In his published works Emerson is chary of the personal element; he
says: "We can hardly speak of our own experiences and the names of
our friends sparingly enough." In his books he would be only an
impersonal voice; the man Emerson, as such, he hesitated to intrude.
But in the Journals we get much more of the personal element, as would
be expected. We get welcome glimpses of the man, of his moods, of his
diversions, of his home occupations, of his self-criticism. We see him
as a host, as a lecturer, as a gardener, as a member of a rural
community. We see him in his walks and talks with friends and
neighbors--with Alcott, Thoreau, Channing, Jones Very, Hawthorne, and
others--and get snatches of the conversations. We see the growth of
his mind, his gradual emancipation from the bondage of the orthodox
traditions.
Very welcome is the growth of Emerson's appreciation of Wordsworth. As
a divinity student he was severe in his criticism of Wordsworth, but
as his own genius unfolded more and more he saw the greatness of
Wordsworth, till in middle life he pronounced his famous Ode the
high-water mark of English literature. Yet after that his fondness for
a telling, picturesque figure allows him to inquire if Wordsworth is
not like a bell with a wooden tongue. All this is an admirable
illustration of his familiar dictum: "Speak what you think now in hard
words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again,
though it contradict everything you say to-day."
In the Journals we see Emerson going up and down the country in his
walks, on his lecture tours in the West, among his neighbors, wherever
and whenever he goes as alert and watchful as a sportsman. He was a
sportsman of a new kind; his game was ideas. He was always looking for
hints and images to aid him in his writings. He was like a bird
perpetually building a nest; every moment he wanted new material, and
everything that diverted him from his quest was an unwelcome
interruption. He had no great argument to build, no system of
philosophy to organize and formulate, no plot, like a novelist, to
work out, no controversy on hand--he wanted pertinent, concrete, and
striking facts and incidents to weave in his essay on Fate, or
Circles, or Character, or Farming, or Worship, or Wealth--something
that his intuitive and disjointed habit of thought could seize upon
and make instant use of.
We see him walking in free converse with his friends and neighbors,
receiving them in his own house, friendly and expectant, but always
standing aloof, never giving himself heartily to them, exchanging
ideas with them across a gulf, prizing their wit and their wisdom, but
cold and reserved toward them personally, destitute of all feeling of
comradeship, an eye, an ear, a voice, an intellect, but rarely, or in
a minor degree, a heart, or a feeling of fellowship--a giving and a
taking quite above and beyond the reach of articulate speech. When
they had had their say, he was done with them. When you have found a
man's limitations, he says, it is all up with him. After your friend
has fired his shot, good-by. The pearl in the oyster is what is
wanted, and not the oyster. "If I love you, what is that to you?" is a
saying that could have been coined only in Concord. It seems to me
that the basis of all wholesome human attachment is character, not
intellect. Admiration and love are quite different things.
Transcendental friendships seem to be cold, bloodless affairs.
One feels as if he wanted to squeeze or shake Emerson to see if he
cannot get some normal human love out of him, a love that looks for
nothing beyond love, a love which is its own excuse for being, a love
that is not a bargain--simple, common, disinterested human love. But
Emerson said, "I like man but not men."
"You would have me love you," he writes in his Journal. "What shall I
love? Your body? The supposition disgusts you. What you have thought
and said? Well, whilst you were thinking and saying them, but not now.
I see no possibility of loving anything but what now is, and is
becoming; your courage, your enterprise, your budding affection, your
opening thought, your prayer, I can love--but what else?"
Can you not love your friend for himself alone, for his kinship with
you, without taking an inventory of his moral and intellectual
qualities; for something in him that makes you happy in his presence?
The personal attraction which Whitman felt between himself and certain
types of men, and which is the basis of most manly friendships,
Emerson probably never felt. One cannot conceive of him as caring
deeply for any person who could not teach him something. He says, "I
speculate on virtue, not burn with love." Again, "A rush of thoughts
is the only conceivable prosperity that can come to me." Pure
intellectual values seem alone to have counted with Emerson and his
followers. With men his question was, "What can you teach me?" With
Nature, "What new image or suggestion have you got for me to-day?"
With science, "What ethical value do your facts hold?" With natural
history, "Can I translate your facts and laws into my supernatural
history?" With civil history, "Will your record help me to understand
my own day and land?" The quintessence of things was what he always
sought.
"We cannot forgive another for not being ourselves," Emerson wrote in
1842, and then added, "We lose time in trying to be like others." One
is reminded of passages in the Emerson-Carlyle correspondence, wherein
each tried to persuade the other to be like himself. Carlyle would
have Emerson "become concrete and write in prose the straightest
way," would have him come down from his "perilous altitude,"
"soliloquizing on the eternal mountain-tops only, in vast solitude,
where men and their affairs lie all hushed in a very dim remoteness
and only _the man_ and the stars and the earth are visible--come down
into your own poor Nineteenth Century, its follies, its maladies, its
blind, or half-blind but gigantic toilings, its laughter and its
tears, and try to evolve in some measure the hidden God-like that lies
in it." "I wish you would take an American hero, one whom you really
love, and give us a History of him--make an artistic bronze statue (in
good words) of his Life and him!" Emerson's reply in effect is,
Cremate your heroes and give me their ashes--give me "the culled
results, the quintessence of private conviction, a _liber veritatis_,
a few sentences, hints of the final moral you draw from so much
penetrating inquest into past and present men."
In reply to Carlyle's criticism of the remote and abstract character
of his work, Emerson says, "What you say now and heretofore respecting
the remoteness of my writing and thinking from real life, though I
hear substantially the same criticism made by my countrymen, I do not
know what it means. If I can at any time express the law and the ideal
right, that should satisfy me without measuring the divergence from it
of the last act of Congress."