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 _Æquanimitas_. 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 præ-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
formulæ 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.