"The universe does not attract us till it is housed in an
individual." "A man, a personal ascendency, is the only great
phenomenon."
"I cannot find language of sufficient energy to convey my sense of
the sacredness of private integrity."
On the other hand, he is never far from his great fear: "But Truth is
such a fly-away, such a sly-boots, so untransportable and unbarrelable a
commodity, that it is as bad to catch as light." "Let him beware of
proposing to himself any end.... I say to you plainly, there is no end
so sacred or so large that if pursued for itself will not become
carrion and an offence to the nostril."
There can be nothing finer than Emerson's knowledge of the world, his
sympathy with young men and with the practical difficulties of applying
his teachings. We can see in his early lectures before students and
mechanics how much he had learned about the structure of society from
his own short contact with the organized church.
"Each finds a tender and very intelligent conscience a
disqualification for success. Each requires of the practitioner a
certain shutting of the eyes, a certain dapperness and compliance,
an acceptance of customs, a sequestration from the sentiments of
generosity and love, a compromise of private opinion and lofty
integrity.... The fact that a new thought and hope have dawned in
your breast, should apprise you that in the same hour a new light
broke in upon a thousand private hearts.... And further I will not
dissemble my hope that each person whom I address has felt his own
call to cast aside all evil customs, timidity, and limitations, and
to be in his place a free and helpful man, a reformer, a benefactor,
not content to slip along through the world like a footman or a spy,
escaping by his nimbleness and apologies as many knocks as he can,
but a brave and upright man who must find or cut a straight road to
everything excellent in the earth, and not only go honorably
himself, but make it easier for all who follow him to go in honor
and with benefit...."
Beneath all lay a greater matter,--Emerson's grasp of the forms and
conditions of progress, his reach of intellect, which could afford fair
play to every one.
His lecture on The Conservative is not a puzzling _jeu d'esprit_, like
Bishop Blougram's Apology, but an honest attempt to set up the opposing
chessmen of conservatism and reform so as to represent real life. Hardly
can such a brilliant statement of the case be found elsewhere in
literature. It is not necessary to quote here the reformer's side of the
question, for Emerson's whole life was devoted to it. The conservatives'
attitude he gives with such accuracy and such justice that the very
bankers of State Street seem to be speaking:--
"The order of things is as good as the character of the population
permits. Consider it as the work of a great and beneficent and
progressive necessity, which, from the first pulsation in the first
animal life up to the present high culture of the best nations, has
advanced thus far....
"The conservative party in the universe concedes that the radical
would talk sufficiently to the purpose if we were still in the
garden of Eden; he legislates for man as he ought to be; his theory
is right, but he makes no allowance for friction, and this omission
makes his whole doctrine false. The idealist retorts that the
conservative falls into a far more noxious error in the other
extreme. The conservative assumes sickness as a necessity, and his
social frame is a hospital, his total legislation is for the present
distress, a universe in slippers and flannels, with bib and
pap-spoon, swallowing pills and herb tea. Sickness gets organized as
well as health, the vice as well as the virtue."
It is unnecessary to go, one by one, through the familiar essays and
lectures which Emerson published between 1838 and 1875. They are in
everybody's hands and in everybody's thoughts. In 1840 he wrote in his
diary: "In all my lectures I have taught one doctrine, namely, the
infinitude of the private man. This the people accept readily enough,
and even with commendation, as long as I call the lecture Art or
Politics, or Literature or the Household; but the moment I call it
Religion they are shocked, though it be only the application of the same
truth which they receive elsewhere to a new class of facts." To the
platform he returned, and left it only once or twice during the
remainder of his life.
