EMERSON’S HISTORIC SENSE
“_I feel time passing away as an ebbing sea. I feel the eternity of
man, the identity of his thought. The Greek had, it seems, the same
fellow beings as I. The sun and moon, water and fire, met his heart
precisely as they meet mine. Then the vaunted distinction between
Greek and English, between Classic and Romantic schools become
superficial and pedantic. When a thought of Plato becomes a thought to
me, when a truth that fired the soul of Pindar fires me, time is no
more._”
A critic has declared that Emerson was lacking in the “historic
sense.” By this he means that Emerson had no aptitude for historical
investigation as it has been developed by modern scholars. He could
never have been an historian like Lord Acton, seeking to get at the
exact truth in regard to all the events of past periods of time.
He was incapable of the fierce industry with which Thomas Carlyle
investigated the records of long dead Hohenzollerns. One Hohenzollern
would have been enough for Emerson. He had no taste for antiquarian
research.
But to say that a man is without the historic sense is like accusing
him of a lack of the sense of humor. This latter accusation usually
means little more than there is a difference in the taste for jokes.
Instead of saying that Emerson lacked the historic sense, it would be
better to inquire as to that which was characteristic in his attitude
to history. Only when we sympathize with that can we obtain any benefit
from him.
There are two ways of looking at human history. One may fix his mind
on the differences between one period and another, or he may be more
profoundly interested in the identities which he recognizes.
In the former case, what is seen is a succession of events and
personages each having its little day and passing away forever. Each
is different from the other, and it is the business of the historian
to note those differences. He is the stage manager careful about the
entrances and the exits of the actors, and about the way the lights are
arranged for each scene. There are distinctly marked periods of time,
each with its beginning, middle and end. This is one way of looking at
history.
Another way is that of the philosopher who is interested primarily not
in persons or events, but in the forces of which they are the temporary
manifestations. He perceives not so much the differences as the
identities. This was Emerson’s habitual point of view. He did not care
for the dead past. So much of it as was really dead he would decently
bury. But that part of it which was alive he would incorporate into the
living present and treat as of contemporary interest. It was here that
Emerson’s historic sense manifested itself.
In the volume called “Representative Men” Emerson illustrates his
conception of History. “The search after the great men,” he says, “is
the dream of youth, and the most serious occupation of manhood.” And
yet when we have found the great man, we find a person very much like
ourselves. We agree with him, which means that he expresses thoughts
that are very like our own. We are conscious of the fact that he
reveals what is in us as well as in him. Plato, Shakespeare, Montaigne,
Napoleon, were representative men. There were millions of persons who
had the same qualities, but in less degree. The fact that they have
been appreciated proves their kinship to the multitude.
“The genius of humanity is the right point of view in history. The
qualities abide; the men who exhibit them have no more nor less, and
pass away; the qualities remain in another brow. No experience is
more familiar. Once you saw phœnixes, now they are gone; the world
is not therefore disenchanted. The vessels on which you read sacred
emblems turn out to be common pottery; but the sense of the picture
is sacred, and you may still read them, transferred to the walls of
the world. For a time our teachers serve us personally, as meters or
milestones of progress. Once they were angels of knowledge and their
figures touched the sky. Then we drew near, saw their means, culture
and limits and they yielded their place to other geniuses. Happy if
a few names remain so high that we have not been able to read them
nearer, and age and comparison have not robbed them of a ray. But at
last we shall cease to look in men for completeness and shall content
ourselves with their social and delegated quality. All that respects
the individual is temporary and prospective like the individual
himself, who is ascending out of his limits into a catholic existence.
We have never come at the true and best benefit of any genius so long
as we believe him an original force.”
Here Emerson differed radically from his friend Carlyle. To Carlyle the
hero was an original force; Luther was more than the Reformation of the
sixteenth century. Cromwell and Frederick the Great were treated as if
they were creatures who were unlike the Englishmen and the Prussians
whom they governed. To Emerson they were men who best represented the
ideals of their countrymen.
To my mind Emerson’s most brilliant bit of historical criticism is
contained in his Essay on Napoleon. Many have been the descriptions of
the life and character of the great Corsican adventurer. Emerson makes
us see the kind of man Napoleon was. “Bonaparte was the idol of common
men because he had in transcendent degree the qualities and powers of
common men.”
He was “a man of stone and iron, capable of sitting on horseback
sixteen or seventeen hours, of going many days together without rest
or food, except by snatches, and with the speed and spring of a tiger
in action; a man not embarrassed by any scruples; compact, instant,
selfish, prudent, and of a perception which did not suffer itself to be
balked or misled by any pretences of others, or any superstition or any
heat or haste of his own.
“I call Napoleon the agent or attorney of the middle classes of modern
society; of the throng who filled the markets, shops, counting
houses, manufactories, ships of the modern world, aiming to be rich.
