While an author is often the worst-qualified critic of individual
books or passages in his own work, he has almost always expressed
somewhere the final criticism of his total. So it is with Emerson. On
one page he defines for us the type of idealism of which he was an
exponent:
“We are idealists whenever we prefer an idea to a
sensation…. Character is more to us…. Religion makes us
idealists.”
On another page, he writes:
“Malthus existed to say, Population outruns food: Owen
existed to say, ‘Given the circumstance, the man’s given. I
can educate a tiger’: Swedenborg, that inner and outer
correspond: Fourier, that the destinies are proportioned to
the attractions; Bentham, the greatest good of the greatest
number. _But what do you exist to say?_”
It is no tragedy if this sower of good seed said no one thing, and
only repeated many unequally wise counsels, and, by the wireless
telegraph of sympathetic genius, spelled out the dots and dashes that,
for the rest of us, unschooled in science, might have remained dots
and dashes till the day of judgment. Emerson’s contemporaries greatly
needed the man and his serene preaching—so undisturbed—while
Theist, atheist, pantheist
Define and wrangle how they list.
To paraphrase Thureau-Dangan, Emerson’s was the empire of the
contemplative monks over barbarian axe-men and sword-bearers. To-day,
while the prosperous shudder at every murmur of social unrest, and the
not-prosperous are drunk with heady wines; while society is, as in
Emerson’s day, still “devoured by a secret melancholy,” disguised in a
hundred forms of madness; while the nations still glare at one another
from behind their breast-works, and the classes still war or hate
(with ever deepening consciousness of class): while all these things
are so, democracy’s “great dangers” may well remain the vulgarizing of
the arts, contempt of contemplation, “the atrophy of the individual
conscience.” Emerson somehow soothes this conscience without putting
it to sleep. His courageous faith in Destiny, his cheering theory of
compensations, his deathless hope, his healthy, exaggerated
individualism: here are counter-irritants for more than one of Time’s
diseases. “If thought makes free, so does the moral sentiment. The
mixtures of spiritual chemistry refuse to be analyzed.” And Emerson
did indeed “make free”; he was Emancipator, “not of black bodies, but
of the minds of white men.”
[2] _Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson: 1820-1872._ With
Annotations. Edited by Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson
Forbes. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company. Ten Volumes.
[3] “Emerson refused to dogmatize about what is necessarily
obscure at present.”—John Albee, _Recollections of Emerson_.
Emerson wrote in his essay on _Experience_: “In accepting the
leading of the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning
the immortality of the soul or the like, but _the universal
impulse to believe_, that is the material circumstance and is
the principal fact in the history of the globe.” This is not far
from the point of view of James, Bergson, and, nowadays, Sir
Oliver Lodge. If Emerson “refused to dogmatize” about the
uncertainties of the future life, he had all the same his nobler
convictions. He writes in his _Journal_: “I know my soul is
immortal if it were only by the sublime emotion I taste in
reading these lines of Swedenborg: ‘The organical body with which
the soul clothes itself is here compared to a garment, because a
garment invests the body, and the soul also puts off the body and
casts it away as old clothes (_exuviæ_), when it emigrates by
means of death from the natural world into its own spiritual
world.’”
[4] In _Harper’s New Monthly Magazine_ for June, 1870, we read:
“Rumor attributes to Ralph Waldo Emerson a peculiar method of
composition. He keeps, it is said, a commonplace book into which
go every striking thought, curious metaphor, keen epigram, which
his own mind incubates or his various reading discovers. When he
is called on for a lecture, he goes to his commonplace book. He
culls from its pages enough of its best material for an hour’s
instruction or entertainment. Connection is immaterial….”