the Sufis,
+or the position of the Megareans? Shall we put him on the shelf with the
+Stoics or the Mystics, with Quietist, Pantheist, Determinist? If life
+were long, it might be worth while to trace Emerson's affinities with
+the philosophic schools; to collect and infer his answers to the
+everlasting problems of psychology and metaphysics; to extract a set of
+coherent and reasoned opinions about knowledge and faculty, experience
+and consciousness, truth and necessity, the absolute and the relative.
+But such inquiries would only take us the further away from the essence
+and vitality of Emerson's mind and teaching. In philosophy proper
+Emerson made no contribution of his own, but accepted, apparently
+without much examination of the other side, from Coleridge after Kant,
+the intuitive, _a priori_ and realist theory respecting the sources of
+human knowledge, and the objects that are within the cognisance of the
+human faculties. This was his starting-point, and within its own sphere
+of thought he cannot be said to have carried it any further. What he did
+was to light up these doctrines with the rays of ethical and poetic
+imagination. As it has been justly put, though Emersonian
+transcendentalism is usually spoken of as a philosophy, it is more
+justly regarded as a gospel.[1] But before dwelling more on this, let us
+look into the record of his life, of which we may say in all truth that
+no purer, simpler, and more harmonious story can be found in the annals
+of far-shining men.
+
+[Footnote 1: Frothingham's _Transcendentalism in New England: a
+History_--a judicious, acute, and highly interesting piece of criticism.]
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+
+Ralph Waldo Emerson was born at Boston, May 25, 1803. He was of an
+ancient and honourable English stock, who had transplanted themselves,
+on one side from Cheshire and Bedfordshire, and on the other from Durham
+and York, a hundred and seventy years before. For seven or eight
+generations in a direct and unbroken line his forefathers had been
+preachers and divines, not without eminence in the Puritan tradition of
+New England. His second name came into the family with Rebecca Waldo,
+with whom at the end of the seventeenth century one Edward Emerson had
+intermarried, and whose family had fled from the Waldensian valleys and
+that slaughter of the saints which Milton called on Heaven to avenge.
+Every tributary, then, that made Emerson what he was, flowed not only
+from Protestantism, but from 'the Protestantism of the Protestant
+religion.' When we are told that Puritanism inexorably locked up the
+intelligence of its votaries in a dark and straitened chamber, it is
+worthy to be remembered that the genial, open, lucid, and most
+comprehensive mind of Emerson was the ripened product of a genealogical
+tree that at every stage of its growth had been vivified by Puritan sap.
+
+Not many years after his birth, Emerson's mother was left a widow with
+narrow means, and he underwent the wholesome training of frugality in
+youth. When the time came, he was sent to Harvard. When Clough visited
+America a generation later, the collegiate training does not appear to
+have struck him very favourably. 'They learn French and history and
+German, and a great many more things than in England, but only
+imperfectly.' This was said from the standard of Rugby and Balliol, and
+the method that Clough calls imperfect had merits of its own. The pupil
+lost much in a curriculum that had a certain rawness about it, compared
+with the traditional culture that was at that moment (1820) just
+beginning to acquire a fresh hold within the old gray quadrangles of
+Oxford. On the other hand, the training at Harvard struck fewer of those
+superfluous roots in the mind, which are only planted that they may be
+presently cast out again with infinite distraction and waste.
+
+When his schooling was over, Emerson began to prepare himself for the
+ministrations of the pulpit, and in 1826 and 1827 he preached in divers
+places. Two years later he was ordained, and undertook the charge of an
+important Unitarian Church in Boston. It was not very long before the
+strain of forms, comparatively moderate as it was in the Unitarian body,
+became too heavy to be borne. Emerson found that he could no longer
+accept the usual view of the Communion Service, even in its least
+sacramental interpretation. To him the rite was purely spiritual in
+origin and intent, and at the best only to be retained as a
+commemoration. The whole world, he said, had been full of idols and
+ordinances and forms, when 'the Almighty God was pleased to qualify and
+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 he has told the world how
+these illustrious men in their several fashions and degrees impressed
+him.[2] It was Carlyle who struck him most. 'Many a time upon the sea,
+in my homeward voyage, I remembered with joy the favoured condition of
+my lonely philosopher,' cherishing visions more than divine 'in his
+stern and blessed solitude.' So Carlyle, with no less cordiality,
+declares that among the figures that he could recollect as visiting his
+Nithsdale hermitage--'all like Apparitions now, bringing with them airs
+from Heaven, or the blasts from the other region, there is not one of a
+more undoubtedly supernal character than yourself; so pure and still,
+with intents so charitable; and then vanishing too so soon into the
+azure Inane, as an Apparition should.'
+
+[Footnote 2: _English Traits_, 7-18. _Ireland_, 143-152. Froude's
+_Carlyle_, ii. 355-359.]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In external incident Emerson's life was uneventful. Nothing could be
+simpler, of more perfect unity, or more free from disturbing episodes
+that leaves scars on men. In 1834 he settled in old Concord, the home of
+his ancestors, then in its third century. 'Concord is very bare,' wrote
+Clough, who made some sojourn there in 1852, 'and so is the country in
+general; it is a small sort of village, almost entirely of wood houses,
+painted white, with Venetian blinds, green outside, with two white
+wooden churches. There are some American elms of a weeping kind, and
+sycamores, i.e. planes; but the wood is mostly pine--white pine and
+yellow pine--somewhat scrubby, occupying the tops of the low banks, and
+marshy hay-land between, very brown now. A little brook runs through to
+the Concord River.'[3] The brook flowed across the few acres that were
+Emerson's first modest homestead. 'The whole external appearance of the
+place,' says one who visited him, 'suggests old-fashioned comfort and
+hospitality. Within the house the flavour of antiquity is still more
+noticeable. Old pictures look down from the walls; quaint blue-and-white
+china holds the simple dinner; old furniture brings to mind the
+generations of the past. At the right as you enter is Mr. Emerson's
+library, a large square room, plainly furnished, but made pleasant by
+pictures and sunshine. The homely shelves that line the walls are well
+filled with books. There is a lack of showy covers or rich bindings, and
+each volume seems to have soberly grown old in constant service. Mr.
+Emerson's study is a quiet room upstairs.'
+
+[Footnote 3: Clough's _Life and Letters_, i. 185.]
+
+Fate did not spare him the strokes of the common lot. His first wife
+died after three short years of wedded happiness. He lost a little son,
+who was the light of his eyes. But others were born to him, and in all
+the relations and circumstances of domestic life he was one of the best
+and most beloved of men. He long carried in his mind the picture of
+Carlyle's life at Craigenputtock as the ideal for the sage, but his own
+choice was far wiser and happier, 'not wholly in the busy world, nor
+quite beyond it.'
+
+'Besides my house,' he told Carlyle in 1838, 'I have, I believe, 22,000
+dollars, whose income in ordinary years is six per cent. I have no other
+tithe or glebe except the income of my winter lectures, which was last
+winter 800 dollars. Well, with this income, here at home, I am a rich
+man. I stay at home and go abroad at my own instance, I have food,
+warmth, leisure, books, friends. Go away from home, I am rich no longer.
+I never have a dollar to spend on a fancy. As no wise man, I suppose,
+ever was rich in the sense of _freedom to spend_, because of the
+inundation of claims, so neither am I, who am not wise. But at home I am
+rich--rich enough for ten brothers. My wife Lidian is an incarnation of
+Christianity,--I call her Asia,--and keeps my philosophy from
+Antinomianism; my mother, whitest, mildest, most conservative of ladies,
+whose only exception to her universal preference for old things is her
+son; my boy, a piece of love and sunshine, well worth my watching from
+morning to night;--these, and three domestic women, who cook and sew and
+run for us, make all my household. Here I sit and read and write, with
+very little system, and, as far as regards composition, with the most
+fragmentary result: paragraphs incompressible, each sentence an
+infinitely repellent particle.
+
+'In summer, with the aid of a neighbour, I manage my garden; and a week
+ago I set out on the west side of my house forty young pine trees to
+protect me or my son from the wind of January. The ornament of the place
+is the occasional presence of some ten or twelve persons, good and wise,
+who visit us in the course of the year.'