His writings vary in coherence. In his early occasional pieces, like the
Phi Beta Kappa address, coherence is at a maximum. They were written for
a purpose, and were perhaps struck off all at once. But he earned his
living by lecturing, and a lecturer is always recasting his work and
using it in different forms. A lecturer has no prejudice against
repetition. It is noticeable that in some of Emerson's important
lectures the logical scheme is more perfect than in his essays. The
truth seems to be that in the process of working up and perfecting his
writings, in revising and filing his sentences, the logical scheme
became more and more obliterated. Another circumstance helped make his
style fragmentary. He was by nature a man of inspirations and exalted
moods. He was subject to ecstasies, during which his mind worked with
phenomenal brilliancy. Throughout his works and in his diary we find
constant reference to these moods, and to his own inability to control
or recover them. "But what we want is consecutiveness. 'T is with us a
flash of light, then a long darkness, then a flash again. Ah! could we
turn these fugitive sparkles into an astronomy of Copernican worlds!"
In order to take advantage of these periods of divination, he used to
write down the thoughts that came to him at such times. From boyhood
onward he kept journals and commonplace books, and in the course of his
reading and meditation he collected innumerable notes and quotations
which he indexed for ready use. In these mines he "quarried," as Mr.
Cabot says, for his lectures and essays. When he needed a lecture he
went to the repository, threw together what seemed to have a bearing on
some subject, and gave it a title. If any other man should adopt this
method of composition, the result would be incomprehensible chaos;
because most men have many interests, many moods, many and conflicting
ideas. But with Emerson it was otherwise. There was only one thought
which could set him aflame, and that was the thought of the unfathomed
might of man. This thought was his religion, his politics, his ethics,
his philosophy. One moment of inspiration was in him own brother to the
next moment of inspiration, although they might be separated by six
weeks. When he came to put together his star-born ideas, they fitted
well, no matter in what order he placed them, because they were all
part of the same idea.
His works are all one single attack on the vice of the age, moral
cowardice. He assails it not by railings and scorn, but by positive and
stimulating suggestion. The imagination of the reader is touched by
every device which can awake the admiration for heroism, the
consciousness of moral courage. Wit, quotation, anecdote, eloquence,
exhortation, rhetoric, sarcasm, and very rarely denunciation, are
launched at the reader, till he feels little lambent flames beginning to
kindle in him. He is perhaps unable to see the exact logical connection
between two paragraphs of an essay, yet he feels they are germane. He
takes up Emerson tired and apathetic, but presently he feels himself
growing heady and truculent, strengthened in his most inward vitality,
surprised to find himself again master in his own house.
The difference between Emerson and the other moralists is that all these
stimulating pictures and suggestions are not given by him in
illustration of a general proposition. They have never been through the
mill of generalization in his own mind. He himself could not have told
you their logical bearing on one another. They have all the vividness of
disconnected fragments of life, and yet they all throw light on one
another, like the facets of a jewel. But whatever cause it was that led
him to adopt his method of writing, it is certain that he succeeded in
delivering himself of his thought with an initial velocity and carrying
power such as few men ever attained. He has the force at his command of
the thrower of the discus.
His style is American, and beats with the pulse of the climate. He is
the only writer we have had who writes as he speaks, who makes no
literary parade, has no pretensions of any sort. He is the only writer
we have had who has wholly subdued his vehicle to his temperament. It is
impossible to name his style without naming his character: they are one
thing.
Both in language and in elocution Emerson was a practised and consummate
artist, who knew how both to command his effects and to conceal his
means. The casual, practical, disarming directness with which he writes
puts any honest man at his mercy. What difference does it make whether a
man who can talk like this is following an argument or not? You cannot
always see Emerson clearly; he is hidden by a high wall; but you always
know exactly on what spot he is standing. You judge it by the flight of
the objects he throws over the wall,--a bootjack, an apple, a crown, a
razor, a volume of verse. With one or other of these missiles, all
delivered with a very tolerable aim, he is pretty sure to hit you. These
catchwords stick in the mind. People are not in general influenced by
long books or discourses, but by odd fragments of observation which they
overhear, sentences or head-lines which they read while turning over a
book at random or while waiting for dinner to be announced. These are
the oracles and orphic words that get lodged in the mind and bend a
man's most stubborn will. Emerson called them the Police of the
Universe. His works are a treasury of such things. They sparkle in the
mine, or you may carry them off in your pocket. They get driven into
your mind like nails, and on them catch and hang your own experiences,
till what was once his thought has become your character.
