There are men whose charm is in their entirety. Their words occasionally
utter what their looks invariably express. We read their thoughts by the
light of their smiles. Not to see and hear these men is not to know
them, and criticism without personal knowledge is in their case
mutilation. Those who did know them listen in despair to the
half-hearted praise and clumsy disparagement of critical strangers, and
are apt to exclaim, as did the younger Pitt, when some extraneous person
was expressing wonder at the enormous reputation of Fox, 'Ah! you have
never been under the wand of the magician.'
Of such was Ralph Waldo Emerson. When we find so cool-brained a critic
as Mr. Lowell writing and quoting thus of Emerson:
'Those who heard him while their natures were yet plastic, and their
mental nerves trembled under the slightest breath of divine air, will
never cease to feel and say:
'"Was never eye did see that face
Was never ear did hear that tongue,
Was never mind did mind his grace
That ever thought the travail long;
But eyes, and ears, and every thought
Were with his sweet perfections caught;"'
we recognise at once that the sooner we take off our shoes the better,
for that the ground upon which we are standing is holy. How can we
sufficiently honour the men who, in this secular, work-a-day world,
habitually breathe
'An ampler ether, a diviner air,'
than ours!
But testimony of this kind, conclusive as it is upon the question of
Emerson's personal influence, will not always be admissible in support of
his claims as an author. In the long-run an author's only witnesses are
his own books.
In Dr. Holmes's estimate of Emerson's books everyone must wish to concur.
{218} These are not the days, nor is this dry and thirsty land of ours
the place, when or where we can afford to pass by any well of spiritual
influence. It is matter, therefore, for rejoicing that, in the opinion
of so many good judges, Emerson's well can never be choked up. His
essays, so at least we are told by no less a critic than Mr. Arnold, are
the most valuable prose contributions to English literature of the
century; his letters to Mr. Carlyle carried into all our homes the charm
of a most delightful personality; the quaint melody of his poems abides
in many ears. He would, indeed, be a churl who grudged Emerson his fame.
But when we are considering a writer so full of intelligence as
Emerson--one so remote and detached from the world's bluster and brag--it
is especially incumbent upon us to charge our own language with
intelligence, and to make sure that what we say is at least truth for us.
Were we at liberty to agree with Dr. Holmes in his unmeasured praise--did
we, in short, find Emerson full of inspiration--our task would be as easy
as it would be pleasant; but not entirely agreeing with Dr. Holmes, and
somehow missing the inspiration, the difficulty we began by mentioning
presses heavily upon us.
Pleasant reading as the introductory thirty-five pages of Dr. Holmes's
book make, we doubt the wisdom of so very sketchy an account of Emerson's
lineage and intellectual environment. Attracted towards Emerson
everybody must be; but there are many who have never been able to get
quit of an uneasy fear as to his 'staying power.' He has seemed to some
of us a little thin and vague. A really great author dissipates all such
fears. Read a page and they are gone. To inquire after the intellectual
health of such a one would be an impertinence. Emerson hardly succeeds
in inspiring this confidence, but is more like a clever invalid who says,
and is encouraged by his friends to say, brilliant things, but of whom it
would be cruel to expect prolonged mental exertion. A man, he himself
has said, 'should give us a sense of mass.' He perhaps does not do so.
This gloomy and possibly distorted view is fostered rather than
discouraged by Dr. Holmes's introductory pages about Boston life and
intellect. It does not seem to have been a very strong place. We lack
performance. It is of small avail to write, as Dr. Holmes does, about
'brilliant circles,' and 'literary luminaries,' and then to pass on, and
leave the circles circulating and the luminaries shining _in vacuo_. We
want to know how they were brilliant, and what they illuminated. If you
wish me to believe that you are witty I must really trouble you to make a
joke. Dr. Holmes's own wit, for example, is as certain as the law of
gravitation, but over all these pages of his hangs vagueness, and we scan
them in vain for reassuring details.