+
+As time went on he was able to buy himself 'a new plaything'--a piece of
+woodland, of more than forty acres, on the border of a little lake half
+a mile wide or more, called Walden Pond. 'In these May days,' he told
+Carlyle, then passionately struggling with his _Cromwell_, with the
+slums of Chelsea at his back, 'when maples, poplars, oaks, birches,
+walnut, and pine, are in their spring glory, I go thither every
+afternoon, and cut with my hatchet an Indian path through the thicket,
+all along the bold shore, and open the finest pictures' (1845).
+
+He loved to write at 'large leisure in noble mornings, opened by prayer
+or by readings of Plato, or whatsoever else is dearest to the Morning
+Muse.' Yet he could not wholly escape the recluse's malady. He confesses
+that he sometimes craves 'that stimulation which every capricious,
+languid, and languescent study needs.' Carlyle's potent concentration
+stirs his envy. The work of the garden and the orchard he found very
+fascinating, eating up days and weeks; 'nay, a brave scholar should shun
+it like gambling, and take refuge in cities and hotels from these
+pernicious enchantments.'
+
+In the doings of his neighbourhood he bore his part; he took a manly
+interest in civil affairs, and was sensible, shrewd, and helpful in
+matters of practical judgment. Pilgrims, sane and insane, the beardless
+and the gray-headed, flocked to his door, far beyond the dozen persons
+good and wise whom he had mentioned to Carlyle. 'Uncertain, troubled,
+earnest wanderers through the midnight of the moral world beheld his
+intellectual fire as a beacon burning on a hill-top, and climbing the
+difficult ascent, looked forth into the surrounding obscurity more
+hopefully than hitherto' (_Hawthorne_). To the most intractable of
+Transcendental bores, worst species of the genus, he was never
+impatient, nor denied himself; nor did he ever refuse counsel where the
+case was not yet beyond hope. Hawthorne was for a time his neighbour
+(1842-45). 'It was good,' says Hawthorne, 'to meet him in the
+wood-paths, or sometimes in our avenue, with that pure intellectual
+gleam diffused about his presence like the garment of a shining one; and
+he so quiet, so simple, so without pretension, encountering each man
+alive as if expecting to receive more than he could impart.'
+
+The most remarkable of all his neighbours was Thoreau, who for a couple
+of years lived in a hut which he had built for himself on the shore of
+Walden Pond. If he had not written some things with a considerable charm
+of style, Thoreau might have been wisely neglected as one of the crazy.
+But Emerson was struck by the originality of his life, and thought it
+well in time to edit the writings of one 'who was bred to no profession;
+never married; lived alone; never went to Church; never voted; refused
+to pay a tax to the State; ate no flesh, drank no wine, never knew the
+use of tobacco; had no temptations to fight against, no appetites, no
+passions, refused all invitations, preferred a good Indian to highly
+cultivated people, and said he would rather go to Oregon than to
+London.' The world has room for every type, so that it be not actively
+noxious, and this whimsical egotist may well have his place in the
+catalogue. He was, after all, in his life only a compendium, on a scale
+large enough to show their absurdity, of all those unsocial notions
+which Emerson in other manifestations found it needful to rebuke. Yet we
+may agree that many of his paradoxes strike home with Socratic force to
+the heart of a civilisation that wise men know to be too purely
+material, too artificial, and too capriciously diffused.
+
+Emerson himself was too sane ever to fall into the hermit's trap of
+banishment to the rocks and echoes. 'Solitude,' he said, 'is
+impracticable, and society fatal.' He steered his way as best he could
+between these two irreconcilable necessities. He had, as we have seen,
+the good sense to make for himself a calling which brought him into
+healthy contact with bodies of men, and made it essential that he should
+have his listeners in some degree in his mind, even when they were not
+actually present to the eye. As a preacher Emerson has been described as
+making a deep impression on susceptible hearers of a quiet mind, by 'the
+calm dignity of his bearing, the absence of all oratorical effort, and
+the singular simplicity and directness of a manner free from the least
+trace of dogmatic assumption.' 'Not long before,' says this witness, 'I
+had listened to a wonderful sermon by Chalmers, whose force and energy,
+and vehement but rather turgid eloquence, carried for the moment all
+before him--his audience becoming like clay in the hands of the potter.
+But I must confess that the pregnant thoughts and serene self-possession
+of the young Boston minister had a greater charm for me than all the
+rhetorical splendours of Chalmers' (_Ireland_, 141).
+
+At the lecturer's desk the same attraction made itself still more
+effectually felt. 'I have heard some great speakers and some
+accomplished orators,' Mr. Lowell says, 'but never any that so moved and
+persuaded men as he. There is a kind of undertone in that rich barytone
+of his that sweeps our minds from their foothold into deep waters with a
+drift that we cannot and would not resist. Search for his eloquence in
+his books and you will perchance miss it, but meanwhile you will find
+that it has kindled all your thoughts.' The same effect was felt in its
+degree wherever he went, and he took pains not to miss it. He had made a
+study of his art, and was so skilful in his mastery of it that it seemed
+as if anybody might do all that he did and do it as well--if only a
+hundred failures had not proved the mistake.
+
+In 1838 Emerson delivered an address in the Divinity School of Harvard,
+which produced a gusty shower of articles, sermons, and pamphlets, and
+raised him without will or further act of his to the high place of the
+heresiarch. With admirable singleness of mind, he held modestly aloof.
+'There is no scholar,' he wrote to a friend, 'less willing or less able
+to be a polemic. I could not give account of myself if challenged. I
+delight in telling what I think, but if you ask me how I dare say so, or
+why it is so, I am the most helpless of men,' The year before, his
+oration on the American Scholar had filled Carlyle with delight. It was
+the first clear utterance, after long decades of years, in which he had
+'heard nothing but infinite jangling and jabbering, and inarticulate
+twittering and screeching.' Then Carlyle enjoined on his American friend
+for rule of life, 'Give no ear to any man's praise or censure; know that
+that is _not_ it; on the one side is as Heaven, if you have strength to
+keep silent and climb unseen; yet on the other side, yawning always at
+one's right hand and one's left, is the frightfullest Abyss and
+Pandemonium' (Dec. 8, 1837). Emerson's temperament and his whole method
+made the warning needless, and, as before, while 'vociferous platitude
+was dinning his ears on all sides,' a whole world of thought was
+'silently building itself in these calm depths.' But what would those
+two divinities of his, Plato and Socrates, have said of a man who 'could
+not give an account of himself if challenged'? Assuredly not every one
+who saith Plato, Plato, is admitted to that ideal kingdom.
+
+It was soon after this that the _Dial_ was projected. It had its origin
+in the Transcendental Club, a little knot of speculative students at
+Boston, who met four or five times a year at one another's houses to
+discuss questions mainly theological, from more liberal points of view
+than was at that time common, 'the air then in America getting a little
+too close and stagnant.' The Club was first formed in 1836. The _Dial_
+appeared in 1840, and went on for four years at quarterly intervals.
+Emerson was a constant contributor, and for the last half of its
+existence he acted as editor. 'I submitted,' he told Carlyle, 'to what
+seemed a necessity of petty literary patriotism--I know not what else to
+call it--and took charge of our thankless little _Dial_ here, without
+subscribers enough to pay even a publisher, much less any labourer; it
+has no penny for editor or contributor, nothing but abuse in the
+newspapers, or, at best, silence; but it serves as a sort of portfolio,
+to carry about a few poems or sentences which would otherwise be
+transcribed or circulated, and we always are waiting until somebody
+shall come and make it good. But I took it, and it took me and a great
+deal of good time to a small purpose' (July 1, 1842). On the whole one
+must agree that it was to small purpose. Emerson's name has reflected
+lustre on the _Dial_, but when his contributions are taken out, and,
+say, half a dozen besides, the residuum is in the main very poor stuff,
+and some of it has a droll resemblance to the talk between Mrs. Hominy
+and the Literary Ladies and the Honourable Elijah Pogram. Margaret
+Fuller--the Miranda, Zenobia, Hypatia, Minerva of her time, and a truly
+remarkable figure in the gallery of wonderful women--edited it for two
+years, and contributed many a vivid, dashing, exuberant, ebullient page.
+Her criticism of Goethe, for example, contains no final or valid word,
+but it is fresh, cordial, and frank, and no other prose contributor,
+again saving the one great name, has anything to say that is so
+readable. Nearly all the rest is extinct, and the _Dial_ now finds
+itself far away from the sunshine of human interest.
