"Noteworthy also," says Carlyle, "and serviceable for the progress of
this same Individual, wilt thou find his subdivision into
Generations."
It is indeed the fact that the course of human history admits of being
marked off into periods, which, from their average duration and the
impulse communicated to them by those who enter upon adolescence along
with them, may be fitly denominated generations, especially when their
opening and closing are signalized by great events which serve as
historical landmarks. No such event, indeed, short of the Day of
Judgment or a universal deluge, can serve as an absolute line of
demarcation; nothing can be more certain than that history and human
life are a perpetual Becoming; and that, although the progress of
development is frequently so startling and unforeseen as to evoke the
poet's exclamation,--
"New endless growth surrounds on every side,
Such as we deemed not earth could ever bear."--
this growth is but development after all. The association of
historical periods with stages in the mental development of man is
nevertheless too convenient to be surrendered; the vision is cleared
and the grasp strengthened by the perception of a well-defined era in
American history, commencing with the election of Andrew Jackson to
the Presidency in 1828 and closing with the death of Abraham Lincoln
in 1865,--a period exactly corresponding with one in English history
measured from the death of Lord Liverpool, the typical representative
of a bygone political era in the prime of other years, and that of
Lord Palmerston, another such representative, in the latter. The epoch
thus bounded almost precisely corresponds to the productive period of
the two great men who, more than any contemporaries, have stood in the
conscious attitude of teachers of their age. With such men as Tennyson
and Browning, vast as their influence has been, the primary impulse
has not been didactic, but artistic; Herbert Spencer, George Eliot,
Matthew Arnold, and others, have been chiefly operative upon the
succeeding generation; Mill and the elder Newman rather address
special classes than the people at large; and Ruskin and Kingsley
would have willingly admitted that however eloquent the expression of
their teaching, its originality mainly consisted in the application of
Carlyle's ideas to subjects beyond Carlyle's range. Carlyle and
Emerson, therefore, stand forth like Goethe and Schiller as the
Dioscuri of their period; the two men to whom beyond others its better
minds looked for guidance, and who had the largest share in forming
the minds from which the succeeding generation was to take its
complexion. Faults and errors they had; but on the whole it may be
said that nations have rarely been more fortunate in their instructors
than the two great English-speaking peoples during the age of Carlyle
and Emerson. Of Carlyle this is not the place to speak further; but
writing on Emerson, it will be necessary to exhibit what we conceive
to have been the special value of his teaching; and to attempt some
description of the man himself, in indication of the high place
claimed for him.
It has been said of some great man of marked originality that he was
the sole voice among many echoes. This cannot be said of Emerson; his
age was by no means deficient in original voices. But his may be said
with truth to have been the chief verbal utterance in an age of
authorship. It is a trite remark, that many of the men of thought
whose ideas have most influenced the world have shown little
inclination for literary composition. The president of a London
freethinking club in Goldsmith's time supposed himself to be in
possession of the works of Socrates, no less than of those of
"Tully and Cicero," but no other trace of their existence has come
to light. Had Emerson lived in any age but his own, it is doubtful
whether, any more than Socrates, he would have figured as an author.
