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_.