Emerson was occupied entirely with the future, as Carlyle was occupied
entirely with the past. Emerson shared the open expectation of the new
world, Carlyle struggled under the gloom and pessimism of the old--a
greater character, but a far less lambent and helpful spirit. Emerson
seems to have been obsessed with the idea that a new and greater man
was to appear. He looked into the face of every newcomer with an
earnest, expectant air, as if he might prove to be the new man: this
thought inspires the last stanzas of his "Song of Nature":
"Let war and trade and creeds and song
Blend, ripen race on race,
The sunburnt world a man shall breed
Of all the zones and countless days.
"No ray is dimmed, no atom worn,
My oldest force is good as new,
And the fresh rose on yonder thorn
Gives back the bending heavens in dew."
Emerson was under no illusion as to the effect of distance. He knew
the past was once the present, and that if it seemed to be transformed
and to rise into cloud-land behind us, it was only the enchantment of
distance--an enchantment which men have been under in all ages. The
everyday, the near-at-hand, become prosaic; there is no room for the
alchemy of time and space to work in. It has been said that all
martyrdoms looked mean in the suffering. Holy ground is not holy when
we walk upon it. The now and the here seem cheap and commonplace.
Emerson knew that "a score of airy miles will smooth rough Monadnoc to
a gem," but he knew also that it would not change the character of
Monadnoc. He knew that the past and the present, the near and the far,
were made of one stuff. He united the courage of science with the
sensibility of poetry. He would not be defrauded of the value of the
present hour, or of the thoughts which he and other men think, or of
the lives which they live to-day. "I will tell you how you can enrich
me--if you will recommend to-day to me." His doctrine of
self-reliance, which he preached in season and out of season, was
based upon the conviction that Nature and the soul do not become old
and outworn, that the great characters and great thoughts of the past
were the achievements of men who trusted themselves before custom or
law. The sun shines to-day; the constellations hang there in the
heavens the same as of old. God is as near us as ever He was--why
should we take our revelations at second hand? No other writer who has
used the English language has ever preached such a heroic doctrine of
self-trust, or set the present moment so high in the circle of the
years, in the diadem of the days.
It is an old charge against Emerson that he was deficient in human
sympathy. He makes it against himself; the ties of association which
most persons find so binding seemed to hold him very lightly. There
was always a previous question with him--the moral value of one's
associations. Unless you sicken and die to some purpose, why such an
ado about it? Unless the old ruin of a house harbored great men and
great women, or was the scene of heroic deeds, why linger around it?
The purely human did not appeal to him; history interested him only as
it threw light upon to-day. History is a record of the universal mind;
hence of your mind, of my mind--"all the facts of history preëxist in
the mind as laws." "What Plato thought, every man may think. What a
saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he
can understand." "All that Shakespear says of the king, yonder slip of
a boy that reads in the corner feels to be true of himself"; and so
on, seeing in history only biography, and interested in the past only
as he can link it with the present. Always an intellectual interest,
never a human or an emotional one. His Journal does not reveal him
going back to the old places, or lingering fondly over the memories of
his youth. He speaks of his "unpleasing boyhood," of his unhappy
recollections, etc., not because of unkindness or hardships
experienced, but because of certain shortcomings or deficiencies of
character and purpose, of which he is conscious--"some meanness," or
"unfounded pride" which may lower him in the opinion of others. Pride,
surely, but not ignoble pride.
Emerson's expectation of the great poet, the great man, is voiced in
his "Representative Men": "If the companions of our childhood should
turn out to be heroes, and their condition regal, it would not
surprise us." On the contrary, I think it would surprise most of us
very much. It is from the remote, the unfamiliar, that we expect great
things. We have no illusions about the near-at-hand. But with Emerson
the contrary seems to have been the case. He met the new person or
took up the new volume with a thrill of expectancy, a condition of
mind which often led him to exaggerate the fact, and to give an undue
bias in favor of the novel, the audacious, the revolutionary. His
optimism carried him to great lengths. Many of the new stars in his
literary firmament have quite faded out--all of them, I think, but
Walt Whitman. It was mainly because he was so full of faith in the
coming man that he gave, offhand, such a tremendous welcome to "Leaves
of Grass"--a welcome that cooled somewhat later, when he found he had
got so much more of the unconventional and the self-reliant than he
had bargained for. I remember that when I spoke of Walt Whitman to him
in Washington in 1871 or '72, he said he wished Whitman's friends
would "quarrel" with him more about his poems, as some years earlier
he himself had done, on the occasion when he and Whitman walked for
hours on Boston Common, he remonstrating with Whitman about certain
passages in "Leaves of Grass" which he tried in vain to persuade him
to omit in the next edition. Whitman would persist in being Whitman.
Now, counseling such a course to a man in an essay on "Self-Reliance"
is quite a different thing from entirely approving of it in a concrete
example.
In 1840 Emerson writes: "A notice of modern literature ought to
include (ought it not?) a notice of Carlyle, of Tennyson, of Landor,
of Bettina, of Sampson Reed." The first three names surely, but who
is Bettina, the girl correspondent of Goethe, that she should go in
such a list? Reed, we learn, was a Boston bank clerk, and a
Swedenborgian, who wrote a book on the growth of the mind, from which
Emerson quotes, and to which he often alludes, a book that has long
been forgotten; and is not Bettina forgotten also?
Emerson found more in Jones Very than has any one else; the poems of
Very that he included in "Parnassus" have little worth. A
comparatively unknown and now forgotten English writer also moved
Emerson unduly. Listen to this: "In England, Landor, De Quincey,
Carlyle, three men of original literary genius; but the scholar, the
catholic, cosmic intellect, Bacon's own son, the Lord Chief Justice on
the Muse's Bench is"--who do you think, in 1847?--"Wilkinson"! Garth
Wilkinson, who wrote a book on the human body. Emerson says of him in
"English Traits": "There is in the action of his mind a long Atlantic
roll, not known except in deepest waters, and only lacking what ought
to accompany such powers, a manifest centrality." To bid a man's stock
up like that may not, in the long run, be good for the man, but it
shows what a generous, optimistic critic Emerson was.