+
+In 1841 the first series of Emerson's Essays was published, and three
+years later the second. The Poems were first collected in 1847, but the
+final version was not made until 1876. In 1847 Emerson paid his second
+visit to England, and delivered his lectures on Representative Men,
+collected and published in 1850. The books are said to have had a very
+slow sale, but the essays and lectures published in 1860, with the
+general title of _The Conduct of Life_, started with a sale of 2,500
+copies, though that volume has never been considered by the Emersonian
+adept to contain most of the pure milk of the Word.
+
+Then came that great event in the history of men and institutions, the
+Civil War. We look with anxiety for the part played by the serene
+thinker when the hour had struck for violent and heroic action. Emerson
+had hitherto been a Free Soiler; he had opposed the extension of
+slavery; and he favoured its compulsory extinction, with compensation on
+the plan of our own policy in the West Indies. He had never joined the
+active Abolitionists, nor did he see 'that there was any particular
+thing for him to do in it then.' 'Though I sometimes accept a popular
+call, and preach on Temperance or the Abolition of Slavery, I am sure to
+feel, before I have done with it, what an intrusion it is into another
+sphere, and so much loss of virtue in my own' (_To Carlyle_, 1844). But
+he missed no occasion of showing that in conviction and aim he was with
+good men. The infirmities of fanatics never hid from him either the
+transcendent purity of their motives or the grandeur of their cause.
+This is ever the test of the scholar: whether he allows intellectual
+fastidiousness to stand between him and the great issues of his time.
+'Cannot the English,' he cried out to Carlyle, 'leave cavilling at petty
+failures and bad manners and at the dunce part, and leap to the
+suggestions and finger-pointings of the gods, which, above the
+understanding, feed the hopes and guide the wills of men?' These
+finger-pointings Emerson did not mistake. He spoke up for Garrison. John
+Brown was several times in Concord, and found a hearty welcome in
+Emerson's house. When Brown made his raid at Harper's Ferry, and the
+crisis became gradually sharper, Emerson felt that the time had come,
+and his voice was raised in clear tones. After the sword is drawn, it is
+deeds not words that interest and decide; but whenever the word of the
+student was needed Emerson was ready to give the highest expression to
+all that was best in his countrymen's mood during that greatest ordeal
+of our time. The inward regeneration of the individual had ever been the
+key to his teaching, and this teaching had been one of the forces that,
+like central fire in men's minds, nourished the heroism of the North in
+its immortal battle.
+
+The exaltation of national character produced by the Civil War opened
+new and wider acceptance for a great moral and spiritual teacher, and
+from the close of the war until his death in 1882, Emerson's ascendency
+within his own sphere of action was complete, and the public recognition
+of him universal. Of story, there is no more to tell. He pursued his old
+way of reading, meditating, conversing, and public lecturing, almost to
+the end. The afternoon of his life was cloudless as the earlier day, and
+the shades of twilight fell in unbroken serenity. In his last years
+there was a partial failure of his memory, and more than one pathetic
+story is told of this tranquil and gradual eclipse. But 'to the last,
+even when the events of yesterday were occasionally obscured, his memory
+of the remote past was unclouded; he would tell about the friends of his
+early and middle life with unbroken vigour.' So, tended in his home by
+warm filial devotion, and surrounded by the reverent kindness of his
+village neighbours, this wise and benign man slowly passed away (April
+27, 1882).[4]
+
+[Footnote 4: The reader who seeks full information about Emerson's life
+will find it scattered in various volumes: among them are--
+
+_Ralph Waldo Emerson_; by George Willis Cooke (Sampson Low & Co.,
+1882)--a very diligent and instructive work.
+
+_R.W.E._; by Alexander Ireland (Simpkin, Marshall, & Co. 1882),
+described by Carlyle, and known by others, as 'full of energy and broad
+sagacity and practicality; infinitely well affected to the man Emerson
+too,'--and full moreover of that intellectual enthusiasm which in his
+Scotch countrymen goes so often with their practicalities.
+
+_Emerson, at Home and Abroad_; by Moncure D. Conway (Truebner & Co.,
+1883): the work of a faithful disciple, who knew Emerson well, and has
+here recorded many interesting anecdotes and traits.]
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+
+It cannot be truly said that Emerson is one of the writers who make
+their way more easily into our minds by virtue of style. That his
+writing has quality and flavour none but a pure pedant would deny. His
+more fervent votaries, however, provoke us with a challenge that goes
+far beyond this. They declare that the finish, charm, and beauty of the
+writing are as worthy of remark as the truth and depth of the thought.
+It is even 'unmatchable and radiant,' says one. Such exaggerations can
+have no reference to any accepted standard. It would in truth, have been
+a marvel if Emerson had excelled in the virtues of the written page, for
+most of his published work was originally composed and used for the
+platform. Everybody knows how different are the speaker's devices for
+gaining possession of his audience, from the writer's means of winning,
+persuading, and impressing the attention of his reader. The key to the
+difference may be that in the speech the personality of the orator
+before our eyes gives of itself that oneness and continuity of
+communication, which the writer has to seek in the orderly sequence and
+array of marshalled sentence and well-sustained period. One of the
+traits that every critic notes in Emerson's writing, is that it is so
+abrupt, so sudden in its transitions, so discontinuous, so
+inconsecutive. Dislike of a sentence that drags made him unconscious of
+the quality, that French critics name _coulant_. Everything is thrown in
+just as it comes, and sometimes the pell-mell is enough to persuade us
+that Pope did not exaggerate when he said that no one qualification is
+so likely to make a good writer, as the power of rejecting his own
+thoughts.
+
+His manner as a lecturer, says Dr. Holmes, was an illustration of his
+way of thinking. 'He would lose his place just as his mind would drop
+its thought and pick up another, twentieth cousin or no relation at all
+to it.' The same manner, whether we liken it to mosaic or to
+kaleidoscope, marks his writing. It makes him hard to follow, oracular,
+and enigmatical. 'Can you tell me,' asked one of his neighbour, while
+Emerson was lecturing, 'what connection there is between that last
+sentence and the one that went before, and what connection it all has
+with Plato?' 'None, my friend, save in God!' This is excellent in a
+seer, but less so in the writer.
+
+Apart from his difficult staccato, Emerson is not free from secondary
+faults. He uses words that are not only odd, but vicious in
+construction; he is not always grammatically correct; he is sometimes
+oblique, and he is often clumsy; and there is a visible feeling after
+epigrams that do not always come. When people say that Emerson's style
+must be good and admirable because it fits his thought, they forget that
+though it is well that a robe should fit, there is still something to be
+said about its cut and fashion.
+
+No doubt, to borrow Carlyle's expression, 'the talent is not the chief
+question here: the idea--that is the chief question.' We do not profess
+to be of those to whom mere style is as dear as it was to Plutarch; of
+him it was said that he would have made Pompey win the battle of
+Pharsalia, if it could have given a better turn to a phrase. It would
+not be worth while to speak of form in a thinker to whom our debt is so
+large for his matter, if there were not so much bad literary imitation
+of Emerson. Dr. Holmes mournfully admits that 'one who talks like
+Emerson or like Carlyle soon finds himself surrounded by a crowd of
+walking phonographs, who mechanically reproduce his mental and oral
+accents. Emerson was before long talking in the midst of a babbling
+Simonetta of echoes.' Inferior writers have copied the tones of the
+oracle without first making sure of the inspiration. They forget that a
+platitude is not turned into a profundity by being dressed up as a
+conundrum. Pithiness in him dwindles into tenuity in them; honest
+discontinuity in the master is made an excuse for finical incoherencies
+in the disciples; the quaint, ingenious, and unexpected collocations of
+the original degenerate in the imitators into a trick of unmeaning
+surprise and vapid antithesis; and his pregnant sententiousness set the
+fashion of a sententiousness that is not fertility but only hydropsy.
+This curious infection, which has spread into divers forms of American
+literature that are far removed from philosophy, would have been
+impossible if the teacher had been as perfect in expression as he was
+pure, diligent, and harmonious in his thinking.
