Emerson has been “discovered” again—this time in the France that he
tried hard and vainly to understand. It all began with the publication
of a critical biography by Madame Dugard in 1907. I was in Paris then,
and read it, and was most of all struck by the comically dressy
effect, in translation, of the simple lines beginning:
Good-bye, proud world, I’m going home.
In French, they correspond to an Emerson dressed in eighteenth century
style, with wig and sword:
Adieu, monde orgueilleux, je retourne au foyer;
Tu n’es pas mon ami, je ne suis pas le tien…
Yet the book is a good introduction to Emerson, and, since 1907,
Madame Dugard and others have translated several volumes of essays for
the French public. I wonder if they have won a reading—outside the
university and professionally literary groups; I wonder if Frenchmen
see far beyond what Robert G. Ingersoll called the “baked-bean side of
his genius”? As the late Perpetual Secretary of the Immortals said,
when the French Academy “crowned” the Dugard book:
“Emerson’s influence in America, like Ruskin’s in England,
is a curious illustration of the need for an ideal which, at
certain moments, the man of action, the Anglo-Saxon, feels.
Such was the empire of contemplative monks over barbarian
chiefs and of mystics over feudal armies. It was Emerson’s
fortune to launch his ideas at a time when America was
largely without them…. Emerson, knowing that the great
danger of democracy is atrophy of the individual conscience,
set himself to preaching individualism—the necessity of a
high culture, the search for an ideal.”