"God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take
which you please; you can never have both." "Discontent is want of
self-reliance; it is infirmity of will." "It is impossible for a man
to be cheated by any one but himself."
The orchestration with which Emerson introduces and sustains these
notes from the spheres is as remarkable as the winged things themselves.
Open his works at a hazard. You hear a man talking.
"A garden is like those pernicious machineries we read of every
month in the newspapers, which catch a man's coat-skirt or his hand,
and draw in his arm, his leg, and his whole body to irresistible
destruction. In an evil hour he pulled down his wall and added a
field to his homestead. No land is bad, but land is worse. If a man
own land, the land owns him. Now let him leave home if he dare.
Every tree and graft, every hill of melons, row of corn, or quickset
hedge, all he has done and all he means to do, stand in his way like
duns, when he would go out of his gate."
Your attention is arrested by the reality of this gentleman in his
garden, by the first-hand quality of his mind. It matters not on what
subject he talks. While you are musing, still pleased and patronizing,
he has picked up the bow of Ulysses, bent it with the ease of Ulysses,
and sent a shaft clear through the twelve axes, nor missed one of them.
But this, it seems, was mere byplay and marksmanship; for before you
have done wondering, Ulysses rises to his feet in anger, and pours
flight after flight, arrow after arrow, from the great bow. The shafts
sing and strike, the suitors fall in heaps. The brow of Ulysses shines
with unearthly splendor. The air is filled with lightning. After a
little, without shock or transition, without apparent change of tone,
Mr. Emerson is offering you a biscuit before you leave, and bidding you
mind the last step at the garden end. If the man who can do these things
be not an artist, then must we have a new vocabulary and rename the
professions.
There is, in all this effectiveness of Emerson, no pose, no literary
art; nothing that corresponds even remotely to the pretended modesty and
ignorance with which Socrates lays pitfalls for our admiration in
Plato's dialogues.
It was the platform which determined Emerson's style. He was not a
writer, but a speaker. On the platform his manner of speech was a living
part of his words. The pauses and hesitation, the abstraction, the
searching, the balancing, the turning forward and back of the leaves of
his lecture, and then the discovery, the illumination, the gleam of
lightning which you saw before your eyes descend into a man of
genius,--all this was Emerson. He invented this style of speaking, and
made it express the supersensuous, the incommunicable. Lowell wrote,
while still under the spell of the magician: "Emerson's oration was more
disjointed than usual, even with him. It began nowhere, and ended
everywhere, and yet, as always with that divine man, it left you feeling
that something beautiful had passed that way, something more beautiful
than anything else, like the rising and setting of stars. Every possible
criticism might have been made on it but one,--that it was not noble.
There was a tone in it that awakened all elevating associations. He
boggled, he lost his place, he had to put on his glasses; but it was as
if a creature from some fairer world had lost his way in our fogs, and
it was _our_ fault, not his. It was chaotic, but it was all such stuff
as stars are made of, and you couldn't help feeling that, if you waited
awhile, all that was nebulous would be whirled into planets, and would
assume the mathematical gravity of system. All through it I felt
something in me that cried, 'Ha! ha!' to the sound of the trumpets."
It is nothing for any man sitting in his chair to be overcome with the
sense of the immediacy of life, to feel the spur of courage, the victory
of good over evil, the value, now and forever, of all great-hearted
endeavor. Such moments come to us all. But for a man to sit in his chair
and write what shall call up these forces in the bosoms of others--that
is desert, that is greatness. To do this was the gift of Emerson. The
whole earth is enriched by every moment of converse with him. The shows
and shams of life become transparent, the lost kingdoms are brought
back, the shutters of the spirit are opened, and provinces and realms of
our own existence lie gleaming before us.