+
+Yet, as happens to all fine minds, there came to Emerson ways of
+expression deeply marked with character. On every page there is set the
+strong stamp of sincerity, and the attraction of a certain artlessness;
+the most awkward sentence rings true; and there is often a pure and
+simple note that touches us more than if it were the perfection of
+elaborated melody. The uncouth procession of the periods discloses the
+travail of the thought, and that too is a kind of eloquence. An honest
+reader easily forgives the rude jolt or unexpected start, when it shows
+a thinker faithfully working his way along arduous and unworn tracks.
+Even at the roughest, Emerson often interjects a delightful cadence. As
+he says of Landor, his sentences are cubes which will stand firm, place
+them how or where you will. He criticised Swedenborg for being
+superfluously explanatory, and having an exaggerated feeling of the
+ignorance of men. 'Men take truths of this nature,' said Emerson, 'very
+fast;' and his own style does no doubt very boldly take this capacity
+for granted in us. In 'choice and pith of diction,' again, of which Mr.
+Lowell speaks, he hits the mark with a felicity that is almost his own
+in this generation. He is terse, concentrated, and free from the
+important blunder of mistaking intellectual dawdling for meditation. Nor
+in fine does his abruptness ever impede a true urbanity. The accent is
+homely and the apparel plain, but his bearing has a friendliness, a
+courtesy, a hospitable humanity, which goes nearer to our hearts than
+either literary decoration or rhetorical unction. That modest and
+lenient fellow-feeling which gave such charm to his companionship
+breathes in his gravest writing, and prevents us from finding any page
+of it cold or hard or dry.
+
+Though Emerson was always urgent for 'the soul of the world, clean from
+all vestige of tradition,' yet his work is full of literature. He at
+least lends no support to the comforting fallacy of the indolent, that
+originating power does not go with assimilating power. Few thinkers on
+his level display such breadth of literary reference. Unlike Wordsworth,
+who was content with a few tattered volumes on a kitchen shelf, Emerson
+worked among books. When he was a boy he found a volume of Montaigne,
+and he never forgot the delight and wonder in which he lived with it.
+His library is described as filled with well-selected authors, with
+curious works from the eastern world, with many editions in both Greek
+and English of his favourite Plato; while portraits of Shakespeare,
+Montaigne, Goethe, Dante, looked down upon him from the walls. Produce a
+volume of Plato or of Shakespeare, he says somewhere, or '_only remind
+us of their names_,' and instantly we come into a feeling of longevity.
+That is the scholar's speech. Opening a single essay at random, we find
+in it citations from Montesquieu, Schiller, Milton, Herodotus, Shelley,
+Plutarch, Franklin, Bacon, Van Helmont, Goethe. So little does Emerson
+lend himself to the idle vanity of seeking all the treasures of wisdom
+in his own head, or neglecting the hoarded authority of the ages. It is
+true that he held the unholy opinion that a translation is as good as
+the original, or better. Nor need we suppose that he knew that pious
+sensation of the book-lover, the feel of a library; that he had any of
+the collector's amiable foolishness about rare editions; or that he
+nourished festive thoughts of 'that company of honest old fellows in
+their leathern jackets in his study,' as comrades in a sober old-world
+conviviality. His books were for spiritual use, like maps and charts of
+the mind of man, and not much for 'excellence of divertisement.' He had
+the gift of bringing his reading to bear easily upon the tenor of his
+musings, and knew how to use books as an aid to thinking, instead of
+letting them take the edge off thought. There was assuredly nothing of
+the compiler or the erudite collegian in him. It is a graver defect that
+he introduces the great names of literature without regard for true
+historical perspective in their place, either in relation to one
+another, or to the special phases of social change and shifting time.
+Still let his admirers not forget that Emerson was in his own way
+Scholar no less than Sage.
+
+A word or two must be said of Emerson's verses. He disclaimed, for his
+own part, any belief that they were poems. Enthusiasts, however, have
+been found to declare that Emerson 'moves more constantly than any
+recent poet in the atmosphere of poesy. Since Milton and Spenser no
+man--not even Goethe--has equalled Emerson in this trait.' _The
+Problem_, according to another, 'is wholly unique, and transcends all
+contemporary verse in grandeur of style.' Such poetry, they say, is like
+Westminster Abbey, 'though the Abbey is inferior in boldness.' Yet,
+strangely enough, while Emerson's poetic form is symbolised by the
+flowing lines of Gothic architecture, it is also 'akin to Doric
+severity.' With all the good will in the world, I do not find myself
+able to rise to these heights; in fact, they rather seem to deserve
+Wordsworth's description, as mere obliquities of admiration.
+
+Taken as a whole, Emerson's poetry is of that kind which springs, not
+from excitement of passion or feeling, but from an intellectual demand
+for intense and sublimated expression. We see the step that lifts him
+straight from prose to verse, and that step is the shortest possible.
+The flight is awkward and even uncouth, as if nature had intended feet
+rather than wings. It is hard to feel of Emerson, any more than
+Wordsworth could feel of Goethe, that his poetry is inevitable. The
+measure, the colour, the imaginative figures, are the product of search,
+not of spontaneous movements of sensation and reflection combining in a
+harmony that is delightful to the ear. They are the outcome of a
+discontent with prose, not of that high-strung sensibility which compels
+the true poet into verse. This must not be said without exception. _The
+Threnody_, written after the death of a deeply loved child, is a
+beautiful and impressive lament. Pieces like _Musquetaquid_, the
+_Adirondacs_, the _Snowstorm_, _The Humble-Bee_, are pretty and pleasant
+bits of pastoral. In all we feel the pure breath of nature, and
+
+                     The primal mind,
+   That flows in streams, that breathes in wind.
+
+There is a certain charm of _naivete_, that recalls the unvarnished
+simplicity of the Italian painters before Raphael. But who shall say
+that he discovers that 'spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling,' which
+a great poet has made the fundamental element of poetry? There are too
+few melodious progressions; the melting of the thought with natural
+images and with human feeling is incomplete; we miss the charm of
+perfect assimilation, fusion, and incorporation; and in the midst of all
+the vigour and courage of his work, Emerson has almost forgotten that it
+is part of the poet's business to give pleasure. It is true that
+pleasure is sometimes undoubtedly to be had from verse that is not above
+mediocrity, and Wordsworth once designed to write an essay examining why
+bad poetry pleases. Poetry that pleases may be bad, but it is equally
+true that no poetry which fails to please can be really good. Some one
+says that gems of expression make Emerson's essays oracular and his
+verse prophetic. But, to borrow Horace's well-known phrase, 'tis not
+enough that poems should be sublime; _dulcia sunto_,--they must be
+touching and sympathetic. Only a bold critic will say that this is a
+mark of Emerson's poems. They are too naked, unrelated, and cosmic; too
+little clad with the vesture of human associations. Light and shade do
+not alternate in winning and rich relief, and as Carlyle found it, the
+radiance is 'thin piercing,' leaving none of the sweet and dim recesses
+so dear to the lover of nature. We may, however, well be content to
+leave a man of Emerson's calibre to choose his own exercises. It is best
+to suppose that he knew what he was about when he wandered into the
+fairyland of verse, and that in such moments he found nothing better to
+his hand. Yet if we are bidden to place him among the poets, it is
+enough to open Keats at the _Ode to a Nightingale_, or Shelley at _The
+Cloud_, the _Skylark_, or the _Sensitive Plant_, or Wordsworth at
+_Tintern Abbey_, or Goethe at _Das Goettliche_, or Victor Hugo in the
+_Contemplations_. Then in spite of occasional formality of rhythm and
+artifice in ornament, we cannot choose but perceive how tuneful is their
+music, how opulent the resources of their imagination, how various,
+subtle, and penetrating their affinity for the fortunes and sympathies
+of men, and next how modest a portion of all these rare and exquisite
+qualifications reveals itself in the verse of Emerson.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+
+Few minds of the first order that have busied themselves in
+contemplating the march of human fortunes, have marched forward in a
+straight line of philosophic speculation unbroken to the end. Like
+Burke, like Coleridge, like Wordsworth, at a given point they have a
+return upon themselves. Having mastered the truths of one side, their
+eyes open to what is true on the other; the work of revolution finished
+or begun, they experience fatigue and reaction. In Hawthorne's romance,
+after Miles Coverdale had passed his spring and summer among the
+Utopians of Blithedale, he felt that the time had come when he must for
+sheer sanity's sake go and hold a little talk with the Conservatives,
+the merchants, the politicians, 'and all those respectable old
+blockheads, who still in this intangibility and mistiness of affairs
+kept a death-grip on one or two ideas which had not come into vogue
+since yesterday morning.' 'No sagacious man,' says Hawthorne, 'will long
+retain his sagacity if he lives exclusively among reformers and
+progressive people, without periodically returning into the settled
+system of things, to correct himself by a new observation from that old
+stand-point.' Yet good men rightly hoped that 'out of the very thoughts
+that were wildest and most destructive might grow a wisdom, holy, calm,
+and pure, and that should incarnate itself with the substance of a noble
+and happy life.' Now that we are able to look back on the crisis of the
+times that Hawthorne describes, we perceive that it was as he expected,
+and that in the person of Emerson the ferment and dissolvency of thought
+worked itself out in a strain of wisdom of the highest and purest.
