Emerson records in his Journal: "I have been writing and speaking what
were once called novelties, for twenty-five or thirty years, and have
not now one disciple. Why? Not that what I said was not true; not that
it has not found intelligent receivers; but because it did not go from
any wish in me to bring men to me, but to themselves. I delight in
driving them from me. What could I do, if they came to me?--they would
interrupt and encumber me. This is my boast that I have no school
follower. I should account it a measure of the impurity of insight, if
it did not create independence."
It is never easy to stray far from the master in high moral, æsthetic,
and literary matters and be on the safe side; we are only to try to
escape his individual bias, to break over his limitations and "brave
the landscape's look" with our own eyes. We are to be more on guard
against his affinities, his unconscious attractions and repulsions,
than against his ethical and intellectual conclusions, if one may make
that distinction, which I know is hazardous business. We readily
impose our own limitations upon others and see the world as old when
we are old.
Emerson criticized Carlyle because Carlyle was not Emerson, just as
Carlyle criticized Emerson because he was not Carlyle. We are all poor
beggars in this respect; each of us is the victim of his own demon.
Beware of the predilection of the master! When his temperament impels
him he is no longer a free man.
We touch Emerson's limitations in his failure to see anything in
Hawthorne's work; they had "no inside to them"; "it would take him and
Alcott together to make a man"; and, again, in his rather
contemptuous disposal of Poe as "the jingle man" and his verdict upon
Shelley as "never a poet"! The intellectual content of Shelley's work
is not great; but that he was not a poet, in fact that he was anything
else but a poet, though not of the highest order, is contrary to the
truth, I think. Limitations like this are not infrequent in Emerson.
Yet Emerson was a great critic of men and of books. A highly
interesting volume showing him in this character could be compiled
from the Journals.
Emerson and Hawthorne were near neighbors for several years. Emerson
liked the man better than his books. They once had a good long walk
together; they walked to Harvard village and back, occupying a couple
of days and walking about twenty miles a day. They had much
conversation--talked of Scott and Landor and others. They found the
bar-rooms at the inns cold and dull places. The Temperance Society had
emptied them. Hawthorne tried to smoke a cigar in one of them, but
"was soon out on the piazza." Hawthorne, Emerson said, was more
inclined to play Jove than Mercury. It is a pleasing picture--these
two men, so unlike, but both typical of New England and both men of a
high order of genius, walking in friendly converse along the country
roads in the golden September days over seventy years ago. Emerson
always regretted that he never succeeded in "conquering a friendship"
with Hawthorne, mainly because they had so few traits in common. To
the satisfaction of silent intercourse with men Emerson was clearly a
stranger. There must be an interchange of ideas; the feeling of
comradeship, the communion of congenial souls was not enough.
Hawthorne, shy, silent, rather gloomy, yet there must have been a
charm about his mere presence that more than made up for his want of
conversation. His silence was golden. Emerson was a transcendental
Yankee and was always bent on driving sharp bargains in the
interchange of ideas with the persons he met. He did not propose to
swap horses or watches or jack-knives, but he would swap ideas with
you day in and day out. If you had no ideas to swap, he lost interest
in you.
The wisdom of a great creative artist like Hawthorne does not
necessarily harden into bright epigrammatic sayings or rules for the
conduct of life, and the available intellectual content of his works
to the Emersonian type of mind may be small; but his interior, his
emotional and imaginative richness may much more than make it up. The
scholar, the sayer of things, must always rank below the creator, or
the maker of things.
Philosophers contradict themselves like other mortals. Here and there
in his Journals Emerson rails against good nature, and says "tomahawks
are better." "Why should they call me good-natured? I, too, like
puss, have a tractile claw." And he declares that he likes the sayers
of No better than the sayers of Yes, and that he preferred hard
clouds, hard expressions, and hard manners. In another mood, or from
another point of view, he says of a man, "Let him go into his closet
and pray the Divinity to make him so great as to be good-natured." And
again, "How great it is to do a little, as, for instance, to deserve
the praise of good nature, or of humility, or of punctuality."
Emerson's characterization of himself as always a painter is
interesting. People, he said, came to his lectures with expectation
that he was to realize the Republic he described, and they ceased to
come when they found this reality no nearer: "They mistook me. I am
and always was a painter. I paint still with might and main and choose
the best subject I can. Many have I seen come and go with false hopes
and fears, and dubiously affected by my pictures. But I paint on." "I
portray the ideal, not the real," he might have added. He was a
poet-seer and not a historian. He was a painter of ideas, as Carlyle
was a painter of men and events. Always is there an effort at vivid
and artistic expression. If his statement does not kindle the
imagination, it falls short of his aim. He visualizes his most subtle
and abstract conceptions--sees the idea wedded to its correlative in
the actual world. A new figure, a fresh simile gave him a thrill of
pleasure. He went hawking up and down the fields of science, of trade,
of agriculture, of nature, seeking them. He thinks in symbols, he
paints his visions of the ideal with pigments drawn from the world all
about him. To call such men as Emerson and Carlyle painters is only to
emphasize their artistic temperaments. Their seriousness, their
devotion to high moral and intellectual standards, only lift them, as
they do Whitman, out of the world of mere decorative art up to the
world of heroic and creative art where art as such does not obtrude
itself.