"I write," he tells Carlyle, "with very little system, and as far as
regards composition, with most fragmentary result--paragraphs
incomprehensible, each sentence an infinitely repellent particle." We
also hear of his going forth into the woods to hunt a thought as a boy
might hunt a butterfly, except that the thought had flown with him
from home, and that his business was not so much to capture it as to
materialize it and make it tangible. This peculiarity serves to
classify Emerson among the ancient sages, men like Socrates and
Buddha, whose instructions were not merely oral but unmethodical and
unsystematic; who spoke as the casual emergency of the day dictated,
and left their observations to be collected by their disciples. An
excellent plan in so far as it accomplishes the endowment of the
sage's word with his own individuality; exceptionable when a doubt
arises whether the utterance belongs to the master or the disciple,
and in the case of diametrically opposite versions, whether Socrates
has been represented more truly by the prose of Xenophon or the poetry
of Plato. We may be thankful that the spirit of Emerson's age, and the
exigencies of his own affairs, irresistibly impelled him to write:
nevertheless the fact remains that with him Man Thinking is not so
much Man Writing as Man Speaking, and that although the omnipotent
machinery of the modern social system caught him too, and forced him
into line with the rest, we have in him a nearer approach to the
voice, apart from the disturbing and modifying habits of literary
composition, than in any other eminent modern thinker. This annuls one
of the most weighty criticisms upon Emerson, so long as he is regarded
merely as an author,--his want of continuity, and consequent want of
logic. Had he attempted to establish a philosophical system, this
would have been fatal. But such an undertaking is of all things
furthest from his thoughts. He does not seek to demonstrate, he
announces. Ideas have come to him which, as viewed by the inward
light, appear important and profitable. He brings these forward to be
tested by the light of other men. He does not seek to connect these
ideas together, except in so far as their common physiognomy bespeaks
their common parentage. Nor does he seek to fortify them by reasoning,
or subject them to any test save the faculty by which the unprejudiced
soul discerns good from evil. If his jewel will scratch glass, it is
sufficiently evinced a diamond.
It follows that although Emerson did not write most frequently or best
in verse, he is, as regards the general constitution of his intellect,
rather to be classed with poets than with philosophers. Poetry cannot
indeed dispense with the accurate observation of nature and mankind,
but poetic genius essentially depends on intuition and inspiration.
There is no gulf between the philosopher and the poet; some of the
greatest of poets have also been among the most powerful of reasoners;
but their claim to poetical rank would not have been impaired if their
ratiocination had been ever so illogical. Similarly, a great thinker
may have no more taste for poetry than was vouchsafed to Darwin or the
elder Mill, without any impeachment of his power of intellect. The two
spheres of action are fundamentally distinct, though the very highest
geniuses, such as Shakespeare and Goethe, have sometimes almost
succeeded in making them appear as one. To determine to which of them
a man actually belongs, we must look beyond the externalities of
literary form, and inquire whether he obtains his ideas by intuition,
or by observation and reflection. No mind will be either entirely
intuitive or entirely reflective, but there will usually be a decided
inclination to one or other of the processes; and in the comparatively
few cases in which thoughts and feelings seem to come to it
unconsciously, as leaves to a tree, we may consider that we have a
poet, though perhaps not a writer of poetry. If indeed the man writes
at all, he will very probably write prose, but this prose will be
impregnated with poetic quality. From this point of view we are able
to set Emerson much higher than if we regarded him simply as a
teacher. He is greater as the American Wordsworth than as the American
Carlyle. We shall understand his position best by comparing him with
other men of genius who are poets too, but not pre-eminently so. In
beauty of language and power of imagination, John Henry Newman and
James Martineau, though they have written little in verse, yield to
few poets. But throughout all their writings the didactic impulse is
plainly the preponderating one, their poetry merely auxiliary and
ornamental; hence they are not reckoned among poets. With Emerson the
case is reversed: the revealer is first in him, the reasoner second;
oral speech is his most congenial form of expression, and he submits
to appear in print because the circumstances of his age render print
the most effectual medium for the dissemination of his thought. It
will be observed that whenever possible he resorts to the medium of
oration or lecture; it may be further remarked that his essays, often
originally delivered as lectures, are very like his discourses, and
his discourses very like his essays. In neither, so far as regards the
literary form of the entire composition, distinguished from the force
and felicity of individual sentences, can he be considered as a
classic model. The essay need not be too severely logical, yet a just
conception of its nature requires a more harmonious proportion and
more symmetrical construction, as well as a more consistent and
intelligent direction towards a single definite end, than we usually
find in Emerson. The orator is less easy to criticize than the
essayist, for oratory involves an element of personal magnetism which
resists all critical analysis. Hence posterity frequently reverses (or
rather seems to reverse, for the decision upon a speech mutilated of
voice and action cannot be really conclusive) the verdicts of
contemporaries upon oratory. "What will our descendants think of the
Parliamentary oratory of our age?" asked a contemporary of Burke's,
"when they are told that in his own time this man was accounted
neither the first, nor the second, nor even the third speaker?"