+
+In 1842 Emerson told Carlyle, in vindication of the _Dial_ and its
+transcendentalisms, that if the direction of their speculations was as
+deplorable as Carlyle declared, it was yet a remarkable fact for history
+that all the bright young men and young women in New England, 'quite
+ignorant of each other, take the world so, and come and make confession
+to fathers and mothers--the boys, that they do not wish to go into
+trade; the girls, that they do not like morning calls and evening
+parties. They are all religious, but hate the churches; they reject all
+the ways of living of other men, but have none to offer in their stead.'
+
+It is worth while to transcribe from the _Dial_ itself the scene at one
+of the many Bostonian Conventions of that date--the Friends of Universal
+Progress, in 1840:--'The composition of the Assembly was rich and
+various. The singularity and latitude of the summons drew together, from
+all parts of New England, and also from the Middle States, men of every
+shade of opinion, from the straightest orthodoxy to the wildest heresy,
+and many persons whose church was a church of one member only. A great
+variety of dialect and of costume was noticed; a great deal of
+confusion, eccentricity, and freak appeared, as well as of zeal and
+enthusiasm. If the Assembly was disorderly, it was picturesque. Madmen,
+madwomen, men with beards, Dunkers, Muggletonians, Come-outers,
+Groaners, Agrarians, Seventh-day Baptists, Quakers, Abolitionists,
+Calvinists, Unitarians, and philosophers, all came successively to the
+top, and seized their moment, if not their _hour_, wherein to chide or
+pray or preach or protest. The faces were a study. The most daring
+innovators, and the champions-until-death of the old cause, sat side by
+side. The still living merit of the oldest New England families, glowing
+yet after several generations, encountered the founders of families,
+fresh merit emerging and expanding the brows to a new breadth, and
+lighting a clownish face with sacred fire. The Assembly was
+characterised by the predominance of a certain plain sylvan strength and
+earnestness' (_Dial_, iii. 101).
+
+If the shade of Bossuet could have looked down upon the scene, he would
+have found fresh material for the sarcasms which a hundred and fifty
+years before he had lavished on the Variations of the Protestant
+Churches. Yet this curious movement, bleak and squalid as it may seem to
+men nurtured in the venerable decorum of ecclesiastical tradition, was
+at bottom identical with the yearning for stronger spiritual emotions,
+and the cravings of religious zeal, that had in older times filled
+monasteries, manned the great orders, and sent wave upon wave of
+pilgrims and crusaders to holy places. 'It is really amazing,' as was
+said by Franklin or somebody else of his fashion of utilitarianism,
+'that one of the passions which it is hardest to develop in man is the
+passion for his own material comfort and temporal well-being.'
+
+Emerson has put on record this mental intoxication of the progressive
+people around him, with a pungency that might satisfy the Philistines
+themselves.[5] From 1820 to 1844, he said, New England witnessed a
+general criticism and attack on institutions, and in all practical
+activities a gradual withdrawal of tender consciences from the social
+organisations. Calvinists and Quakers began to split into old school and
+new school. Goethe and the Germans became known. Swedenborg, in spite of
+his taint of craziness, by the mere prodigy of his speculations, began
+'to spread himself into the minds of thousands'--including in no
+unimportant degree the mind of Emerson himself.[6] Literary criticism
+counted for something in the universal thaw, and even the genial
+humanity of Dickens helped to break up the indurations of old theology.
+Most powerful of all was the indirect influence of science. Geology
+disclosed law in an unsuspected region, and astronomy caused men to
+apprehend that 'as the earth is not the centre of the Universe, so it is
+not the special scene or stage on which the drama of divine justice is
+played before the assembled angels of heaven.'
+
+[Footnote 5: _New England Reformers: Essays_, ii. 511-519.]
+
+[Footnote 6: The Swedenborgians--'a sect which, I think, must contribute
+more than all other sects to the new faith, which must come out of
+all.'--_To Carlyle_, 1834.]
+
+A temper of scrutiny and dissent broke out in every direction. In
+almost every relation men and women asked themselves by what right
+Conformity levied its tax, and whether they were not false to their own
+consciences in paying it. 'What a fertility of projects for the
+salvation of the world! One apostle thought that all men should go to
+farming; and another thought that no man should buy or sell--that use of
+money was the cardinal evil; another thought the mischief was in our
+diet--that we eat and drink damnation. These made unleavened bread, and
+were foes to the death to fermentation. Others attacked the system of
+agriculture, the use of animal manures in farming, and the tyranny of
+man over brute instinct. These abuses polluted his food. The ox must be
+taken from the plough, and the horse from the cart; the hundred acres of
+the farm must be spaded, and the man must walk wherever boats and
+locomotives will not carry him.... Others assailed particular
+vocations.... Others attacked the institution of marriage as the
+fountain of social evils.... Who gave me the money with which I bought
+my coat? Why should professional labour and that of the counting-house
+be paid so disproportionately to the labour of the porter and the
+woodsawer? Am I not too protected a person? Is there not a wide
+disparity between the lot of me and the lot of thee, my poor brother, my
+poor sister?'
+
+One of Emerson's glories is, that while wise enough to discern the peril
+and folly of these excesses, he was under no temptation to fall back. It
+was giddy work, but he kept his eye on the fixed stars. Certainly
+Emerson was not assailed by the stress of mighty and violent events, as
+Burke and Wordsworth were in some sense turned into reactionaries by the
+calamities of revolution in France. The 'distemper of enthusiasm,' as
+Shaftesbury would have called it, took a mild and harmless form in New
+England: there the work in hand was not the break-up of a social system,
+but only the mental evolution of new ideals, the struggle of an ethical
+revival, and the satisfaction of a livelier spirit of scruple. In face
+of all delirations, Emerson kept on his way of radiant sanity and
+perfect poise. Do not, he warned his enthusiasts, expend all energy on
+some accidental evil, and so lose sanity and power of benefit. '_It is
+of little moment that one or two or twenty errors of our social system
+be corrected, but of much that the man be in his senses._ Society gains
+nothing whilst a man, not himself renovated, attempts to renovate things
+around him; he has become tediously good in some particular, but
+negligent or narrow in the rest, and hypocrisy and vanity are often the
+disgusting result. It is handsomer to remain in the establishment,
+better than the establishment, and conduct that in the best manner, than
+to make a sally against evil by some single improvement, without
+supporting it by a total regeneration.'
+
+Emerson, then, is one of the few moral reformers whose mission lay in
+calming men rather than in rousing them, and in the inculcation of
+serenity rather than in the spread of excitement. Though he had been
+ardent in protest against the life conventional, as soon as the protest
+ran off into extravagance, instead of either following or withstanding
+it with rueful petulancies, he delicately and successfully turned a
+passing agitation into an enduring revival. The last password given by
+the dying Antonine to the officer of the watch was _AEquanimitas_. In a
+brighter, wider, and more living sense than was possible even to the
+noblest in the middle of the second century, this, too, was the
+watchword of the Emersonian teaching. Instead of cultivating the
+tormenting and enfeebling spirit of scruple, instead of multiplying
+precepts, he bade men not to crush their souls out under the burden of
+Duty; they are to remember that a wise life is not wholly filled up by
+commandments to do and to abstain from doing. Hence, we have in Emerson
+the teaching of a vigorous morality without the formality of dogma and
+the deadly tedium of didactics. If not laughter, of which only
+Shakespeare among the immortals has a copious and unfailing spring,
+there is at least gaiety in every piece, and a cordial injunction to men
+to find joy in their existence to the full. Happiness is with him an aim
+that we are at liberty to seek directly and without periphrasis.