'Mild orthodoxy, ripened in Unitarian sunshine,' does not sound very
appetising, though we are assured by Dr. Holmes that it is 'a very
agreeable aspect of Christianity.' Emerson himself does not seem to have
found it very lively, for in 1832, after three years' experience of the
ministry of the 'Second Church' of Boston, he retires from it, not
tumultuously or with any deep feeling, but with something very like a
yawn. He concludes his farewell sermon to his people as follows:
'Having said this I have said all. I have no hostility to this
institution. {221} I am only stating my want of sympathy with it.'
Dr. Holmes makes short work of Emerson's childhood. He was born in
Boston on the 25th May, 1803, and used to sit upon a wall and drive his
mother's cow to pasture. In fact, Dr. Holmes adds nothing to what we
already knew of the quiet and blameless life that came to its appointed
end on the 27th April, 1882. On the completion of his college education,
Emerson became a student of theology, and after a turn at teaching, was
ordained, in March, 1829, minister of the 'Second Church' in Boston. In
September of the same year he married; and the death of his young wife,
in February, 1832, perhaps quickened the doubts and disinclinations which
severed his connection with his 'Church' on the 9th September, 1832. The
following year he visited Europe for the first time, and made his
celebrated call upon Carlyle at Craigenputtock, and laid the keel of a
famous friendship. In the summer of 1834 he settled at Concord. He
married again, visited England again, wrote essays, delivered lectures,
made orations, published poems, carried on a long and most remarkable
correspondence with Carlyle, enjoyed after the most temperate and serene
of fashions many things and much happiness. And then he died.
'Can you emit sparks?' said the cat to the ugly duckling in the fairy
tale, and the poor abashed creature had to admit that it could not.
Emerson could emit sparks with the most electrical of cats. He is all
sparks and shocks. If one were required to name the most non-sequacious
author one had ever read, I do not see how one could help nominating
Emerson. But, say some of his warmest admirers, 'What then? It does not
matter!' It appears to me to matter a great deal.
A wise author never allows his reader's mind to be at large, but casts
about from the very first how to secure it all for himself. He takes you
(seemingly) into his confidence, perhaps pretends to consult you as to
the best route, but at all events points out to you the road, lying far
ahead, which you are to travel in his company. How carefully does a
really great writer, like Dr. Newman or M. Renan, explain to you what he
is going to do and how he is going to do it! His humour, wit, and fancy,
however abundant they may be, spring up like wayside flowers, and do but
adorn and render more attractive the path along which it is his object to
conduct you. The reader's mind, interested from the beginning, and
desirous of ascertaining whether the author keeps his word and adheres to
his plan, feels the glow of healthy exercise, and pays a real though
unconscious attention. But Emerson makes no terms with his readers--he
gives them neither thread nor clue, and thus robs them of one of the
keenest pleasures of reading--the being beforehand with your author, and
going shares with him in his own thoughts.
If it be said that it is manifestly unfair to compare a mystical writer
like Emerson with a polemical or historical one, I am not concerned to
answer the objection, for let the comparison be made with whom you will,
the unparalleled non-sequaciousness of Emerson is as certain as the
Correggiosity of Correggio. You never know what he will be at. His
sentences fall over you in glittering cascades, beautiful and bright, and
for the moment refreshing, but after a very brief while the mind, having
nothing to do on its own account but to remain wide open, and see what
Emerson sends it, grows first restive and then torpid. Admiration gives
way to astonishment, astonishment to bewilderment, and bewilderment to
stupefaction.
'Napoleon is not a man, but a system,' once said, in her most impressive
tones, Madame de Stael to Sir James Mackintosh, across a dinner-table.
'Magnificent!' murmured Sir James. 'But what does she mean?' whispered
one of those helplessly commonplace creatures who, like the present
writer, go about spoiling everything. 'Mass! I cannot tell!' was the
frank acknowledgment and apt Shakspearian quotation of Mackintosh.
Emerson's meaning, owing to his non-sequacious style, is often very
difficult to apprehend. Hear him for a moment on 'Experience':
'I gossip for my hour concerning the eternal politic. I have seen
many fair pictures, not in vain. A wonderful time I have lived in. I
am not the novice I was fourteen, nor yet seven years ago. Let who
will ask, Where is the fruit? I find a private fruit sufficient. This
is a fruit, that I should not ask for a rash effect from meditations,
counsels, and the hiving of truths.'