Transferred to the tribunal of the library, Burke's oratory bears away
the palm from Pitt and Fox and Sheridan; yet, unless we had heard the
living voices of them all, it would be unsafe for us to challenge the
contemporary verdict. We cannot say, with the lover in Goethe, that
the word printed appears dull and soulless, but it certainly wants
much which conduced to the efficacy of the word spoken:--
"Ach wie traurig sieht in Lettern,
Schwarz auf weiss, das Lied mich an,
Das aus deinem Mund vergoettern,
Das ein Herz zerreissen kann!"
Emerson's orations are no less delightful and profitable reading than
his essays, so long as they can be treated as his essays were intended
to be treated when they came into print; that is, read deliberately,
with travelings backward when needed, and frequent pauses of thought.
But if we consider them as discourses to be listened to, we shall find
some difficulty in reconciling their popularity and influence with
their apparent disconnectedness, and some reason to apprehend that,
occasional flashes of epigram excepted, they must speedily have passed
from the minds of the hearers. The apparent defect was probably
remedied in delivery by the magnetic power of the speaker; not that
sort of power which "wields at will the fierce democracy," but that
which convinces the hearer that he is listening to a message from a
region not as yet accessible to himself. The impassioned orator
usually provokes the suspicion that he is speaking from a brief. Not
so Emerson: above all other speakers he inspires the confidence that
he declares a thing to be, not because he wishes, but because he
perceives it to be so. His quiet, unpretending, but perfectly
unembarrassed manner, as of a man with a message which he simply
delivers and goes away, must have greatly aided to supply the absence
of vigorous reasoning and skillful oratorical construction. We could
not expect a spirit commissioned to teach us to condescend to such
methods; and Emerson's discourse, whether in oration or essay, though
by no means deficient in human feeling nor of the "blessed Glendoveer"
order, frequently does sound like that of a being from another sphere,
simply because he derived his ideas from a higher world; as must
always be the case with the man of spiritual, not of course with the
man of practical genius. It matters nothing whether this is really so,
or whether what wears the aspect of imparted revelation is but a
fortifying of the natural eye, qualifying it to look a little deeper
than neighboring eyes into things around. In either case the person so
endowed stands a degree nearer to the essential truth of things than
his fellows; and the consciousness of the fact, transpiring through
his personality, gives him a weight which might otherwise seem
inexplicable. Nothing can be more surprising than the deference with
which the learned and intelligent contemporaries of the humble and
obscure Spinoza resort to his judgment before he has so much as
written a book.
This estimate of Emerson as an American Wordsworth, one who like
Wordsworth not merely enforced but practically demonstrated the
proposition that
"One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can,"
is controverted by many who can see in him nothing but a polisher and
stringer of epigrammatic sayings. It is impossible to argue with any
who cannot recognize the deep vitality of 'Nature,' of the two series
of Essays first published, and of most of the early orations and
discourses; but it may be conceded that Emerson's fountain of
inspiration was no more perennial than Wordsworth's, and that in his
latter years his gift of epigrammatic statement enabled him to avoid
both the Scylla and the Charybdis of men of genius whose fount of
inspiration has run low. In some such cases, such as Wordsworth's, the
author simply goes on producing, with less and less geniality at every
successive effort. In others, such as Browning's, he escapes inanity
by violent exaggeration of his characteristic mannerisms. Neither of
these remarks applies to Emerson: he does not, in ceasing to be
original, become insipid, nor can it be said that he is any more
mannered at the last than at the first. This is a clear proof that his
peculiarity of speech is not mannerism but manner; that consequently
he is not an artificial writer, and that, since the treatment of his
themes as he has chosen to treat them admits of no compromise between
nature and rhetoric, he has the especial distinction of simplicity
where simplicity is difficult and rare. That such is the case will
appear from an examination of his earlier and more truly prophetic
writings.
