the air there which haunt my memory still. Happy the man who in that
susceptible season of youth hears such voices! they are a possession to
him for ever. No such voices as those which we heard in our youth at
Oxford are sounding there now. Oxford has more criticism now, more
knowledge, more light; but such voices as those of our youth it has no
longer. The name of Cardinal Newman is a great name to the imagination
still; his genius and his style are still things of power. But he is
over eighty years old; he is in the Oratory at Birmingham; he has
adopted, for the doubts and difficulties which beset men’s minds to-day,
a solution which, to speak frankly, is impossible. Forty years ago he
was in the very prime of life; he was close at hand to us at Oxford; he
was preaching in St. Mary’s pulpit every Sunday; he seemed about to
transform and to renew what was for us the most national and natural
institution in the world, the Church of England. Who could resist the
charm of that spiritual apparition, gliding in the dim afternoon light
through the aisles of St. Mary’s, rising into the pulpit, and then, in
the most entrancing of voices, breaking the silence with words and
thoughts which were a religious music,—subtle, sweet, mournful? I seem
to hear him still, saying: ‘After the fever of life, after wearinesses
and sicknesses, fightings and despondings, languor and fretfulness,
struggling and succeeding; after all the changes and chances of this
troubled, unhealthy state,—at length comes death, at length the white
throne of God, at length the beatific vision.’ Or, if we followed him
back to his seclusion at Littlemore, that dreary village by the London
road, and to the house of retreat and the church which he built
there,—a mean house such as Paul might have lived in when he was
tent-making at Ephesus, a church plain and thinly sown with
worshippers,—who could resist him there either, welcoming back to the
severe joys of church-fellowship, and of daily worship and prayer, the
firstlings of a generation which had well-nigh forgotten them? Again I
seem to hear him: ‘The season is chill and dark, and the breath of the
morning is damp, and worshippers are few; but all this befits those who
are by their profession penitents and mourners, watchers and pilgrims.
More dear to them that loneliness, more cheerful that severity, and more
bright that gloom, than all those aids and appliances of luxury by which
men nowadays attempt to make prayer less disagreeable to them. True
faith does not covet comforts; they who realise that awful day, when
they shall see Him face to face whose eyes are as a flame of fire, will
as little bargain to pray pleasantly now as they will think of doing so
then.’
Somewhere or other I have spoken of those ‘last enchantments of the
Middle Age’ which Oxford sheds around us, and here they were! But there
were other voices sounding in our ear besides Newman’s. There was the
puissant voice of Carlyle; so sorely strained, over-used, and mis-used
since, but then fresh, comparatively sound, and reaching our hearts with
true, pathetic eloquence. Who can forget the emotion of receiving in its
first freshness such a sentence as that sentence of Carlyle upon Edward
Irving, then just dead: ‘Scotland sent him forth a herculean man; our
mad Babylon wore and wasted him with all her engines,—and it took her
twelve years!’ A greater voice still,—the greatest voice of the
century,—came to us in those youthful years through Carlyle: the voice
of Goethe. To this day,—such is the force of youthful associations,—I
read the _Wilhelm Meister_ with more pleasure in Carlyle’s translation
than in the original. The large, liberal view of human life in _Wilhelm
Meister_, how novel it was to the Englishman in those days! and it was
salutary, too, and educative for him, doubtless, as well as novel. But
what moved us most in _Wilhelm Meister_ was that which, after all, will
always move the young most,—the poetry, the eloquence. Never, surely,
was Carlyle’s prose so beautiful and pure as in his rendering of the
Youths’ dirge over Mignon!—‘Well is our treasure now laid up, the fair
image of the past. Here sleeps it in the marble, undecaying; in your
hearts, also, it lives, it works. Travel, travel, back into life! Take
along with you this holy earnestness, for earnestness alone makes life
eternity.’ Here we had the voice of the great Goethe;—not the stiff,
and hindered, and frigid, and factitious Goethe who speaks to us too
often from those sixty volumes of his, but of the great Goethe, and the
true one.
And besides those voices, there came to us in that old Oxford time a
voice also from this side of the Atlantic,—a clear and pure voice,
which for my ear, at any rate, brought a strain as new, and moving, and
unforgettable, as the strain of Newman, or Carlyle, or Goethe. Mr.