It has been necessary to reduce the living soul of Emerson to mere dead
attributes like "moral courage" in order that we might talk about him at
all. His effectiveness comes from his character; not from his
philosophy, nor from his rhetoric nor his wit, nor from any of the
accidents of his education. He might never have heard of Berkeley or
Plato. A slightly different education might have led him to throw his
teaching into the form of historical essays or of stump speeches. He
might, perhaps, have been bred a stonemason, and have done his work in
the world by travelling with a panorama. But he would always have been
Emerson. His weight and his power would always have been the same. It is
solely as character that he is important. He discovered nothing; he
bears no relation whatever to the history of philosophy. We must regard
him and deal with him simply as a man.
Strangely enough, the world has always insisted upon accepting him as a
thinker: and hence a great coil of misunderstanding. As a thinker,
Emerson is difficult to classify. Before you begin to assign him a
place, you must clear the ground by a disquisition as to what is meant
by "a thinker", and how Emerson differs from other thinkers. As a man,
Emerson is as plain as Ben Franklin.
People have accused him of inconsistency; they say that he teaches one
thing one day, and another the next day. But from the point of view of
Emerson there is no such thing as inconsistency. Every man is each day a
new man. Let him be to-day what he is to-day. It is immaterial and waste
of time to consider what he once was or what he may be.
His picturesque speech delights in fact and anecdote, and a public which
is used to treatises and deduction cares always to be told the moral. It
wants everything reduced to a generalization. All generalizations are
partial truths, but we are used to them, and we ourselves mentally make
the proper allowance. Emerson's method is, not to give a generalization
and trust to our making the allowance, but to give two conflicting
statements and leave the balance of truth to be struck in our own minds
on the facts. There is no inconsistency in this. It is a vivid and very
legitimate method of procedure. But he is much more than a theorist: he
is a practitioner. He does not merely state a theory of agitation: he
proceeds to agitate. "Do not," he says, "set the least value on what I
do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle
anything as false or true. 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." He was not engaged in teaching many things, but one
thing,--Courage. Sometimes he inspires it by pointing to great
characters,--Fox, Milton, Alcibiades; sometimes he inspires it by
bidding us beware of imitating such men, and, in the ardor of his
rhetoric, even seems to regard them as hindrances and dangers to our
development. There is no inconsistency here. Emerson might logically
have gone one step further and raised inconsistency into a jewel. For
what is so useful, so educational, so inspiring, to a timid and
conservative man, as to do something inconsistent and regrettable? It
lends character to him at once. He breathes freer and is stronger for
the experience.
Emerson is no cosmopolitan. He is a patriot. He is not like Goethe,
whose sympathies did not run on national lines. Emerson has America in
his mind's eye all the time. There is to be a new religion, and it is to
come from America; a new and better type of man, and he is to be an
American. He not only cared little or nothing for Europe, but he cared
not much for the world at large. His thought was for the future of this
country. You cannot get into any chamber in his mind which is below this
chamber of patriotism. He loves the valor of Alexander and the grace of
the Oxford athlete; but he loves them not for themselves. He has a use
for them. They are grist to his mill and powder to his gun. His
admiration of them he subordinates to his main purpose,--they are his
blackboard and diagrams. His patriotism is the backbone of his
significance. He came to his countrymen at a time when they lacked, not
thoughts, but manliness. The needs of his own particular public are
always before him.
"It is odd that our people should have, not water on the brain, but
a little gas there. A shrewd foreigner said of the Americans that
'whatever they say has a little the air of a speech.'"
"I shall not need to go into an enumeration of our national defects
and vices which require this Order of Censors in the State.... The
timidity of our public opinion is our disease, or, shall I say, the
publicness of opinion, the absence of private opinion."
"Our measure of success is the moderation and low level of an
individual's judgment. Dr. Channing's piety and wisdom had such
weight in Boston that the popular idea of religion was whatever this
eminent divine held."
"Let us affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity, the squalid
contentment of the times."
The politicians he scores constantly.
"Who that sees the meanness of our politics but congratulates
Washington that he is long already wrapped in his shroud and forever
safe." The following is his description of the social world of his
day: "If any man consider the present aspects of what is called by
distinction _society_, he will see the need of these ethics. The
sinew and heart of man seem to be drawn out, and we are become
timorous, desponding whimperers."