Of these, the first in importance as in time is the tract 'Nature,'
commenced in 1833, rewritten, completed, and published in 1836. Of all
Emerson's writings this is the most individual, and the most adapted
for a general introduction to his ideas. These ideas are not in fact
peculiar to him; and yet the little book is one of the most original
ever written, and one of those most likely to effect an intellectual
revolution in the mind capable of apprehending it. The reason is
mainly the intense vitality of the manner, and the translation of
abstract arguments into concrete shapes of witchery and beauty. It
contains scarcely a sentence that is not beautiful,--not with the cold
beauty of art, but with the radiance and warmth of feeling. Its
dominant note is rapture, like the joy of one who has found an
enchanted realm, or who has convinced himself that old stories deemed
too beautiful to be true are true indeed. Yet it is exempt from
extravagance, the splendor of the language is chastened by taste, and
the gladness and significance of the author's announcements would
justify an even more ardent enthusiasm. They may be briefly summed up
as the statements that Nature is not mechanical, but vital; that the
Universe is not dead, but alive; that God is not remote, but
omnipresent. There was of course no novelty in these assertions, nor
can Emerson bring them by a hair's-breadth nearer demonstration than
they had always been. He simply re-states them in a manner entirely
his own, and with a charm not perhaps surpassing that with which
others had previously invested them, but peculiar and dissimilar.
Everything really Emersonian in Emerson's teaching may be said to
spring out of this little book: so copious, however, were the
corollaries deducible from principles apparently so simple, that the
flowers veiled the tree; and precious as the tract is, as the first
and purest draught of the new wine, it is not the most practically
efficient of his works, and might probably have passed unperceived if
it had not been reinforced by a number of auxiliary compositions, some
produced under circumstances which could not fail to provoke wide
discussion and consequent notoriety. The principles unfolded in
'Nature' might probably have passed with civil acquiescence if Emerson
had been content with the mere statement; but he insisted on carrying
them logically out, and this could not be done without unsettling
every school of thought at the time prevalent in America. The Divine
omnipresence, for example, was admitted in words by all except
materialists and anti-theists; but if, as Emerson maintained, this
involved the conception of the Universe as a Divine incarnation, this
in its turn involved an optimistic view of the universal scheme
totally inconsistent with the Calvinism still dominant in American
theology. If all existence was a Divine emanation, no part of it could
be more sacred than another part,--which at once abolished the mystic
significance of religious ceremonies so dear to the Episcopalians;
while the immediate contact of the Universe with the Deity was no less
incompatible with the miraculous interferences on which Unitarianism
reposed its faith. Such were some of the most important negative
results of Emerson's doctrines; in their positive aspect, by asserting
the identity of natural and spiritual laws, they invested the former
with the reverence hitherto accorded only to the latter, and restored
to a mechanical and prosaic society the piety with which men in the
infancy of history had defied the forces of Nature. Substantially,
except for the absence of any definite relation to literary art,
Emerson's mission was very similar to Wordsworth's; but by natural
temperament and actual situation he wanted the thousand links which
bound Wordsworth to the past, and eventually made the sometime
innovator the patron of a return towards the Middle Ages.
Emerson had no wish to regress, and, almost alone among thinkers who
have reached an advanced age, betrays no symptom of reaction
throughout the whole of his career. The reason may be, that his
scrupulous fairness and frank conceptions to the Conservative cast of
thought had left him nothing to retract or atone for. He seems to have
started on his journey through life with his Conservatism and
Liberalism ready made up, taking with him just as much of either as
he wanted. This is especially manifest in the discourse 'The
Conservative' (1841), in which he deliberately weighs conservative
against progressive tendencies, impersonates each in an imaginary
interlocutor, and endeavors to display their respective justification
and shortcomings. Nothing can be more rigidly equitable or more
thoroughly sane than his estimate; and as the issues between
conservatism and reform have broadened and deepened, time has only
added to its value. It is a perfect manual for thoughtful citizens,
desirous of understanding the questions that underlie party issues,
and is especially to be commended to young and generous minds, liable
to misguidance in proportion to their generosity.
