In one respect many of us feel toward Emerson as a wife feels toward
her husband; we like to find fault with him ourselves, but it hurts us
to have others do the same. He was a friend of our youth.
Though we may in a measure have outgrown him, and now find his
paradoxes, his daring affirmations, his trick of overstatement and
understatement less novel and stimulating than we once did, yet we
cherish him in our heart of hearts.
The process of maturing, with the spirit as with the body, with man
as with the various organic growths, is more or less a hardening and
toughening process,--a hardening for strength and endurance. Emerson
belongs to the earlier period, before the hardening has progressed
far, while the grain of our thoughts is yet in the milk. He appeals
to us most strongly in youth or early manhood, when we are not too
critical and while we are yet full of brave and generous impulses. A
little callow we may be, but buoyant and optimistic. As we grow older
something seems to evaporate from him, and one returns to his pages in
middle or later life as to the scene of some youthful festival, half
religious, half social, in which he took part, and the memory of which
still stirs his emotions.
Emerson finally dropped the church, but he never ceased to be a
clergyman. He was like a flower escaped from the garden, and finding a
lodgment in an adjoining field, but which never ceased to be a garden
flower. A certain sanctity and unworldliness always clung to him,--a
certain remoteness from the common thoughts, aims, attractions, of
everyday humanity. If he had been a better worldling he would have been
a better poet,--that is, if he had had more of the feelings, passions,
sympathies and thoughts of ordinary men. These things would have given
him more flexibility and brought him closer to human life. Rarely, as
poet or prose writer, could he speak in the tone of the people. There
was always, more or less concealed, the tone of the pulpit. Mr. James
expressed this idea well when he said that Emerson “had no prosaic side
relating him to ordinary people.”
This prosaic side is very important to the poet, or to any man who
would touch and move his fellow-men. We desire our singer or teacher
to be of the same flesh and blood as ourselves. Emerson was always a
preacher, and his theme, by whatever name he called it, was always
religion, or what he called religion, namely, the universality of the
moral law.
No lover of Emerson, I imagine, would have had him other than what
he was; I certainly would not. At the same time it is a pleasure to
explore his limitations and see just what he was, and what he was not.
He was a rare soul, probably the most astral genius in English or
any other literature. His books are for young men and for those of a
religious cast of mind. His signal defect as a writer, as a contributor
to the world’s literature, arises from this same want of sympathy with
the world,--from the select, abridged, circumscribed character of his
genius. He did not and could not deal with human life as Montaigne, or
Bacon, or Plutarch, or Cicero did.
He was conscious of his defect in this direction, and would fain have
had it otherwise. Thus he writes in his journal in 1839: “We would
all be public men if we could afford it. I am wholly private; such
is the poverty of my constitution. ‘Heaven betrayed me to a book and
wrapped me in a gown.’ I have no social talent, no will, and a steady
appetite for insights in any or all directions, to balance my manifold
imbecilities.” He even quotes approvingly the remark of some one
that he “always seemed to be on stilts.” “It is even so. Most of the
persons whom I see in my own house I see across a gulf. I cannot go
to them nor they come to me.” He lacked sympathy with men. He cared
nothing for persons as such, but only for the genius of humanity which
they embodied, and this genius of humanity he did not find in any
sufficiency in ordinary mortals.
He writes in his journal, “I like man, but not men!” He liked ideas,
but not things. He dwelt in the abstract, not in the concrete. “In the
highest friendship,” he says, “we form a league with the Idea of the
man who stands to us in that relation--not with the actual person.” And
his letters, fine and eloquent as most of them are, do not read like a
message from one person to another person, but from one Idea to another
Idea.
Yet Emerson’s leading trait is eminently American; I mean his
hospitality toward the new,--the eagerness with which he sought and
welcomed the new idea and the new man. Perhaps we might call it
his inborn radicalism. No writer ever made such rash, such extreme
statements, in the hope that some new truth might be compassed.
Anything new and daring instantly challenged his attention. His face
was wholly set toward the future,--the new. The past was discredited
the moment it became the past. “The coming only is sacred,” he said;
“no truth so sublime but it may be trivial to-morrow in the light of
new thoughts.”
As a writer, he sought to make all the old thoughts appear trivial in
the light of his audacious affirmations. He stood ready at all times to
strike his colors to the man who could bring a larger generalization
than his own. All his knowledge, all his opinions, were at the mercy
of the new idea. He did not tread the beaten paths, or seek truth in
the logical way; he sought for it by spurts and sallies of the mind.
He called himself an “experimenter,” and said he did not pretend to
settle anything as true or false. “I unsettle all things. No facts are
to me sacred; none are profane: I simply experiment; an endless seeker
with no Past at my back.” In his random, prophetic way he hits on many
sublime truths--hits on them by sheer force of affirmation, like the
truth of evolution, and of the correlation of forces. Indeed, there are
few great thoughts current in our time that were not indicated by the
bold guessing of Emerson. The fragmentary and projectile-like character
of his thinking is often very effective. He spent no force upon logic,
upon fortifying his position, but sent his single bullet as far and as
deep as he could. Emerson’s hope and confidence in the new is shown in
his serious prophecy and expectancy of the coming man.
He was apparently always on the lookout for a new and greater man than
had yet appeared. He was always sweeping the horizon for this strange
sail. “A new person,” he says, “is to me a great event, and keeps me
from sleep.” He met every stranger with a curious, expectant glance.
He looked at you and waited for you to speak, as if the thought that
perhaps here is the man I am waiting for, was never absent from his
mind. “If the companions of our childhood,” he says, “should turn out
to be heroes, and their condition regal, it would not surprise us.” But
the experience of most persons, I fancy, points just the other way: we
are always incredulous when told that our playmates have turned out
to be heroes; just as the whole world, except the Emersons in it, are
skeptical of the worth of the new idea, or of the new invention.
Emerson does not so much expound a philosophy as he celebrates a
sentiment or a law. He does not inculcate a virtue, but quickens our
moral sense. He does not teach a religion, but shows all nature as
religious. His method is not that of the analyst; he celebrates and
presents whole what others give in detail. His mind is deficient in
continuity, but strong in affirmation, strong in its separate sallies
and flights. He has not a definite, practical bent like Carlyle; he
seldom lays his hand on any current evil or want, but rather glorifies
the world as it is. He is abstract in his aim, and concrete in his
methods. He fixes his eye on the star, but would make it draw his wagon.
Carlyle was like an engine tied to its iron rails,--he turned aside for
nothing; Emerson was more like a sailing yacht that hovers about all
shores and takes advantage of every breeze.