Lowell has well described the apparition of Emerson to your young
generation here, in that distant time of which I am speaking, and of his
workings upon them. 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. To us at Oxford Emerson was
but a voice speaking from three thousand miles away. But so well he
spoke, that from that time forth Boston Bay and Concord were names
invested to my ear with a sentiment akin to that which invests for me
the names of Oxford and of Weimar; and snatches of Emerson’s strain
fixed themselves in my mind as imperishably as any of the eloquent words
which I have been just now quoting. ‘Then dies the man in you; then once
more perish the buds of art, poetry, and science, as they have died
already in a thousand thousand men.’ ‘What Plato has thought, he may
think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen
any man, he can understand.’ ‘Trust thyself! every heart vibrates to
that iron string. Accept the place the Divine Providence has found for
you, the society of your contemporaries, the connexion of events. Great
men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius
of their age; betraying their perception that the Eternal was stirring
at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their
being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest spirit the
same transcendent destiny; and not pinched in a corner, not cowards
fleeing before a revolution, but redeemers and benefactors, pious
aspirants to be noble clay plastic under the Almighty effort, let us
advance and advance on chaos and the dark!’ These lofty sentences of
Emerson, and a hundred others of like strain, I never have lost out of
my memory; I never _can_ lose them.
At last I find myself in Emerson’s own country, and looking upon Boston
Bay. Naturally I revert to the friend of my youth. It is not always
pleasant to ask oneself questions about the friends of one’s youth; they
cannot always well support it. Carlyle, for instance, in my judgment,
cannot well support such a return upon him. Yet we should make the
return; we should part with our illusions, we should know the truth.
When I come to this country, where Emerson now counts for so much, and
where such high claims are made for him, I pull myself together, and ask
myself what the truth about this object of my youthful admiration really
is. Improper elements often come into our estimate of men. We have
lately seen a German critic make Goethe the greatest of all poets,
because Germany is now the greatest of military powers, and wants a poet
to match. Then, too, America is a young country; and young countries,
like young persons, are apt sometimes to evince in their literary
judgments a want of scale and measure. I set myself, therefore,
resolutely to come at a real estimate of Emerson, and with a leaning
even to strictness rather than to indulgence. That is the safer course.
Time has no indulgence; any veils of illusion which we may have left
around an object because we loved it, Time is sure to strip away.
* * * * *
I was reading the other day a notice of Emerson by a serious and
interesting American critic. Fifty or sixty passages in Emerson’s poems,
says this critic,—who had doubtless himself been nourished on Emerson’s
writings, and held them justly dear,—fifty or sixty passages from
Emerson’s poems have already entered into English speech as matter of
familiar and universally current quotation. Here is a specimen of that
personal sort of estimate which, for my part, even in speaking of
authors dear to me, I would try to avoid. What is the kind of phrase of
which we may fairly say that it has entered into English speech as
matter of familiar quotation? Such a phrase, surely, as the ‘Patience on
a monument’ of Shakespeare; as the ‘Darkness visible’ of Milton; as the
‘Where ignorance is bliss’ of Gray. Of not one single passage in
Emerson’s poetry can it be truly said that it has become a familiar
quotation like phrases of this kind. It is not enough that it should be
familiar to his admirers, familiar in New England, familiar even
throughout the United States; it must be familiar to all readers and
lovers of English poetry. Of not more than one or two passages in
Emerson’s poetry can it, I think, be truly said, that they stand
ever-present in the memory of even many lovers of English poetry. A
great number of passages from his poetry are no doubt perfectly familiar
to the mind and lips of the critic whom I have mentioned, and perhaps of
a wide circle of American readers. But this is a very different thing
from being matter of universal quotation, like the phrases of the
legitimate poets.
And, in truth, one of the legitimate poets, Emerson, in my opinion, is
not. His poetry is interesting, it makes one think; but it is not the
poetry of one of the born poets. I say it of him with reluctance,
although I am sure that he would have said it of himself; but I say it
with reluctance, because I dislike giving pain to his admirers, and
because all my own wish, too, is to say of him what is favourable. But I
regard myself, not as speaking to please Emerson’s admirers, not as
speaking to please myself; but rather, I repeat, as communing with Time
and Nature concerning the productions of this beautiful and rare spirit,
and as resigning what of him is by their unalterable decree touched with
caducity, in order the better to mark and secure that in him which is
immortal.
Milton says that poetry ought to be simple, sensuous, impassioned. Well,
Emerson’s poetry is seldom either simple, or sensuous, or impassioned.
In general it lacks directness; it lacks concreteness; it lacks energy.
His grammar is often embarrassed; in particular, the want of
clearly-marked distinction between the subject and the object of his
sentence is a frequent cause of obscurity in him. A poem which shall be
a plain, forcible, inevitable whole he hardly ever produces. Such good
work as the noble lines graven on the Concord Monument is the exception
with him; such ineffective work as the ’Fourth of July Ode’ or the
‘Boston Hymn’ is the rule. Even passages and single lines of thorough
plainness and commanding force are rare in his poetry. They exist, of
course; but when we meet with them they give us a slight shock of
surprise, so little has Emerson accustomed us to them. Let me have the
pleasure of quoting one or two of these exceptional passages:—
‘So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
So near is God to man,
When Duty whispers low, _Thou must_,
The youth replies, _I can_.’