+Provided men do not lose their balance by immersing themselves in their
+pleasures, they are right, according to Emerson, in pursuing them. But
+joy is no neighbour to artificial ecstasy. What Emerson counsels the
+poet, he intended in its own way and degree for all men. The poet's
+habit of living, he says beautifully, should be set on a key so low
+that the commonest influences should delight him. 'That spirit which
+suffices quiet hearts, which seems to come forth to such from every dry
+knoll of sere grass, from every pine-stump and half-embedded stone on
+which the dull March sun shines, comes forth to the poor and hungry, and
+such as are of simple taste. If thou fill thy brain with Boston and New
+York, with fashion and covetousness, and wilt stimulate thy jaded senses
+with wine and French coffee, thou shalt find no radiance of wisdom in
+the lonely waste of the pinewoods' (ii. 328).
+
+It was perhaps the same necessity of having to guide men away from the
+danger of transcendental aberrations, while yet holding up lofty ideals
+of conduct, that made Emerson say something about many traits of conduct
+to which the ordinary high-flying moralist of the treatise or the pulpit
+seldom deigns to stoop. The essays on Domestic Life, on Behaviour, on
+Manners, are examples of the attention that Emerson paid to the right
+handling of the outer conditions of a wise and brave life. With him
+small circumstances are the occasions of great qualities. The parlour
+and the counting-house are as fit scenes for fortitude, self-control,
+considerateness, and vision, as the senate or the battlefield. He
+re-classifies the virtues. No modern, for example, has given so
+remarkable a place to Friendship among the sacred necessities of
+well-endowed character. Neither Plato nor Cicero, least of all Bacon,
+has risen to so noble and profound a conception of this most strangely
+commingled of all human affections. There is no modern thinker, again,
+who makes Beauty--all that is gracious, seemly, and becoming--so
+conspicuous and essential a part of life. It would be inexact to say
+that Emerson blended the beautiful with the precepts of duty or of
+prudence into one complex sentiment, as the Greeks did, but his theory
+of excellence might be better described than any other of modern times
+by the [Greek: kalokagathia], the virtue of the true gentleman, as set
+down in Plato and Aristotle.
+
+So untrue is it that in his quality of Sage Emerson always haunted the
+perilous altitudes of Transcendentalism, 'seeing nothing under him but
+the everlasting snows of Himalaya, the Earth shrinking to a Planet, and
+the indigo Firmament sowing itself with daylight stars.' He never thinks
+it beneath his dignity to touch a point of minor morals, or to say a
+good word for what he somewhere calls subterranean prudence. Emerson
+values mundane circumspection as highly as Franklin, and gives to
+manners and rules of daily behaviour an importance that might have
+satisfied Chesterfield. In fact, the worldly and the selfish are
+mistaken when they assume that Common Sense is their special and
+exclusive portion. The small Transcendentalist goes in search of truth
+with the meshes of his net so large that he takes no fish. His
+landscapes are all horizon. It is only the great idealists, like
+Emerson, who take care not to miss the real.
+
+The remedy for the break-down of the old churches would, in the mind of
+the egotist, have been to found a new one. But Emerson knew well before
+Carlyle told him, that 'no truly great man, from Jesus Christ downwards,
+ever founded a sect--I mean wilfully intended founding one.' Not only
+did he establish no sect, but he preached a doctrine that was positively
+incompatible with the erection of any sect upon its base. His whole hope
+for the world lies in the internal and independent resources of the
+individual. If mankind is to be raised to a higher plane of happiness
+and worth, it can only be by the resolution of each to live his own life
+with fidelity and courage. The spectacle of one liberated from the
+malign obstructions to free human character, is a stronger incentive to
+others than exhortation, admonition, or any sum of philanthropical
+association. If I, in my own person and daily walk, quietly resist
+heaviness of custom, coldness of hope, timidity of faith, then without
+wishing, contriving, or even knowing it, I am a light silently drawing
+as many as have vision and are fit to walk in the same path. Whether I
+do that or not, I am at least obeying the highest law of my own being.
+
+In the appeal to the individual to be true to himself, Emerson does not
+stand apart from other great moral reformers. His distinction lies in
+the peculiar direction that he gives to his appeal. All those
+regenerators of the individual, from Rousseau down to J.S. Mill, who
+derived their first principles, whether directly or indirectly, from
+Locke and the philosophy of sensation, experience, and acquisition,
+began operations with the will. They laid all their stress on the
+shaping of motives by education, institutions, and action, and placed
+virtue in deliberateness and in exercise. Emerson, on the contrary,
+coming from the intuitional camp, holds that our moral nature is
+vitiated by any interference of our will. Translated into the language
+of theology, his doctrine makes regeneration to be a result of grace,
+and the guide of conscience to be the indwelling light; though, unlike
+the theologians, he does not trace either of these mysterious gifts to
+the special choice and intervention of a personal Deity. Impulsive and
+spontaneous innocence is higher than the strength to conquer temptation.
+The natural motions of the soul are so much better than the voluntary
+ones. 'There is no such thing as manufacturing a strong will,' for all
+great force is real and elemental. In all this Emerson suffers from the
+limitations that are inseparable from pure spiritualism in all its
+forms. As if the spiritual constitution were ever independent of the
+material organisation bestowed upon the individual at the moment when he
+is conceived, or of the social conditions that close about him from the
+instant of his birth. The reaction, however, against what was
+superficial in the school of the eighteenth century went to its extreme
+length in Emerson, and blinded his eyes to the wisdom, the profundity,
+and the fruitfulness of their leading speculations. It is enough for us
+to note the fact in passing, without plunging into contention on the
+merits. All thoughts are always ready, potentially if not actually. Each
+age selects and assimilates the philosophy that is most apt for its
+wants. Institutions needed regeneration in France, and so those thinkers
+came into vogue and power who laid most stress on the efficacy of good
+institutions. In Emerson's America, the fortunes of the country made
+external circumstances safe for a man, and his chance was assured; so a
+philosophy was welcomed which turned the individual inwards upon
+himself, and taught him to consider his own character and spiritual
+faculty as something higher than anything external could ever be.
+
+Again to make a use which is not uninstructive of the old tongue,
+Emerson is for faith before works. Nature, he says, will not have us
+fret and fume. She does not like our benevolences, our churches, our
+pauper-societies, much better than she likes our frauds and wars. They
+are but so many yokes to the neck. Our painful labours are unnecessary
+and fruitless. A higher law than that of our will regulates events. If
+we look wider, things are all alike: laws and creeds and modes of living
+are a travesty of truth. Only in our easy, simple, spontaneous action
+are we strong, and by contenting ourselves with obedience we become
+strong. Our real action is in our silent moments. Why should we be awed
+by the name of Action? 'Tis a trick of the senses.[7]
+
+[Footnote 7: _Essays_: Spiritual Laws, etc.]
+
+Justification by faith has had a savour of antinomianism and
+indifferency ever since the day when Saint Paul so emphatically denied
+that he made void the law through faith, and said of certain
+calumniators that their damnation was just. Emerson was open to the same
+charge, and he knew it. In a passage already quoted, Emerson says
+good-humouredly that his wife keeps his philosophy from running to
+antinomianism He could not mistake the tendency of saying that, if you
+look wider, things are all alike, and that we are in the grasp of a
+higher law than our own will. On that side he only paints over in
+rainbow colours the grim doctrine which the High Calvinist and the
+Materialistic Necessarian hold in common.
+
+All great minds perceive all things; the only difference lies in the
+order in which they shall choose to place them. Emerson, for good reason
+of his own, dwelt most on fate, character, and the unconscious and
+hidden sources, but he writes many a page of vigorous corrective. It is
+wholesome, he says, to man to look not at Fate, but the other way; the
+practical view is the other. As Mill says of his wish to disbelieve the
+doctrine of the formation of character by circumstances--'Remembering
+the wish of Fox respecting the doctrine of resistance to governments,
+that it might never be forgotten by Kings nor remembered by subjects, I
+said that it would be a blessing if the doctrine of necessity could be
+believed by all _quoad_ the characters of others, and disbelieved in
+regard to their own.' So Emerson knew well enough that man's
+consciousness of freedom, action, and power over outer circumstances
+might be left to take care of itself, as the practical view generally
+can. The world did not need him to tell it that a man's fortunes are a
+part of his character. His task was the more far-reaching one of drawing
+them to recognise that love is the important thing, not benevolent
+works; that only impure men consider life as it is reflected in events,
+opinions, and persons; that they fail to see the action until it is
+done, whereas what is far better worth considering is that its moral
+element prae-existed in the actor.