This celebrated discourse is one of a group including one still more
celebrated, the address to the graduating class of Divinity College,
Cambridge, published as 'The Christian Teacher' (1838). This, says Mr.
Cabot, seems to have been struck off at a heat, which perhaps accounts
for its nearer approach than any of his other addresses to the
standard of what is usually recognized as eloquence. Eloquent in a
sense Emerson usually was, but here is something which could transport
a fit audience with enthusiasm. It also possessed the power of
awakening the keenest antagonism; but censure has long since died
away, and nothing that Emerson wrote has been more thoroughly adopted
into the creed of those with whom external observances and material
symbols find no place. Equally epoch-making in a different way was the
oration on 'Man Thinking, or the American Scholar' (1837), entitled by
Dr. Holmes "our intellectual Declaration of Independence," and of
which Mr. Lowell says: "We were socially and intellectually moored to
English thought, till Emerson cut the cable and gave us a chance at
the dangers and glories of blue water." In these three great
discourses, and in a less measure in 'The Transcendentalist' and 'Man
the Reformer' (both in 1841), America may boast of possessing works of
the first class, which could have been produced in no other country,
and which--even though, in Emerson's own phrase, wider circles should
come to be drawn around them--will remain permanent landmarks in
intellectual history.
These discourses may be regarded as Emerson's public proclamations of
his opinions; but he is probably more generally known and more
intimately beloved by the two unobtrusive volumes of Essays,
originally prefaced for England by Carlyle. Most of these, indeed,
were originally delivered as lectures, but to small audiences, and
with little challenge to public attention. It may be doubted whether
they would have succeeded as lectures but for the personal magnetism
of the speaker; but their very defects aid them with the reader, who,
once fascinated by their beauty of phrase and depth of spiritual
insight, imbibes their spirit all the more fully for his ceaseless
effort to mend their deficient logic with his own. Like Love in
Dante's sonnet, Emerson enters into and blends with the reader, and
his influence will often be found most potent where it is least
acknowledged. Each of the twenty may be regarded as a fuller working
out of some subject merely hinted at in 'Nature,'--statues, as it
were, for niches left vacant in the original edifice. The most
important and pregnant with thought are 'History,' where the same
claim is preferred for history as for the material world, that it is
not dead but alive; 'Self-Reliance,' a most vigorous assertion of a
truth which Emerson was apt to carry to extremes,--the majesty of the
individual soul; 'Compensation,' an exposition of the universe as the
incarnation of unerring truth and absolute justice; 'Love,' full of
beauty and rapture, yet almost chilling to the young by its assertion
of what is nevertheless true, that even Love in its human semblance
only subserves ulterior ends; 'Circles,' the demonstration that this
circumstance is no way peculiar to Love, that there can be nothing
ultimate, final, or unrelated to ulterior purpose,--nothing around
which, in Emersonian phrase, you cannot draw a circle; 'The
Over-Soul,' a prose hymn dedicated to an absolutely spiritual
religion; 'The Poet,' a celebration of Poetry as coextensive with
Imagination, and in the highest sense with Reason also; 'Experience'
and 'Character,' valuable essays, but evincing that the poetical
impulse was becoming spent, and that Emerson's mind was more and more
tending to questions of conduct. The least satisfactory of the essays
is that on 'Art,' where he is only great on the negative side, Art's
inevitable limitations. The aesthetical faculty, which contemplates
Beauty under the restraints of Form, was evidently weak in him.