He was the agitator, the destroyer of prescription, the internal
improver, the liberal, the radical, the inventor of means, the opener
of doors and markets, the subverter of monopoly and abuse.”
Napoleon’s change from the young revolutionist to the Emperor was
nothing strange. “The democrat is the young conservative. The
aristocrat is the democrat, ripe and gone to seed--because both parties
stand on the one ground of the supreme value of property, which one
endeavors to get and the other to keep. Bonaparte may be said to
represent the whole history of this party, its youth and its age, yes
and with poetic justice its fate in his own.”
Turn from the Essay on Napoleon to that on Power. In the description
of the village tavern keeper you will recognize a poor relation
of the great Napoleon. There is the same combination of force and
unscrupulousness.
“I knew a burly Bonaface who for many years kept a public house in one
of our rural capitals. He was a knave whom the town could ill spare.
He was a social vascular creature, grasping and selfish. There is no
crime which he did not or could not commit. But he made good friends
of the selectmen, served them with his best chop when they supped at
his house, and also with his honor the Judge he was very cordial,
grasping his hand. He introduced all the fiends, male and female, into
the town, and united in his person the functions of bully, incendiary,
swindler, barkeeper and burglar. He girdled the trees, and cut off
the horses’ tails of the temperance people in the night. He led the
‘rummies’ and radicals in the town meeting. Meanwhile, he was civil,
fat and easy in his house, and precisely the most public-spirited
citizen. He was active in getting the roads repaired and planted
with shade trees; he subscribed for the fountains, the gas and the
telegraph, he introduced the new horse rake, the new scraper, the
baby-jumper and what not that Connecticut sends to the admiring
citizens.”
Schoolboys dispute the question--Was the career of Napoleon Bonaparte
beneficial to Europe? The same question arises in regard to the
public-spirited and disreputable tavern keeper. Emerson as an historian
would not attempt to give a final verdict. He would insist on having
the facts on both sides presented. And then he would judge the value of
the facts by their correspondence with his own experience.
“The fact narrated must correspond to something in me to be credible
or intelligible. We as we read must become Greeks, Romans, Turks,
priest and king, martyr and executioner, must fasten the image to some
reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly.”
One experiences history as he experiences religion. There are a few
passions that are common to all men. They are the keys to all story
of the past. It is mere pedantry to explain the worship and the
achievements of other ages as if they were mysteries. After all they
are nothing strange. We have felt the same impulses.
“How easily these old worships of Moses, of Zoroaster, of Menu, of
Socrates, domesticate themselves in the mind. I cannot find any
antiquity in them. They are mine as much as theirs.
“I have seen the first monks and anchorets without crossing seas
or centuries. More than once some individual has appeared to me
with such negligence of labour and such commanding contemplation, a
haughty beneficiary, begging in the name of God, as made good to the
nineteenth century Simeon the Stylite, the Thebais, and the first
Capuchins.
“The priestcraft of the East and West, of the Magian, Brahmin, Druid,
and Inca, is expounded in the individual’s private life. The cramping
influence of a hard formalist on a young child in repressing his
spirits and courage, paralyzing the understanding, and that without
producing indignation, but only fear and obedience, and even much
sympathy with tyranny,--is a familiar fact explained to the child when
he becomes a man, only by seeing that the oppressor of his youth is
himself a child tyrannized over by those names and words and forms,
of whose influence he was merely the organ to the youth. The fact
teaches him how Belus was worshipped, and how the Pyramids were built,
better than the discovery by Champollion of the names of all the
workmen and the cost of every tile. He finds Assyria and the Mounds of
Cholula at his door, and himself has laid the courses.
“Again, in that protest which each considerate person makes against
the superstition of his times, he repeats step for step the part of
old reformers, and in the search after truth finds like them new
perils to virtue. He learns again what moral vigour is needed to
supply the girdle of a superstition. A great licentiousness treads on
the heels of a reformation. How many times in the history of the world
has the Luther of the day had to lament the decay of piety in his own
household! ‘Doctor,’ said his wife to Martin Luther, one day, ‘how is
it that, whilst subject to papacy, we prayed so often and with such
fervour, whilst now we pray with the utmost coldness and very seldom?’
“The advancing man discovers how deep a property he has in
literature,--in all fable as well as in all history. He finds that
the poet was no odd fellow who described strange and impossible
situations, but that universal man wrote by his pen a confession true
for one and true for all. His own secret biography he finds in lines
wonderfully intelligible to him, dotted down before he was born. One
after another he comes up in his private adventures with every fable
of Æsop, of Homer, of Hafiz, of Ariosto, of Chaucer, of Scott, and
verifies them with his own head and hands.”