EMERSON IN ENGLAND--ENGLISH TRAITS--EMERSON
AND MATTHEW ARNOLD
Emerson's last visit to England was made in 1873, after his health
had failed. He had been in Egypt and on the Continent, hoping to
recover the freshness of his mental powers; but that was not to be.
In London he and his daughter Ellen, who gave to her father a loving
devotion without limits, lived in apartments in Down Street,
Piccadilly. It was only too evident that, even after ten months of
rest and travel, he was an invalid in mind. He could not recollect
names--a failing common in advanced age, of course, but Emerson was
only in his seventieth year and was to live ten years more. He
resorted to all kinds of paraphrases and circumlocutions. "One of
the men who seemed to me the most sincere and clear-minded I have met
was--you know whom I mean, I met him at your house, the biologist,
the champion of Darwin--with what lucid energy he talked to us."
When I mentioned Huxley's name, Emerson said, "Yes, how could I
forget him?" But presently the name had to be given to him again.
The power of association {63} between people or things and the names
of them had been lost. He was always, said the critics, a little
_déconsu_; sentences, they insisted, succeeded each other without
much obvious connection, or without the copula which would have
brought them into their true relation.
The truth is, he gave his reader credit for a little imaginative
power. He took him into partnership. He was mindful of Voltaire's
pungent epigram: "_L'art d'être ennuyeux, c'est l'art de tout,
dire_." He had his own theory of style and of diction. His
temperament left him no choice. If his quickness of transition from
one subject to another, or from one thought to another, left some of
his readers toiling after him in vain, they were not the readers for
whom he wrote. Why should they read him if he wrote a language to
them unknown?
The interview between Huxley and himself to which Emerson referred
was at breakfast; for breakfasts were then given almost as often as
luncheons are now. There were a dozen or so people to meet him; men
and women. I introduced each of them as they arrived. In each case
they had been asked to make Emerson's acquaintance, but to some of
them Emerson was an unknown name; or, if not wholly unknown, called
up in their minds no clear image of the man or knowledge of his
life's work. "Tell me who he is." "Tell me what he has done." "Is
he English or American?" But I suppose there never has been a time
when a knowledge of {64} literature, or of great spiritual
influences, has been an indispensable passport to social position.
Nor was it because Emerson was an American that he was unfamiliar to
these delightful and, in many ways, accomplished women.
Years afterward, in 1888, I was engaged to lunch on the day when news
of Matthew Arnold's death had come. Arnold had been so good a friend
to me that I did not like going on this first moment to such an
entertainment, but I thought the talk would turn on Arnold, and I
went. My hostess was a woman renowned in the world, or in her world,
for great qualities, known to everybody, and I should have thought
knowing everybody who had, as Arnold had, a place both in letters and
in society. I referred to his sudden death. "Ah, yes," she
answered, "an American, was he not?" That may be set off against the
unacquaintance of these other ladies with Emerson.
What Emerson cared for was to meet the men and women who stood in
some spiritual or intellectual relation to him; or who were his
disciples. Mr. Alexander Ireland, in his biographical sketch of
Emerson, quotes an illustrative story. It was in Edinburgh, this
same year, and Dr. William Smith, President of the Edinburgh
Philosophical Association, was driving him about that wonderful city.
Dr. Smith had told him of "a worthy tradesman in Nicholas Street who
is his enthusiastic admirer." When Emerson heard of it, he proposed
to call on him. They stopped at the {65} "worthy tradesman's," and
Dr. Smith went into the shop and said: "Mr. ----, Mr. Emerson is at
the door and will be glad to see you for a few minutes." "The five
minutes were well spent," adds Dr. Smith; and the disciple was happy
for the rest of his life. It was characteristic of Emerson, and of
Emerson as an American. Very likely he did not quite understand how
immense is the gulf which in this country separates the man who
stands behind a counter from the man who stands in front of the
counter. If he had understood, he would not have cared. What he
cared for was the point of contact, and of discipleship. It was the
master who sought his pupil, because he was his pupil.
