For this descendant of a line of Yankee ministers, there is no
dividing line between the secular and the sacred. To Emerson, life is
itself sacred; and the universe no less holy than the Ark of the
Tabernacle—
So nigh is grandeur to our dust
So nigh is God to man.
“Christianity is wrongly conceived by all such as take it for a system
of doctrines,” he wrote in his diary as a young man—thereby
fortifying in some sort what Augustine Birrell was to say half a
century later: “You cannot, however dogmatically inclined, construct a
theology out of Emerson.” His stress was placed—as he was persuaded
Christ’s was—upon moral truth; and at thirty he wrote: “I feel myself
pledged, if health and opportunity be granted me, to demonstrate that
all necessary truth is its own evidence.” Demonstrate? Emerson never
did succeed in “demonstrating” very much. In Dr. Eliot’s words, here
was no logician or reasoner, but “a poet who wrote chiefly in prose.”
But his prose is certainly no less poetic than his poetry. The
inspiration is in both cases moral; and, to paraphrase—
His every line, of noble origin,
Is breathed upon by Hope’s perpetual breath.
Yet Emerson was intolerant of cant about immortality. “I notice that
as soon as writers broach this subject they begin to quote. I hate
quotations. Tell me what you know.”[3]
Emerson demonstrates, after death, one meaning of immortality by
living again in his “Journal”—the tenth volume of which has just come
to my book-shelf. Some complain of prolixity, but to read this Journal
is to find the measure of the man: and that is all the more cheering
to the lazy reader in that Emerson is far from being immeasurable. He
set down from day to day not only the record of events and personages
who impressed him, but many stray thoughts and reflections. He swept
into his Journal all the chips from his workshop, and stored there all
the rough materials he meant to carve and fabricate and ornament.
Workshop? The word is decidedly unpoetical, and perhaps inapt; for, as
Madame Dugard points out, he made of his soul a lyre whose strings
vibrated to all the winds of the spirit (_his_ spirit, that is); and
in his Journal he notes these passing vibrations in phrases where
words like _flow_, _flee_, _flux_, _fugitive_, _fugacious_, _current_,
_stream_, _undulation_, occur and recur. Undeniably he sometimes
forced himself; he acknowledged that his talent, like the New England
soil, is good only while he works it. “If I cease to task myself, I
have no thoughts.” And adds: “This is a poor sterile Yankeeism. What I
admire and love is the generous and spontaneous soil which flowers and
fruits at all seasons.” Many of his memoranda he developed later in
the essay form—a procedure suspected by his own contemporaries[4]—but
I like the mere scraps. Very perfectly do they express the eagerly
searching, earnestly austere man: reflecting all his sincerity and
incompleteness just as the beautiful paragraphs they piled up as their
sole monuments mirror the minds of Joubert in France and Amiel in
Switzerland. There is no humbug here, though there are some few
fallacies to reward those who read principally to prove, at the
author’s expense, their own astuteness. Emerson fully realized—at
fifty—what his deficiencies were; he called himself an intellectual
chiffonier, with a Jew’s rag-bag of brocade remnants and velvets and
torn cloth-of-gold. Truth to tell, he is all this no less in his
essays than in these Journals—and is a literary architect no more than
his friend Montaigne. As he repeated his lectures, and they gained in
polish and conciseness, the defect still sometimes remained: he built
more than one excellent house without stairs. It is in momentary
flashes of intuitive communication with the great spirits—lightning
flashes that suddenly light up the black night in which we spend most
of our time—that his genius shines. Somewhere in his Journal he writes:
“One man sees the fact or object, and another sees the power
of it; one the triangle, and the other the cone which is
generated by the revolution of the triangle.”
He who has so often been reproached with aloofness looked at many
common facts, and saw what we see there—and beyond. His first lesson
of religion is that things seen are temporal, unseen things eternal;
yet is the temporal much for the eternally-minded, who preserves the
all-important sense of wonder. “Now that man was ready, the horse was
brought,” he writes; and continues:
“The timeliness of this invention of the locomotive must be
conceded. To us Americans it seems to have fallen as a
political aid. We could not have held the vast North America
together which now we engage to do. It was strange, too,
that when it was time to build a road across to the Pacific,
a railroad, a ship-road, a telegraph, and in short, a
perfect communication in every manner for all
nations,—’twas strange to see how it was secured. _The
good World-Soul understands us well._”
Nowise was Emerson a Ruskinian. To the railroad he says—“like the
courageous Lord Mayor at his first hunting, when told the hare was
coming: ‘Let it come in Heaven’s name, I am not afraid on’t.’” And
this assurance is all the more welcome as one of the not too frequent
flashes of his humor.