Or again this:—
‘Though love repine and reason chafe,
There came a voice without reply:
“’Tis man’s perdition to be safe,
When for the truth he ought to die.”’
Excellent! but how seldom do we get from him a strain blown so clearly
and firmly! Take another passage where his strain has not only
clearness, it has also grace and beauty:—
‘And ever, when the happy child
In May beholds the blooming wild,
And hears in heaven the bluebird sing,
“Onward,” he cries, “your baskets bring!
In the next field is air more mild,
And in yon hazy west is Eden’s balmier spring.”’
In the style and cadence here there is a reminiscence, I think, of Gray;
at any rate the pureness, grace, and beauty of these lines are worthy
even of Gray. But Gray holds his high rank as a poet, not merely by the
beauty and grace of passages in his poems; not merely by a diction
generally pure in an age of impure diction: he holds it, above all, by
the power and skill with which the evolution of his poems is conducted.
Here is his grand superiority to Collins, whose diction in his best
poem, the ‘Ode to Evening,’ is purer than Gray’s; but then the ‘Ode to
Evening’ is like a river which loses itself in the sand, whereas Gray’s
best poems have an evolution sure and satisfying. Emerson’s ‘Mayday,’
from which I just now quoted, has no real evolution at all; it is a
series of observations. And, in general, his poems have no evolution.
Take, for example, his ‘Titmouse.’ Here he has an excellent subject; and
his observation of Nature, moreover, is always marvellously close and
fine. But compare what he makes of his meeting with his titmouse with
what Cowper or Burns makes of the like kind of incident! One never quite
arrives at learning what the titmouse actually did for him at all,
though one feels a strong interest and desire to learn it; but one is
reduced to guessing, and cannot be quite sure that after all one has
guessed right. He is not plain and concrete enough,—in other words, not
poet enough,—to be able to tell us. And a failure of this kind goes
through almost all his verse, keeps him amid symbolism and allusion and
the fringes of things, and, in spite of his spiritual power, deeply
impairs his poetic value. Through the inestimable virtue of
concreteness, a simple poem like ‘The Bridge’ of Longfellow, or the
‘School Days’ of Mr. Whittier, is of more poetic worth, perhaps, than
all the verse of Emerson.
I do not, then, place Emerson among the great poets. But I go further,
and say that I do not place him among the great writers, the great men
of letters. Who are the great men of letters? They are men like Cicero,
Plato, Bacon, Pascal, Swift, Voltaire,—writers with, in the first
place, a genius and instinct for style; writers whose prose is by a kind
of native necessity true and sound. Now the style of Emerson, like the
style of his transcendentalist friends and of the ‘Dial’ so
continually,—the style of Emerson is capable of falling into a strain
like this, which I take from the beginning of his ‘Essay on Love’:
‘Every soul is a celestial being to every other soul. The heart has its
sabbaths and jubilees, in which the world appears as a hymeneal feast,
and all natural sounds and the circle of the seasons are erotic odes and
dances.’ Emerson altered this sentence in the later editions. Like
Wordsworth, he was in later life fond of altering; and in general his
later alterations, like those of Wordsworth, are not improvements. He
softened the passage in question, however, though without really mending
it. I quote it in its original and strongly-marked form. Arthur Stanley
used to relate that about the year 1840, being in conversation with some
Americans in quarantine at Malta, and thinking to please them, he
declared his warm admiration for Emerson’s ‘Essays,’ then recently
published. However, the Americans shook their heads, and told him that
for home taste Emerson was decidedly too _greeny_. We will hope, for
their sakes, that the sort of thing they had in their heads was such
writing as I have just quoted. Unsound it is, indeed, and in a style
almost impossible to a born man of letters.
It is a curious thing, that quality of style which marks the great
writer, the born man of letters. It resides in the whole tissue of his
work, and of his work regarded as a composition for literary purposes.
Brilliant and powerful passages in a man’s writings do not prove his
possession of it; it lies in their whole tissue. Emerson has passages of
noble and pathetic eloquence, such as those which I quoted at the
beginning; he has passages of shrewd and felicitous wit; he has crisp
epigram; he has passages of exquisitely touched observation of nature.