During Emerson's too brief stay in London I called often in Down
Street. Miss Ellen was anxious to protect her father against the
pressure from many quarters for public addresses, and to decline as
many private invitations as possible. At Oxford it was the same, but
neither in Oxford nor London did Emerson lecture except briefly at
Mr. Thomas Hughes's Working-men's College. Between him and Tom
Hughes--he was never called anything else--there was not very much in
common except sterling qualities of character. Hughes was a good and
amiable Philistine, English to the tips of his fingers, who wrote one
book, _Tom Brown's Schooldays_, which is immortal, and half a dozen
others that are dead or were never really alive. But Hughes was one
of our friends in the black days when we had few in England, {66}
working-men excepted; and Emerson was too good a patriot to forget
that; and too much a lover of manliness in men not to like one who
had that supreme trait in a high degree, as Hughes had. So he made
the exception in his favour, for the Working-men's College was an
institution of high usefulness, in which Hughes's heart was bound up.
As for society, Emerson was an invalid, and able on that ground to
decline invitations without offence. He had studied English society,
as one form of English life, when here in 1848; and was content with
that experience. "I do not care for classes," he said.
The nineteenth century produced two supremely good books on American
and on English civilization: Tocqueville's _De la Démocratic en
Amérique_ and Emerson's _English Traits_, published in 1856.
Tocqueville's book, published in 1835, remains the best book on the
United States for the student who cares to get down to the foundation
of things; who cares more for ideas, tendencies, and principles than
for details. Of Emerson's the same thing may be said, yet no two
treatises could be more unlike than those of the Frenchman and the
American.
But all I wish now to point out is the effect of _English Traits_
upon the English themselves. Roughly speaking, it puzzled them. It
is one of the truest books ever written. Yet to the English
themselves its truth has never appeared quite true. On Emerson, as
thinker, poet, philosopher, all kinds of judgments have been formed
{67} in England, and expressed, in some cases, with vehemence. He
has always had an audience and a following here; and always enemies.
But the book they least understand is the book about themselves.
Looking into the egregious Allibone for an apt quotation concerning
the _Traits_ I find none, but instead a remark by Allibone himself
that "Mr. Emerson's writings have excited considerable interest on
both sides of the Atlantic!" The space given to Emerson in the
_Dictionary of English Literature_ is less than a column, though
fourteen columns are not thought too many for Longfellow; nor are
they. In the Supplement Emerson gets a little more attention; still
grudgingly given.
Allibone does not matter, and the perplexity of the Philistine
struggling with a book he cannot understand does not matter. But let
us go at once to the best of English critics; to Matthew Arnold.
Alas! we fare no better. Arnold's Discourse on Emerson has been
resented by Emersonians as an elaborate disparagement of their
Master. It is not that. Arnold was incapable of disparagement, and
while he denies to Emerson many gifts which his readers find in him,
his appreciation is still sympathetic, and he lifts himself to own
from time to time Emerson's real greatness. He thinks the _Essays_
"the most important work done in prose in our language" during the
last century--"more important than Carlyle's." But he puts aside the
_English Traits_ because, compared with Montaigne, La Bruyère, {68}
Addison (!), the _Traits_ will not stand the comparison.
"Emerson's observation has not the disinterested quality of the
observation of these masters. It is the observation of a man
systematically benevolent, as Hawthorne's observation in _Our Old
Home_ is the work of a man chagrined."
And Arnold explains that Emerson's systematic benevolence comes from
his persistent optimism. The book is too good-natured to be
scientific. Yet, oddly enough--or perhaps not oddly--the criticism
of the English Philistine is the exact opposite of Arnold's. The man
in the street, if he has read the _English Traits_, complains that
the criticism of things English is too relentless; that Emerson
always has the scalpel and the probe in hand; that the inquiry is not
critical but anatomical; and the atmosphere that of the dissecting
room. He is appalled when he sees the most cherished beliefs of
centuries and blended races put under the microscope, and when
Character, Aristocracy, Plutocracy, the Church, Religion itself are
made to take off their masks and yield up their secrets. They are
not conciliated even when Emerson sums up the English as "the best of
actual races." What care they for comparisons with other races, or
for the opinion of other races, or of transatlantic critics upon
England and the English and the institutions of this little island?
Emerson's criticism is chemical, it resolves things into their
elements, their primordial atoms. No doubt, but neither the Throne
nor {69} the Church is shaken, nor a single Act of Parliament
repealed.
Arnold, recalling the influences which wrought upon him as a student
at Oxford "amid the last enchantments of the Middle Ages," said to an
American audience in Emerson's "own delightful town," Boston:
"He was your Newman, your man of soul and genius visible to you in
the flesh, speaking to your bodily ears, a present object for your
heart and imagination. That is surely the most potent of all
influences! Nothing can come up to it."
