Emerson's wisdom and catholicity of spirit always show in his
treatment of the larger concerns of life and conduct. How remarkable
is this passage written in Puritanic New England in 1842:
I hear with pleasure that a young girl in the midst of rich,
decorous Unitarian friends in Boston is well-nigh persuaded
to join the Roman Catholic Church. Her friends, who are also
my friends, lamented to me the growth of this inclination.
But I told them that I think she is to be greatly
congratulated on the event. She has lived in great poverty
of events. In form and years a woman, she is still a child,
having had no experiences, and although of a fine, liberal,
susceptible, expanding nature, has never yet found any
worthy object of attention; has not been in love, nor been
called out by any taste, except lately by music, and sadly
wants adequate objects. In this church, perhaps, she shall
find what she needs, in a power to call out the slumbering
religious sentiment. It is unfortunate that the guide who
has led her into this path is a young girl of a lively,
forcible, but quite external character, who teaches her the
historical argument for the Catholic faith. I told A. that I
hoped she would not be misled by attaching any importance to
that. If the offices of the church attracted her, if its
beautiful forms and humane spirit draw her, if St. Augustine
and St. Bernard, Jesus and Madonna, cathedral music and
masses, then go, for thy dear heart's sake, but do not go
out of this icehouse of Unitarianism, all external, into an
icehouse again of external. At all events, I charged her to
pay no regard to dissenters, but to suck that orange
thoroughly.
And this on the Church and the common people written the year before:
The Church aërates my good neighbors and serves them as a
somewhat stricter and finer ablution than a clean shirt or a
bath or a shampooing. The minister is a functionary and the
meeting-house a functionary; they are one and, when they
have spent all their week in private and selfish action, the
Sunday reminds them of a need they have to stand again in
social and public and ideal relations beyond
neighborhood,--higher than the town-meeting--to their fellow
men. They marry, and the minister who represents this high
public, celebrates the fact; their child is baptized, and
again they are published by his intervention. One of their
family dies, he comes again, and the family go up publicly
to the church to be publicised or churched in this official
sympathy of mankind. It is all good as far as it goes. It is
homage to the Ideal Church, which they have not: which the
actual Church so foully misrepresents. But it is better so
than nohow. These people have no fine arts, no literature,
no great men to boswellize, no fine speculation to entertain
their family board or their solitary toil with. Their talk
is of oxen and pigs and hay and corn and apples. Whatsoever
liberal aspirations they at any time have, whatsoever
spiritual experiences, have looked this way, and the Church
is their fact for such things. It has not been discredited
in their eyes as books, lectures, or living men of genius
have been. It is still to them the accredited symbol of the
religious Idea. The Church is not to be defended against any
spiritualist clamoring for its reform, but against such as
say it is expedient to shut it up and have none, this much
may be said. It stands in the history of the present time as
a high school for the civility and mansuetude of the people.
(I might prefer the Church of England or of Rome as the
medium of those superior ablutions described above, only
that I think the Unitarian Church, like the Lyceum, as yet
an open and uncommitted organ, free to admit the
ministrations of any inspired man that shall pass by: whilst
the other churches are committed and will exclude him.)
I should add that, although this is the real account to be
given of the church-going of the farmers and villagers, yet
it is not known to them, only felt. Do you not suppose that
it is some benefit to a young villager who comes out of the
woods of New Hampshire to Boston and serves his
apprenticeship in a shop, and now opens his own store, to
hang up his name in bright gold letters a foot long? His
father could not write his name: it is only lately that he
could: the name is mean and unknown: now the sun shines on
it: all men, all women, fairest eyes read it. It is a fact
in the great city. Perhaps he shall be successful and make
it wider known: shall leave it greatly brightened to his
son. His son may be head of a party: governor of the state:
a poet: a powerful thinker: and send the knowledge of this
name over the habitable earth. By all these suggestions, he
is at least made responsible and thoughtful by his public
relation of a seen and aërated name.
Let him modestly accept those hints of a more beautiful life
which he meets with; how to do with few and easily gotten
things: but let him seize with enthusiasm the opportunity of
doing what he can, for the virtues are natural to each man
and the talents are little perfections.
Let him hope infinitely with a patience as large as the sky.
Nothing is so young and untaught as time.
How wise is his saying that we do not turn to the books of the
Bible--St. Paul and St. John--to start us on our task, as we do to
Marcus Aurelius, or the Lives of the philosophers, or to Plato, or
Plutarch, "because the Bible wears black clothes"! "It comes with a
certain official claim against which the mind revolts. The Bible has
its own nobilities--might well be charming if left simply on its
merits, as other books are, but this, 'You must,' 'It is your duty,'
in connection with it, repels. 'T is like the introduction of martial
law into Concord. If you should dot our farms with picket lines, and I
could not go or come across lots without a pass, I should resist, or
else emigrate. If Concord were as beautiful as Paradise, it would be
as detestable to me."
In his essays and letters Emerson gives one the impression of never
using the first words that come to mind, nor the second, but the third
or fourth; always a sense of selection, of deliberate choice. To use
words in a novel way, and impart a little thrill of surprise, seemed
to be his aim. This effort of selection often mars his page. He is
rarely carried away by his thought, but he snares or captures it with
a word. He does not feel first and think second; he thinks first, and
the feeling does not always follow. He dearly loved writing; it was
the joy of his life, but it was a conscious intellectual effort. It
was often a kind of walking on stilts; his feet are not on the common
ground. And yet--and yet--what a power he was, and how precious his
contributions!
He says in his Journal, "I have observed long since that to give the
thought a full and just expression I must not prematurely utter it."
This hesitation, this studied selection robs him of the grace of
felicity and spontaneity. The compensation is often a sense of novelty
and a thrill of surprise. Moreover, he avoids the commonplace and the
cheap and tedious. His product is always a choice one, and is seen to
have a quality of its own. No page has more individuality than his,
and none is so little like the page of the ordinary professional
writer.
'Tis a false note to speak of Emerson's doctrines, as Henry James did.
He had no doctrines. He had leading ideas, but he had no system, no
argument. It was his attitude of mind and spirit that was significant
and original. He would have nothing to do with stereotyped opinions.
What he said to-day might contradict what he said yesterday, or what
he might say to-morrow. No matter, the spirit was the same. Truth is a
sphere that has opposite poles. Emerson more than any other writer
stood for the contradictory character of spiritual truth. Truth is
what we make it--what takes the imprint of one's mind; it is not a
definite something like gold or silver, it is any statement that fits
our mental make-up, that comes home to us. What comes home in one mood
may not come home in another.
Emerson had no creed, he had no definite ideas about God. Personality
and impersonality might both be affirmed of Absolute Being, and what
may not be affirmed of it in our own minds?
The good of such a man as Emerson is not in his doctrines, but in his
spirit, his heroic attitude, his consonance with the universal mind.
His thought is a tremendous solvent; it digests and renders fluid the
hard facts of life and experience.