This surely is an odd way of hiving truths. It follows from it that
Emerson is more striking than suggestive. He likes things on a large
scale--he is fond of ethnical remarks and typical persons.
Notwithstanding his habit of introducing the names of common things into
his discourses and poetry ('Hay, corn, roots, hemp, flax, apples, wool,
and wood,' is a line from one of his poems), his familiarity therewith is
evidently not great. 'Take care, papa,' cried his little son, seeing him
at work with his spade, 'you will dig your leg.'
His essay on _Friendship_ will not be found satisfactory. Here is a
subject on which surely we are entitled to 'body.' The _Over Soul_ was
different; _there_ it was easy to agree with Carlyle, who, writing to
Emerson, says: 'Those voices of yours which I likened to unembodied souls
and censure sometimes for having no body--how _can_ they have a body?
They are light rays darting upwards in the east!' But friendship is a
word the very sight of which in print makes the heart warm. One
remembers Elia: 'Oh! it is pleasant as it is rare to find the same arm
linked in yours at forty which at thirteen helped it to turn over the
Cicero _De Amicitia_, or some other tale of antique friendship which the
young heart even then was burning to anticipate.' With this in your ear
it is rather chilling to read, 'I do, then, with my friends as I do with
my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use
them. We must have society on our own terms, and admit or exclude it on
the slightest cause. I cannot afford to speak much with my friend.'
These are not genial terms.
For authors and books his affection, real as it was, was singularly
impersonal. In his treatment of literary subjects, we miss the purely
human touch, the grip of affection, the accent of scorn, that so
pleasantly characterize the writings of Mr. Lowell. Emerson, it is to be
feared, regarded a company of books but as a congeries of ideas. For one
idea he is indebted to Plato, for another to Dr. Channing. _Sartor
Resartus_, so Emerson writes, is a noble philosophical poem, but 'have
you read Sampson Read's _Growth of the Mind_?' We read somewhere of
'Pindar, Raphael, Angelo, Dryden, and De Stael.' Emerson's notions of
literary perspective are certainly 'very early.' Dr. Holmes himself is
every bit as bad. In this very book of his, speaking about the dangerous
liberty some poets--Emerson amongst the number--take of crowding a
redundant syllable into a line, he reminds us 'that Shakspeare and Milton
knew how to use it effectively; Shelley employed it freely: Bryant
indulged in it; Willis was fond of it.' One has heard of the _Republic
of Letters_, but this surely does not mean that one author is as good as
another. 'Willis was fond of it.' I dare say he was, but we are not
fond of Willis, and cannot help regarding the citation of his poetical
example as an outrage.
None the less, if we will have but a little patience, and bid our
occasional wonderment be still, and read Emerson at the right times and
in small quantities, we shall not remain strangers to his charm. He
bathes the universe in his thoughts. Nothing less than the Whole ever
contented Emerson. His was no parochial spirit. He cries out:
'From air and ocean bring me foods,
From all zones and altitudes.'
How beautiful, too, are some of his sentences! Here is a bit from his
essay on Shakspeare in _Representative Men_:
'It is the essence of poetry to spring like the rainbow daughter of
Wonder from the invisible, to abolish the past, and refuse all
history. Malone, Warburton, Dyce, and Collier have wasted their life.
The famed theatres have vainly assisted. Betterton, Garrick, Kemble,
Kean, and Macready dedicate their lives to his genius--him they crown,
elucidate, obey, and express--the genius knows them not. The
recitation begins, _one golden word leaps out immortal from all this
painful pedantry_, _and sweetly torments us with invitations to his
own inaccessible homes_.'
The words we have ventured to italicize seem to us to be of surpassing
beauty, and to express what many a play-goer of late years must often
have dimly felt.