And that is the influence which descended beneficially upon us of a
past or passing generation, to whom it was given to see Emerson and
to hear him. As I think it all over, I begin to doubt whether to
have heard Emerson on the platform did not bring you a sense of
greater intimacy than to have known him even in his Concord home.
There was a time, during Theodore Parker's illness and absence, when
Emerson and Wendell Phillips used to take his place at stated
intervals--in both cases, I think, once a month. Before the great
audience of the Music Hall, Emerson had precisely the same manner as
with a few hundred people. He hardly seemed to be aware of his
audience. He stood there behind Parker's desk, towering above it,
his slight figure adjusting itself to whatever attitude suited his
mood for the moment; never quite erect; the body never quite
straight; the hands fumbling with his {70} manuscript; turning over a
dozen leaves at a time; turning back again another dozen, as if it
scarce mattered in what order he read. Often he skipped; the large
quarto pages were turned by the score and there was no return. His
mind seemed to be carrying on processes of thought quite independent
of those he had inscribed on his manuscript. He felt his way with
his hearers; and his unconsciousness of their presence was therefore
apparent only. Between them and him there was the flow of invisible,
mysterious currents, whether of sympathy or antipathy. In Mr.
Gladstone's fine image, they gave back to him in vapour what he
poured out in a flood upon them. But that, of course, was far more
completely true of an orator like Mr. Gladstone than of a lecturer
like Emerson who read his discourse. But it was true in a measure of
Emerson also.
But Emerson was an orator too. He was not always above the arts of
the orator. He could, and did, calculate his effects; observing the
while whether they told or not. He delighted in a crescendo. His
voice rose and fell and rose again; and he had unsuspected depths of
resonant tone. At one moment clear and cold, then vibrating with
emotion, in which the whole force of the man seemed to seek
expression; then sometimes at the very end becoming prophetic,
appealing, menacing; till the sentences came as if from the Judgment
seat. He once read Allingham's poem, "The Talisman," as the
peroration of his address in the Music Hall. I never heard anything
like {71} it--like the wild, strange melody of his voice, which had
in it the intonations and cadences which give to many Slavic airs,
and most of all to the Hungarian Czardas, though that is dance music,
a magic charm.
I have spoken of the prejudice against Emerson which prevailed in
Boston and elsewhere. It was most vehement in society. That
worshipful company, which is necessarily a minority and prides itself
on being a minority, likes to set its own standards and expects the
rest of the world, so far as it comes in contact with these social
law-givers, to conform to these standards. They soon became aware
that to no standard but his own did Emerson ever conform; save so far
as civility and kindness bade him. He gave way readily enough in
little things. It is a sign of greatness to hold little things of
little account; an aphorism by no means universally accepted.
However, it was not Emerson's manners to which society objected, or
could ever object. He had the manners of a king, without the demands
of a king. He was a republican king. He stood for equality, in the
sense that he looked down on no man. The society view is different.
Society exists in order to look down on all who are not within its
sacred circle. They must be inferior because they are outside. But
its objection to Emerson lay deeper. It recognized in him the
natural enemy of privilege and prerogative. There were distinguished
members of this distinguished body who regarded a man who took {72}
the liberty of examining the substructure on which all societies are
built as an anarchist. They were afraid of him. They thought it
safer to exclude him. By and by, they compromised. Is not, or was
not, Boston the Home of Culture? So, as Emerson's fame grew, the
exclusion policy was seen to be feeble. But when the closed doors
were opened, what was the astonishment of these excellent persons to
discover that Emerson did not seem to care whether they were open or
closed. He had his own life to live, and lived it, serenely aloof.
Nothing dies so hard as a prejudice. I have one of my own which
lives in spite of my affection for Emerson, and my many debts to him,
and my gratitude that he gave me a little of his friendship. I mean
that on a too young mind he had, or might have, an influence not
entirely for good. He set his ideals so high that, as you looked up
to him and them, your feet sometimes went astray, or stumbled. He
taught you, though he may not have meant it, to underrate precision
of knowledge, and the value of details. When the things of the
spirit and the spiritual life mattered so much, how could it be worth
while to know all the tenses of Greek verbs or to be aware of the
rudiments of toe in the palæontological horse? There are sentences
and pages in _The Conduct of Life_ and elsewhere which refute this
view, and I do not press it. But I know the effect, not of this or
that essay, but of Emerson's attitude toward education, and his
philosophic indifference {73} to all but what is highest in thought.
And I think even to-day I would not put his books into the hands of a
boy who had not settled views about learning, and a conviction of the
invincible necessity of an accurate method.
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