It is the same wherever we open his books. He must spur on, feed up,
bring forward the dormant character of his countrymen. When he goes to
England, he sees in English life nothing except those elements which are
deficient in American life. If you wish a catalogue of what America has
not, read English Traits. Emerson's patriotism had the effect of
expanding his philosophy. To-day we know the value of physique, for
science has taught it, but it was hardly discovered in his day, and his
philosophy affords no basis for it. Emerson in this matter transcends
his philosophy. When in England, he was fairly made drunk with the
physical life he found there. He is like Caspar Hauser gazing for the
first time on green fields. English Traits is the ruddiest book he ever
wrote. It is a hymn to force, honesty, and physical well-being, and ends
with the dominant note of his belief: "By this general activity and by
this sacredness of individuals, they [the English] have in seven hundred
years evolved the principles of freedom. It is the land of patriots,
martyrs, sages, and bards, and if the ocean out of which it emerged
should wash it away, it will be remembered as an island famous for
immortal laws, for the announcements of original right which make the
stone tables of liberty." He had found in England free speech, personal
courage, and reverence for the individual.
No convulsion could shake Emerson or make his view unsteady even for an
instant. What no one else saw, he saw, and he saw nothing else. Not a
boy in the land welcomed the outbreak of the war so fiercely as did this
shy village philosopher, then at the age of fifty-eight. He saw that war
was the cure for cowardice, moral as well as physical. It was not the
cause of the slave that moved him; it was not the cause of the Union for
which he cared a farthing. It was something deeper than either of these
things for which he had been battling all his life. It was the cause of
character against convention. Whatever else the war might bring, it was
sure to bring in character, to leave behind it a file of heroes; if not
heroes, then villains, but in any case strong men. On the 9th of April,
1861, three days before Fort Sumter was bombarded, he had spoken with
equanimity of "the downfall of our character-destroying civilization....
We find that civilization crowed too soon, that our triumphs were
treacheries; we had opened the wrong door and let the enemy into the
castle."
"Ah," he said, when the firing began, "sometimes gunpowder smells good."
Soon after the attack on Sumter he said in a public address, "We have
been very homeless for some years past, say since 1850; but now we have
a country again.... The war was an eye-opener, and showed men of all
parties and opinions the value of those primary forces that lie beneath
all political action." And it was almost a personal pledge when he said
at the Harvard Commemoration in 1865, "We shall not again disparage
America, now that we have seen what men it will bear."
The place which Emerson forever occupies as a great critic is defined by
the same sharp outlines that mark his work, in whatever light and from
whatever side we approach it. A critic in the modern sense he was not,
for his point of view is fixed, and he reviews the world like a
search-light placed on the top of a tall tower. He lived too early and
at too great a distance from the forum of European thought to absorb the
ideas of evolution and give place to them in his philosophy. Evolution
does not graft well upon the Platonic Idealism, nor are physiology and
the kindred sciences sympathetic. Nothing aroused Emerson's indignation
more than the attempts of the medical faculty and of phrenologists to
classify, and therefore limit individuals. "The grossest ignorance does
not disgust me like this ignorant knowingness."
We miss in Emerson the underlying conception of growth, of development,
so characteristic of the thought of our own day, and which, for
instance, is found everywhere latent in Browning's poetry. Browning
regards character as the result of experience and as an ever changing
growth. To Emerson, character is rather an entity complete and eternal
from the beginning. He is probably the last great writer to look at life
from a stationary standpoint. There is a certain lack of the historic
sense in all he has written. The ethical assumption that all men are
exactly alike permeates his work. In his mind, Socrates, Marco Polo, and
General Jackson stand surrounded by the same atmosphere, or rather stand
as mere naked characters surrounded by no atmosphere at all. He is
probably the last great writer who will fling about classic anecdotes as
if they were club gossip. In the discussion of morals, this assumption
does little harm. The stories and proverbs which illustrate the thought
of the moralist generally concern only those simple relations of life
which are common to all ages. There is charm in this familiar dealing
with antiquity. The classics are thus domesticated and made real to us.