'Representative Men,' Emerson's next work of importance (1845), shows
that his parachute was descending; but he makes a highly successful
compromise by taking up original ideas as reflected in the actions and
thoughts of great typical men, one remove only from originality of
exposition on his own part. The treatment is necessarily so partial as
to exercise a distorting influence on his representation of the men
themselves. Napoleon, for example, may have been from a certain point
of view the hero of the middle class, as Emerson chooses to consider
him; but he was much besides, which cannot even be hinted at in a
short lecture. The representation of such a hero, nevertheless,
whether the character precisely fitted Napoleon or not, is highly
spirited and suggestive; and the same may be said of the other
lectures. That on Shakespeare is the least satisfying, the consummate
art which is half Shakespeare's greatness making little appeal to
Emerson. He appears also at variance with himself when he speaks of
Shakespeare's existence as "obscure and profane," such a healthy,
homely, unambitious life being precisely what he elsewhere extols as a
model. The first lecture of the series, 'Uses of Great Men,' would
seem to have whispered the message more vociferously repeated by Walt
Whitman.
Emerson was yet to write two books of worth, not illumed with "the
light that never was on sea or land," but valuable complements to his
more characteristic work, and important to mankind as an indisputable
proof that a teacher need not be distrusted in ordinary things because
he is a mystic and a poet. 'The Conduct of Life' (1851), far inferior
to his earlier writings in inspiration, is yet one of the most popular
and widely influential of his works because condescending more nearly
to the needs and intelligence of the average reader. It is not less
truly Emersonian, less fully impregnated with his unique genius; but
the themes discussed are less interesting, and the glory and the
beauty of the diction are much subdued. Without it, we should have
been in danger of regarding Emerson too exclusively as a
transcendental seer, and ignoring the solid ground of good sense and
practical sagacity from which the waving forests of his imagery drew
their nutriment. It greatly promoted his fame and influence by coming
into the hands of successive generations of readers who naturally
inquired for his last book, found the author, with surprise, so much
nearer their own intellectual position than they had been led to
expect, and gradually extended the indorsement which they could not
avoid according to the book, to the author himself. When the Reason
and the Understanding have agreed to legitimate the pretensions of a
speculative thinker, these may be considered stable. Emerson
insensibly took rank with the other American institutions; it seemed
natural to all, that without the retractation or modification of a
syllable on his part, Harvard should in 1866 confer her highest honors
upon him whose address to her Divinity School had aroused such fierce
opposition in 1838. Emerson's views, being pure intuitions, rarely
admitted of alteration in essence, though supplement or limitation
might sometimes be found advisable. The Civil War, for instance, could
not but convince him that in his zeal for the independence of the
individual he had dangerously impaired the necessary authority of
government. His attitude throughout this great contest was the ideal
of self-sacrificing patriotism: in truth, it might be said of him, as
of so few men of genius, that you could not find a situation for him,
public or private, whose obligations he was not certain to fulfill. He
had previously given proof of his insight into another nation by his
'English Traits,' mainly founded upon the visit he had paid to England
in 1847-48: a book to be read with equal pleasure and profit by the
nation of which and by the nation for which it was written; while its
insight, sanity, and kindliness justify what has been said on
occasion of another of Emerson's writings: "The ideologist judges the
man of action more shrewdly and justly than the man of action judges
the ideologist." This was the secret of Napoleon's bitter animosity to
"ideologists": he felt instinctively that the man of ideas could see
into him and through him, and recognize and declare his place in the
scheme of the universe as an astronomer might a planet's. He would
have wished to be an incalculable, original, elemental force; and it
vexed him to feel that he was something whose course could be mapped
and whose constitution defined by a mere mortal like a Coleridge or a
De Stael, who could treat him like the incarnate Thought he was, and
show him, as Emerson showed the banker, "that he also was a phantom
walking and working amid phantoms, and that he need only ask a
question or two beyond his daily questions to find his solid universe
proving dim and impalpable before his sense."