+
+It would be easy to show that Emerson has not worked out his answers to
+these eternal enigmas, for ever reproducing themselves in all ages, in
+such a form as to defy the logician's challenge. He never shrinks from
+inconsistent propositions. He was unsystematic on principle. 'He thought
+that truth has so many facets that the best we can do is to notice each
+in turn, without troubling ourselves whether they agree.' When we
+remember the inadequateness of human language, the infirmities of our
+vision, and all the imperfections of mental apparatus, the wise men will
+not disdain even partial glimpses of a scene too vast and intricate to
+be comprehended in a single map. To complain that Emerson is no
+systematic reasoner is to miss the secret of most of those who have
+given powerful impulses to the spiritual ethics of an age. It is not a
+syllogism that turns the heart towards purification of life and aim; it
+is not the logically enchained propositions of a _sorites_, but the
+flash of illumination, the indefinable accent, that attracts masses of
+men to a new teacher and a high doctrine. The teasing _ergoteur_ is
+always right, but he never leads nor improves nor inspires.
+
+Any one can see how this side of the Emersonian gospel harmonised with
+the prepossessions of a new democracy. Trust, he said, to leading
+instincts, not to traditional institutions, nor social ordering, nor the
+formulae of books and schools for the formation of character; the great
+force is real and elemental. In art, Mr. Ruskin has explained the
+palpable truth that semi-civilised nations can colour better than we do,
+and that an Indian shawl and China vase are inimitable by us. 'It is
+their glorious ignorance of all rules that does it; the pure and true
+instincts have play, and do their work; and the moment we begin teaching
+people any rules about colour, and make them do this or that, we crush
+the instinct, generally for ever' (_Modern Painters_, iii. 91). Emerson
+said what comes to the same thing about morals. The philosophy of
+democracy, or the government of a great mixed community by itself, rests
+on a similar assumption in politics. The foundations of a self-governed
+society on a great scale are laid in leading instincts. Emerson was
+never tired of saying that we are wiser than we know. The path of
+science and of letters is not the way to nature. What was done in a
+remote age by men whose names have resounded far, has no deeper sense
+than what you and I do to-day. What food, or experience, or succour have
+Olympiads and Consulates for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, for the Kanaka
+in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter? When he is
+in this vein Emerson often approaches curiously near to Rousseau's
+memorable and most potent paradox of 1750, that the sciences corrupt
+manners.[8]
+
+[Footnote 8: What so good, asks Rousseau, 'as a sweet and precious
+ignorance, the treasure of a pure soul at peace with itself, which
+finds all its blessedness in inward retreat, in testifying to itself
+its own innocence, and which feels no need of seeking a warped and
+hollow happiness in the opinion of other people as to its
+enlightenment?']
+
+Most men will now agree that when the great fiery trial came, the
+Emersonian faith and the democratic assumption abundantly justified
+themselves. Even Carlyle wrote to Emerson at last (June 4, 1871): 'In my
+occasional explosions against Anarchy, and my inextinguishable hatred of
+_it_, I privately whisper to myself, "Could any Friedrich Wilhelm now,
+or Friedrich, or most perfect Governor you could hope to realise, guide
+forward what is America's essential task at present, faster or more
+completely than 'Anarchic America' is now doing?" Such "Anarchy" has a
+great deal to say for itself.'
+
+The traits of comparison between Carlyle and Emerson may be regarded as
+having been pretty nearly exhausted for the present, until time has
+changed the point of view. In wit, humour, pathos, penetration, poetic
+grandeur, and fervid sublimity of imagination, Carlyle is the superior
+beyond measure. But Emerson is as much his superior in that high and
+transparent sanity, which is not further removed from midsummer madness
+than it is from a terrene and grovelling mediocrity. This sanity, among
+other things, kept Emerson in line with the ruling tendencies of his
+age, and his teaching brings all the aid that abstract teaching can,
+towards the solution of the moral problems of modern societies. Carlyle
+chose to fling himself headlong and blindfold athwart the great currents
+of things, against all the forces and elements that are pushing modern
+societies forward. Beginning in his earlier work with the same faith as
+Emerson in leading instincts, he came to dream that the only leading
+instinct worth thinking about is that of self-will, mastery, force, and
+violent strength. Emerson was for basing the health of a modern
+commonwealth on the only real strength, and the only kind of force that
+can be relied upon, namely, the honest, manly, simple, and emancipated
+character of the citizen. This gives to his doctrine a hold and a prize
+on the work of the day, and makes him our helper. Carlyle's perverse
+reaction had wrecked and stranded him when the world came to ask him for
+direction. In spite of his resplendent genius, he had no direction to
+give, and was only able in vague and turbid torrents of words to hide a
+shallow and obsolete lesson. His confession to Emerson, quoted above,
+looks as if at last he had found this out for himself.
+
+If Emerson stood thus well towards the social and political drift of
+events, his teaching was no less harmoniously related to the new and
+most memorable drift of science which set in by his side. It is a
+misconception to pretend that he was a precursor of the Darwinian
+theory. Evolution, as a possible explanation of the ordering of the
+universe, is a great deal older than either Emerson or Darwin. What
+Darwin did was to work out in detail and with masses of minute evidence
+a definite hypothesis of the specific conditions under which new forms
+are evolved. Emerson, of course, had no definite hypothesis of this
+sort, nor did he possess any of the knowledge necessary to give it
+value. But it was his good fortune that some of his strongest
+propositions harmonise with the scientific theory of the survival of the
+fittest in the struggle for material existence. He connects his
+exhortation to self-reliance with the law working in nature for
+conservation and growth,--to wit, that 'Power is in nature the essential
+measure of right,' and that 'Nature suffers nothing to remain in her
+kingdom which cannot help itself.' The same strain is constantly
+audible. Nature on every side, within us and without, is for ever
+throwing out new forms and fresh varieties of living and thinking. To
+her experiments in every region there is no end. Those succeed which
+prove to have the best adaptation to the conditions. Let, therefore,
+neither society nor the individual check experiment, originality, and
+infinite variation. Such language, we may see, fits in equally well with
+democracy in politics and with evolution in science. If, moreover,
+modern science gives more prominence to one conception than another, it
+is to that of the natural universe of force and energy, as One and a
+Whole. This too is the great central idea with Emerson, repeated a
+thousand times in prose and in verse, and lying at the very heart of his
+philosophy. Newton's saying that 'the world was made at one cast'
+delights him. 'The secret of the world is that its energies are
+_solidaires_.' Nature 'publishes itself in creatures, reaching from
+particles and spicula, through transformation on transformation to the
+highest symmetries. A little heat, that is, a little motion, is all that
+differences the bald dazzling white and deadly cold poles of the earth
+from the prolific tropical climates.' Not only, as Professor Tyndall
+says, is Emerson's religious sense entirely undaunted by the discoveries
+of science; all such discoveries he comprehends and assimilates. 'By
+Emerson scientific conceptions are continually transmuted into the finer
+forms and warmer lines of an ideal world.'
+
+That these transmutations are often carried by Emerson to the extent of
+vain and empty self-mystifications is hard to deny, even for those who
+have most sympathy with the general scope of his teaching. There are
+pages that to the present writer, at least, after reasonably diligent
+meditation, remain mere abracadabra, incomprehensible and worthless.
+For much of this in Emerson, the influence of Plato is mainly
+responsible, and it may be noted in passing that his account of Plato
+(_Representative Men_) is one of his most unsatisfactory performances.
+'The title of Platonist,' says Mill, 'belongs by far better right to
+those who have been nourished in, and have endeavoured to practise
+Plato's mode of investigation, than to those who are distinguished only
+by the adoption of certain dogmatical conclusions, drawn mostly from the
+least intelligible of his works.' Nothing is gained by concealing that
+not every part of Emerson's work will stand the test of the Elenchus,
+nor bear reduction into honest and intelligible English.