What matter if Æsop appear a little too much like an American citizen,
so long as his points tell?
It is in Emerson's treatment of the fine arts that we begin to notice
his want of historic sense. Art endeavors to express subtle and ever
changing feelings by means of conventions which are as protean as the
forms of a cloud; and the man who in speaking on the plastic arts makes
the assumption that all men are alike will reveal before he has uttered
three sentences that he does not know what art is, that he has never
experienced any form of sensation from it. Emerson lived in a time and
clime where there was no plastic art, and he was obliged to arrive at
his ideas about art by means of a highly complex process of reasoning.
He dwelt constantly in a spiritual place which was the very focus of
high moral fervor. This was his enthusiasm, this was his revelation, and
from it he reasoned out the probable meaning of the fine arts. "This,"
thought Emerson, his eye rolling in a fine frenzy of moral feeling,
"this must be what Apelles experienced, this fervor is the passion of
Bramante. I understand the Parthenon." And so he projected his feelings
about morality into the field of the plastic arts. He deals very freely
and rather indiscriminately with the names of artists,--Phidias,
Raphael, Salvator Rosa,--and he speaks always in such a way that it is
impossible to connect what he says with any impression we have ever
received from the works of those masters.
In fact, Emerson has never in his life felt the normal appeal of any
painting, or any sculpture, or any architecture, or any music. These
things, of which he does not know the meaning in real life, he yet uses,
and uses constantly, as symbols to convey ethical truths. The result is
that his books are full of blind places, like the notes which will not
strike on a sick piano.
It is interesting to find that the one art of which Emerson did have a
direct understanding, the art of poetry, gave him some insight into the
relation of the artist to his vehicle. In his essay on Shakespeare there
is a full recognition of the debt of Shakespeare to his times. This
essay is filled with the historic sense. We ought not to accuse Emerson
because he lacked appreciation of the fine arts, but rather admire the
truly Goethean spirit in which he insisted upon the reality of arts of
which he had no understanding. This is the same spirit which led him to
insist on the value of the Eastern poets. Perhaps there exist a few
scholars who can tell us how far Emerson understood or misunderstood
Saadi and Firdusi and the Koran. But we need not be disturbed for his
learning. It is enough that he makes us recognize that these men were
men too, and that their writings mean something not unknowable to us.
The East added nothing to Emerson, but gave him a few trappings of
speech. The whole of his mysticism is to be found in Nature, written
before he knew the sages of the Orient, and it is not improbable that
there is some real connection between his own mysticism and the
mysticism of the Eastern poets.
Emerson's criticism on men and books is like the test of a great chemist
who seeks one or two elements. He burns a bit of the stuff in his
incandescent light, shows the lines of it in his spectrum, and there an
end.
It was a thought of genius that led him to write Representative Men. The
scheme of this book gave play to every illumination of his mind, and it
pinned him down to the objective, to the field of vision under his
microscope. The table of contents of Representative Men is the dial of
his education. It is as follows: Uses of Great Men; Plato, or The
Philosopher; Plato, New Readings; Swedenborg, or The Mystic; Montaigne,
or The Sceptic; Shakespeare, or The Poet; Napoleon, or The Man of the
World; Goethe, or The Writer. The predominance of the writers over all
other types of men is not cited to show Emerson's interest in The
Writer, for we know his interest centred in the practical man,--even his
ideal scholar is a practical man,--but to show the sources of his
illustration. Emerson's library was the old-fashioned gentleman's
library. His mines of thought were the world's classics. This is one
reason why he so quickly gained an international currency. His very
subjects in Representative Men are of universal interest, and he is
limited only by certain inevitable local conditions. Representative Men
is thought by many persons to be his best book. It is certainly filled
with the strokes of a master. There exists no more profound criticism
than Emerson's analysis of Goethe and of Napoleon, by both of whom he
was at once fascinated and repelled.