Yet he is not a great writer; his style has not the requisite wholeness
of good tissue. Even Carlyle is not, in my judgment, a great writer. He
has surpassingly powerful qualities of expression, far more powerful
than Emerson’s, and reminding one of the gifts of expression of the
great poets,—of even Shakespeare himself. What Emerson so admirably
says of Carlyle’s ‘devouring eyes and pourtraying hand,’ ‘those thirsty
eyes, those portrait-eating, portrait-painting eyes of thine, those
fatal perceptions,’ is thoroughly true. What a description is Carlyle’s
of the first publisher of _Sartor Resartus_, ‘to whom the idea of a new
edition of _Sartor_ is frightful, or rather ludicrous, unimaginable’; of
this poor Fraser, in whose ‘wonderful world of Tory pamphleteers,
conservative Younger-brothers, Regent Street loungers, Crockford
gamblers, Irish Jesuits, drunken reporters, and miscellaneous unclean
persons (whom nitre and much soap will not wash clean), not a soul has
expressed the smallest wish that way!’ What a portrait, again, of the
well-beloved John Sterling! ‘One, and the best, of a small class extant
here, who, nigh drowning in a black wreck of Infidelity (lighted up by
some glare of Radicalism only, now growing _dim_ too), and about to
perish, saved themselves into a Coleridgian Shovel-Hattedness.’ What
touches in the invitation of Emerson to London! ‘You shall see
blockheads by the million; Pickwick himself shall be visible,—innocent
young Dickens, reserved for a questionable fate. The great Wordsworth
shall talk till you yourself pronounce him to be a bore. Southey’s
complexion is still healthy mahogany brown, with a fleece of white hair,
and eyes that seem running at full gallop. Leigh Hunt, man of genius in
the shape of a cockney, is my near neighbour, with good humour and no
common-sense; old Rogers with his pale head, white, bare, and cold as
snow, with those large blue eyes, cruel, sorrowful, and that sardonic
shelf chin.’ How inimitable it all is! And finally, for one must not go
on for ever, this version of a London Sunday, with the public-houses
closed during the hours of divine service! ‘It is silent Sunday; the
populace not yet admitted to their beer-shops, till the respectabilities
conclude their rubric mummeries,—a much more audacious feat than beer.’
Yet even Carlyle is not, in my judgment, to be called a great writer;
one cannot think of ranking him with men like Cicero and Plato and Swift
and Voltaire. Emerson freely promises to Carlyle immortality for his
histories. They will not have it. Why? Because the materials furnished
to him by that devouring eye of his, and that pourtraying hand, were not
wrought in and subdued by him to what his work, regarded as a
composition for literary purposes, required. Occuring in conversation,
breaking out in familiar correspondence, they are magnificent,
inimitable; nothing more is required of them; thus thrown out anyhow,
they serve their turn and fulfil their function. And, therefore, I
should not wonder if really Carlyle lived, in the long run, by such an
invaluable record as that correspondence between him and Emerson, of
which we owe the publication to Mr. Charles Norton,—by this and not by
his works, as Johnson lives in Boswell, not by his works. For Carlyle’s
sallies, as the staple of a literary work, become wearisome; and as time
more and more applies to Carlyle’s works its stringent test, this will
be felt more and more. Shakespeare, Molière, Swift,—they, too, had,
like Carlyle, the devouring eye and the pourtraying hand. But they are
great literary masters, they are supreme writers, because they knew how
to work into a literary composition their materials, and to subdue them
to the purposes of literary effect. Carlyle is too wilful for this, too
turbid, too vehement.
You will think I deal in nothing but negatives. I have been saying that
Emerson is not one of the great poets, the great writers. He has not
their quality of style. He is, however, the propounder of a philosophy.
The Platonic dialogues afford us the example of exquisite literary form
and treatment given to philosophical ideas. Plato is at once a great
literary man and a great philosopher.
If we speak carefully, we cannot call Aristotle or Spinoza or Kant great
literary men, or their productions great literary works. But their work
is arranged with such constructive power that they build a philosophy,
and are justly called great philosophical writers. Emerson cannot, I
think, be called with justice a great philosophical writer. He cannot
build; his arrangement of philosophical ideas has no progress in it, no
evolution; he does not construct a philosophy. Emerson himself knew the
defects of his method, or rather want of method, very well; indeed, he
and Carlyle criticise themselves and one another in a way which leaves
little for any one else to do in the way of formulating their defects.
Carlyle formulates perfectly the defects of his friend’s poetic and
literary production when he says of the ‘Dial’: ‘For me it is too
ethereal, speculative, theoretic; I will have all things condense
themselves, take shape and body, if they are to have my sympathy.’ And,
speaking of Emerson’s orations, he says: ‘I long to see some concrete
Thing, some Event, Man’s Life, American Forest, or piece of Creation,
which this Emerson loves and wonders at, well _Emersonised_,—depictured
by Emerson, filled with the life of Emerson, and cast forth from him,
then to live by itself. If these orations balk me of this, how
profitable soever they may be for others, I will not love them.’ Emerson
himself formulates perfectly the defect of his own philosophical
productions when he speaks of his ‘formidable tendency to the lapidary
style. I build my house of boulders.’ ‘Here I sit and read and write,’
he says again, ‘with very little system, and, as far as regards
composition, with the most fragmentary result; paragraphs
incompressible, each sentence an infinitely repellent particle.’ Nothing
can be truer; and the work of a Spinoza or Kant, of the men who stand as
great philosophical writers, does not proceed in this wise.