Eight years ago, when I read Mme. Dugard’s volume, I was
youthful—with all of youth’s intolerance. It seemed no mere
coincidence that Emerson’s father recorded his birth in his diary
between a dry note on the “Election Sermon” and a report of a session
of his literary club at Mr. Adams’s. Cheerful youth, not needing
reassurance concerning the excellence of this world as an abiding
place, is unlikely to set a high value on what contemporary reviewers,
even in the American religious press, found to praise in Emerson’s
essays: “Their lofty cheer, and spirit-stirring notes of courage and
hope.” I certainly had no conception of Emerson’s influence upon my
father’s generation—an influence so great that Carlyle called his
friend a new era in our history; so great that when some clergymen
complained that he was leading young men to hell, Father Taylor
remarked: “It may be that Emerson is going to hell, but I am certain
he will change the climate there, and emigration will set that way.”
Then again, I had no sympathy with Emerson because it seemed to me, in
spite of all the long words and imported transcendentalism—or,
partly, on account of them—that he didn’t “get anywhere.” (I
sometimes feel so still—but the charge is less damnatory. I do not
wonder that Moncure Conway wrote of Emerson setting free in his
heart—in his _heart_, notice—“a winged thought that sang a new song
and soared—whither?”)
Emerson’s dependence upon intuitions and praises of them as the
springs of action and organ of inspiration conferring wisdom upon man
seemed the less respectable because I hadn’t read Bergson—who has
made intuitions more than ever fashionable. Emerson lived in the
spirit-world—a quite different place from any trodden by the student
in Paris who is at home in the world of the Sorbonne and the
Bibliothèque Nationale, and in the world of flesh-and-blood. To
healthy youth, nothing is much more repugnant than the Wordsworthian
ideal of wise passivity, while the notion of a Buddhistic Nirvana
seems murderous of “Nature”—however you define her. Moreover, I know
not how to direct my inexorable thoughts, Emerson avows, and scarcely
appears to think any direction of them needful. His best thoughts
steal upon him in silence, and Truth flies out of the window when Will
enters in by the door. “There is never a fine aspiration but is on its
way to its body or institution,” he confidently asserts. Too
confidently, it seemed to me. Emerson, aged thirty, wrote that a
system-grinder hates the truth; he loved the truth, and
therefore—therefore?—side-stepped system. It was not till much later
that he uttered the heartfelt cry: “If Minerva offered me a gift and
an option, I would say, give me continuity. I am tired of scraps….
“‘The Asmodæan feat be mine
To spin my sand-bags into twine.’”
Perhaps the scrappiness of Emerson is less distressing to the youthful
mind, eternally and quite needlessly refreshed by the comedy of life
on every side of it, than the Emersonian “trick of solitariness,” that
he played as a Harvard undergraduate not less but perhaps rather more
than as the Concord sage. When Madame Dugard’s book on Emerson was
published in Paris, I sat down and wrote a critique—stored with
Roussellian analogies, à la Irving Babbitt. I was full of Rousseau
then, and I piled on sentences that I meant to be cruel and
crushing—not of Professor Babbitt, or Jean-Jacques, or Madame Dugard,
but of poor Emerson. I showed my article, unfinished, to a dear
friend—wiser than I; and then tore it up. Here is a part of the
letter I had from my friend commenting on the little essay:
“I find your point that Emerson, the preacher of
individualism, was himself thin-blooded and barren of true
personality, interesting: whether or not it is true. I never
happened to find it put just so before, and should certainly
never have thought of it. But I suppose, after all, a
certain kind of individuality might be expressed by
impersonality as well as by any other instrument. I’ve only
glanced through the Dugard book, but the point of view seems
to be the conventional one that Emerson was too far removed
from the stress and pain of life to touch very closely
vibrant, struggling souls. As you translate, ‘he fills only
the full, reassures only the optimists.’ I suppose that is
true enough. And yet—and yet, is any life so full that it
does not need refilling; or any optimism so complete and so
unshaken that it does not need reassurance, _expression_,
from an articulate, a stronger spirit? Isn’t optimism with
many people a religious yearning rather than any truly
temperamental attribute; a thing to be struggled for, and
cherished, and reinforced from without? Whatever forces from
within may have urged Emerson toward idealism and optimism,
wasn’t he at least equally an idealist, and optimist, from
conviction, or faith, or whatever else you call the
semi-religious element? The Emersonian idealism is more, I
am sure, than the natural overflow of a serenely poetic
disposition—to which you try to reduce it. You must not
forget that essay of his on Destiny—Destiny, man’s heroic,
large-spirited friend, man’s bolster against Fate
(discouraging and enervating personage!).
“I suppose that it is fair enough to complain that Emerson
gives light without heat, but how many writers throw off
much heat and little light—to say nothing of ‘darkness
visible’…. Not many philosophers and poets and friends of
ours yield us both forms of power. Perhaps the combination
of the two—light and, well, at least _warmth_—is the most
remarkable thing about Christ and his system.”
I feel less ashamed of my calfish distrust and dislike of Emerson now
that I have read in President Eliot’s centenary essay on the great New
Englander his confession that he too, “as a young man,” found the
writings of Emerson “unattractive, and not seldom unintelligible, …
speculative, and visionary.” It is only after one has suffered from
living that one fully values Emerson—only as one is gradually
educated himself, in experience’s school, that one appreciates his
worth as a prophet of modern education; of the latter day social
organization, its maladies and quacks and salves; of what Dr. Eliot
calls “natural” rather than supernatural religion.