+
+One remarkable result of Emerson's idealism ought not to be passed over.
+'The visible becomes the Bestial,' said Carlyle, 'when it rests not on
+the invisible.' To Emerson all rested on the invisible, and was summed
+up in terms of the invisible, and hence the Bestial was almost unknown
+in his philosophic scheme. Nay, we may say that some mighty phenomena in
+our universe were kept studiously absent from his mind. Here is one of
+the profoundest differences between Emerson and most of those who, on as
+high an altitude, have pondered the same great themes. A small trait
+will serve for illustration. It was well known in his household that he
+could not bear to hear of ailments. 'There is one topic,' he writes,
+'peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational mortals,
+namely, their distempers. If you have not slept, or if you have slept,
+or if you have headache, sciatica, or leprosy, or thunder-stroke, I
+beseech you by all angels to hold your peace, and not pollute the
+morning, to which all the housemates bring serene and pleasant thoughts,
+by corruption and groans. Come out of the azure. Love the
+day'--(_Conduct of Life_, 159).
+
+If he could not endure these minor perturbations of the fair and smiling
+face of daily life, far less did he willingly think of Death. Of nothing
+in all the wide range of universal topics does Emerson say so little as
+of that which has lain in sombre mystery at the very core of most
+meditations on life, from Job and Solon down to Bacon and Montaigne.
+Except in two beautiful poems, already mentioned, Death is almost
+banished from his page. It is not the title or the subject of one of his
+essays, only secondarily even of that on Immortality. Love, Friendship,
+Prudence, Heroism, Experience, Manners, Nature, Greatness, and a score
+of other matters--but none to show that he ever sat down to gather into
+separate and concentrated shape his reflections on the terrifying
+phantom that has haunted the mind of man from the very birth of time.
+
+Pascal bade us imagine a number of men in chains and doomed to death;
+some of them each day butchered in sight of the others; those who
+remained watching their own lot in that of their fellows, and awaiting
+their turn in anguish and helplessness. Such, he cried, is the pitiful
+and desperate condition of man. But nature has other cruelties more
+stinging than death. Mill, himself an optimist, yet declares the course
+of natural phenomena to be replete with everything which, when committed
+by human beings is most worthy of abhorrence, so that 'one who
+endeavoured in his actions to imitate the natural course of things would
+be universally seen and acknowledged to be the wickedest of men.' To man
+himself, moreover, 'the most criminal actions are not more unnatural
+than most of the virtues.' We need not multiply from poets and divines,
+from moralists and sages, these grim pictures. The sombre melancholy,
+the savage moral indignation, the passionate intellectual scorn, with
+which life and the universe have filled strong souls, some with one
+emotion and some with another, were all to Emerson in his habitual
+thinking unintelligible and remote. He admits, indeed, that 'the disease
+and deformity around us certify that infraction of natural,
+intellectual, and moral laws, and often violation on violation to breed
+such compound misery.' The way of Providence, he says in another place,
+is a little rude, through earthquakes, fever, the sword of climate, and
+a thousand other hints of ferocity in the interiors of nature.
+Providence has a wild rough incalculable road to its end, and 'it is of
+no use to try to white-wash its huge mixed instrumentalities, or to
+dress up that terrific benefactor in a clean shirt and white neckcloth
+of a student of divinity.' But he only drew from the thought of these
+cruelties of the universe the practical moral that 'our culture must
+not omit the arming of the man.' He is born into the state of war, and
+will therefore do well to acquire a military attitude of soul. There is
+perhaps no better moral than this of the Stoic, but greater
+impressiveness might have marked the lesson, if our teacher had been
+more indulgent to the man's sense of tragedy in that vast drama in which
+he plays his piteous part.
+
+In like manner, Emerson has little to say of that horrid burden and
+impediment on the soul, which the churches call Sin, and which, by
+whatever name we call it, is a very real catastrophe in the moral nature
+of man. He had no eye, like Dante's, for the vileness, the cruelty, the
+utter despicableness to which humanity may be moulded. If he saw them at
+all, it was through the softening and illusive medium of generalised
+phrases. Nor was he ever shocked and driven into himself by 'the immoral
+thoughtlessness' of men. The courses of nature, and the prodigious
+injustices of man in society, affect him with neither horror nor awe. He
+will see no monster if he can help it. For the fatal Nemesis or terrible
+Erinnyes, daughters of Erebus and Night, Emerson substitutes a
+fair-weather abstraction named Compensation. One radical tragedy in
+nature he admits--'the distinction of More and Less.' If I am poor in
+faculty, dim in vision, shut out from opportunity, in every sense an
+outcast from the inheritance of the earth, that seems indeed to be a
+tragedy. 'But see the facts clearly and these mountainous inequalities
+vanish. Love reduces them, as the sun melts the iceberg in the sea. The
+heart and soul of all men being one, this bitterness of His and Mine
+ceases. His is mine.' Surely words, words, words! What can be more idle,
+when one of the world's bitter puzzles is pressed on the teacher, than
+that he should betake himself to an altitude whence it is not visible,
+and then assure us that it is not only invisible, but non-existent? This
+is not to see the facts clearly, but to pour the fumes of obscuration
+round them. When he comforts us by saying 'Love, and you shall be
+loved,' who does not recall cases which make the Jean Valjean of Victor
+Hugo's noble romance not a figment of the theatre, but an all too actual
+type? The believer who looks to another world to redress the wrongs and
+horrors of this; the sage who warns us that the law of life is
+resignation, renunciation, and doing-without (_entbehren sollst
+du_)--each of these has a foothold in common language. But to say that
+all infractions of love and equity are speedily punished--punished by
+fear--and then to talk of the perfect compensation of the universe, is
+mere playing with words, for it does not solve the problem in the terms
+in which men propound it. Emerson, as we have said, held the spirit of
+System in aversion as fettering the liberal play of thought, just as in
+morals, with greater boldness, he rebelled against a minute and cramping
+interpretation of Duty. We are not sure that his own optimistic doctrine
+did not play him the same tyrannical trick, by sealing his eyes to at
+least one half of the actualities of nature and the gruesome
+possibilities of things. It had no unimportant effect on Emerson's
+thought that he was born in a new world that had cut itself loose from
+old history. The black and devious ways through which the race has
+marched are not real in North America, as they are to us in old Europe,
+who live on the very site of secular iniquities, are surrounded by
+monuments of historic crime, and find present and future entangled,
+embittered, inextricably loaded both in blood and in institutions with
+desperate inheritances from the past.
+
+There are many topics, and those no mean topics, on which the best
+authority is not the moralist by profession, as Emerson was, but the man
+of the world. The world hardens, narrows, desiccates common natures, but
+nothing so enriches generous ones. For knowledge of the heart of man, we
+must go to those who were closer to the passions and interests of actual
+and varied life than Emerson ever could have been--to Horace, Montaigne,
+La Bruyere, Swift, Moliere, even to Pope. If a hostile critic were to
+say that Emerson looked at life too much from the outside, as the
+clergyman is apt to do, we should condemn such a remark as a
+disparagement, but we should understand what it is in Emerson that the
+critic means. He has not the temperament of the great humorists, under
+whatever planet they may have been born, jovial, mercurial, or
+saturnine. Even his revolt against formalism is only a new fashion of
+composure, and sometimes comes dangerously near to moral dilettantism.
+The persistent identification of everything in nature with everything
+else sometimes bewilders, fatigues, and almost afflicts us. Though he
+warns us that our civilisation is not near its meridian, but as yet only
+in the cock-crowing and the morning star, still all ages are much alike
+with him: man is always man, 'society never advances,' and he does
+almost as little as Carlyle himself to fire men with faith in social
+progress as the crown of wise endeavour. But when all these deductions
+have been made and amply allowed for, Emerson remains among the most
+persuasive and inspiring of those who by word and example rebuke our
+despondency, purify our sight, awaken us from the deadening slumbers of
+convention and conformity, exorcise the pestering imps of vanity, and
+lift men up from low thoughts and sullen moods of helplessness and
+impiety.
+
+
+
+
+END OF VOL. I.
+
+_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Critical Miscellanies,  Vol. 1, Essay
+5, Emerson, by John Morley
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