The later writings of Emerson, though exhibiting few or no traces of
mental decay, are in general repetitions or at least confirmations of
what had once been announcements and discoveries. This can scarcely be
otherwise when the mind's productions are derived from its own stuff
and substance. Emerson's contemporary Longfellow could renovate and
indeed augment his poetical power by resort in his old age to Italy;
but change of environment brings no reinforcement of energy to the
speculative thinker. Events however may come to his aid; and when
Emerson was called before the people by a momentous incident like the
death of President Lincoln, he rose fully to the height of the
occasion. His last verses, also, are among his best. We have spoken of
him as primarily and above all things a poet; but his claim to that
great distinction is to be sought rather in the poetical spirit which
informs all his really inspired writings, than in the comparatively
restricted region of rhyme and metre. It might have been otherwise.
Many of his detached passages are the very best things in verse yet
written in America: but though a maker, he is not a fashioner. The
artistic instinct is deficient in him; he is seldom capable of
combining his thoughts into a harmonious whole. No one's expression is
better when he aims at conveying a single thought with gnomic
terseness, as in the mottoes to his essays; few are more obscure when
he attempts continuous composition. Sometimes, as in the admirable
stanzas on the Bunker Hill dedication, the subject has enforced the
due clearness and compression of thought; sometimes, as in the
glorious lines beginning "Not from a vain or shallow thought," he is
guided unerringly by a divine rapture; in one instance at least, 'The
Rhodora,' where he is writing of beauty, the instinct of beauty has
given his lines the symmetry as well as the sparkle of the diamond.
Could he have always written like this, he would have been supreme
among American poets in metre; as it is, comparison seems unfair both
to him and to them.
What we have to learn from Emerson is chiefly the Divine immanence in
the world, with all its corollaries; no discovery of his, but
re-stated by him in the fashion most suitable to his age, and with a
cogency and attractiveness rivaled by no contemporary. If we tried to
sum up his message in a phrase, we might perhaps find this in Keats's
famous 'Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty'; only, while Keats was
evidently more concerned for Beauty than for Truth, Emerson held an
impartial balance. These are with him the tests of each other:
whatever is really true is also beautiful, whatever is really
beautiful is also true. Hence his especial value to a world whose more
refined spirits are continually setting up types of aesthetic beauty
which must needs be delusive, as discordant with beauty contemplated
under the aspect of morality; while the mass never think of bringing
social and political arrangements to the no less infallible test of
conformity to an ideally beautiful standard. Hence the seeming
idealist is of all men the most practical; and Emerson's gospel of
beauty should be especially precious to a country like his own, where
circumstances must for so long tell in favor of the more material
phases of civilization. Even more important is that aspect of his
teaching which deals with the unalterableness of spiritual laws, the
impossibility of evading Truth and Fact in the long run, or of
wronging any one without at the same time wronging oneself. Happy
would it be for the United States if Emerson's essay on 'Compensation'
in particular could be impressed upon the conscience, where there is
any, of every political leader; and interwoven with the very texture
of the mind of every one who has a vote to cast at the polls!
The special adaptation of Emerson's teaching to the needs of America
is, nevertheless, far from the greatest obligation under which he has
laid his countrymen. His greatest service is to have embodied a
specially American type of thought and feeling. It is the test of real
greatness in a nation to be individual, to produce something in the
world of intellect peculiar to itself and indefeasibly its own. Such
intellectual growths were indeed to be found in America before
Emerson's time, but they were not of the highest class. Franklin was a
great sage, but his wisdom was worldly wisdom. Emerson gives us, in
his own phrase, morality on fire with emotion,--the only morality
which in the long run will really influence the heart of man. Man is
after all too noble a being to be permanently actuated by enlightened
selfishness; and when we compare Emerson with even so truly eminent a
character as Franklin, we see, as he saw when he compared Carlyle with
Johnson, how great a stride forward his country had taken in the mean
time. But he could do for America what Carlyle could not do for Great
Britain, for it was done already: he could and did create a type of
wisdom especially national, as distinctive of the West as Buddha's of
the East.
[Illustration: Signature of Richard Garnett]
All the following citations from Emerson's works are
reprinted by special arrangement with, and the kind
permission of, Mr. Emerson's family, and Messrs.
Houghton, Miffin & Co., publishers, Boston, Mass.