Patience should indeed be the motto for any Emerson reader who is not by
nature 'author's kin.' For example, in the essay on _Character_, after
reading, 'Everything in nature is bipolar, or has a positive and negative
pole. There is a male and a female, a spirit and a fact, a north and a
south. Spirit is the positive, the event is the negative; will is the
north, action the south pole. Character may be ranked as having its
natural place in the north'--how easy to lay the book down and read no
more that day; but a moment's patience is amply rewarded, for but sixteen
lines farther on we may read as follows: 'We boast our emancipation from
many superstitions, but if we have broken any idols it is through a
transfer of the idolatry. What have I gained that I no longer immolate a
bull to Jove or to Neptune, or a mouse to Hecate; that I do not tremble
before the Eumenides or the Catholic Purgatory, or the Calvinistic
Judgment Day--if I quake at opinion, the public opinion as we call it, or
the threat of assault or contumely, or bad neighbours, or poverty, or
mutilation, or at the rumour of revolution or of wonder! If I quake,
what matters it what I quake at?' Well and truly did Carlyle write to
Emerson, 'You are a new era, my man, in your huge country.'
Emerson's poetry has at least one of the qualities of true poetry--it
always pleases and occasionally delights. Great poetry it may not be,
but it has the happy knack of slipping in between our fancies, and of
clinging like ivy to the masonry of the thought-structure beneath which
each one of us has his dwelling. I must be allowed room for two
quotations, one from the stanzas called _Give all to Love_, the other
from _Wood Notes_.
'Cling with life to the maid;
But when the surprise,
First shadow of surmise,
Flits across her bosom young
Of a joy apart from thee,
Free be she, fancy-free,
Nor thou detain her vesture's hem,
Nor the palest rose she flung
From her summer's diadem.
Though thou loved her as thyself,
As a self of purer clay,
Though her parting dims the day,
Stealing grace from all alive;
Heartily know
When half-gods go,
The gods arrive.'
The lines from _Wood Notes_ run as follows:
'Come learn with me the fatal song
Which knits the world in music strong,
Whereto every bosom dances,
Kindled with courageous fancies;
Come lift thine eyes to lofty rhymes
Of things with things, of times with times,
Primal chimes of sun and shade,
Of sound and echo, man and maid;
The land reflected in the flood;
Body with shadow still pursued.
For nature beats in perfect tune
And rounds with rhyme her every rune;
Whether she work in land or sea
Or hide underground her alchemy.
Thou canst not wave thy staff in air,
Or dip thy paddle in the lake,
But it carves the bow of beauty there,
And the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake.
Not unrelated, unaffied,
But to each thought and thing allied,
Is perfect nature's every part,
Rooted in the mighty heart.'
What place Emerson is to occupy in American literature is for America to
determine. Some authoritative remarks on this subject are to be found in
Mr. Lowell's essay on 'Thoreau,' in _My Study Windows_; but here at home,
where we are sorely pressed for room, it is certain he must be content
with a small allotment, where, however, he may for ever sit beneath his
own vine and fig-tree, none daring to make him afraid. Emerson will
always be the favourite author of somebody; and to be always read by
somebody is better than to be read first by everybody and then by nobody.
Indeed, it is hard to fancy a pleasanter destiny than to join the company
of lesser authors. All their readers are sworn friends. They are spared
the harsh discords of ill-judged praise and feigned rapture. Once or
twice in a century some enthusiastic and expansive admirer insists upon
dragging them from their shy retreats, and trumpeting their fame in the
market-place, asserting, possibly with loud asseverations (after the
fashion of Mr. Swinburne), that they are precisely as much above Otway
and Collins and George Eliot as they are below Shakespeare and Hugo and
Emily Bronte. The great world looks on good-humouredly for a moment or
two, and then proceeds as before, and the disconcerted author is left
free to scuttle back to his corner, where he is all the happier, sharing
the raptures of the lonely student, for his brief experience of
publicity.
Let us bid farewell to Emerson, who has bidden farewell to the world in
the words of his own _Good-bye_:
'Good-bye to flattery's fawning face,
To grandeur with his wise grimace,
To upstart wealth's averted eye,
To supple office low and high,
To crowded halls, to court and street,
To frozen hearts and hasting feet,
To those who go and those who come,--
Good-bye, proud world, I'm going home,
I am going to my own hearth-stone
Bosomed in yon green hills, alone,
A secret nook in a pleasant land,
Whose groves the frolic fairies planned;
Where arches green the livelong day
Echo the blackbird's roundelay,
And vulgar feet have never trod,
A spot that is sacred to thought and God.'