XV

Emerson wonders why it is that man eating does not attract the

imagination or attract the artist: "Why is our diet and table not

agreeable to the imagination, whilst all other creatures eat without

shame? We paint the bird pecking at fruit, the browsing ox, the lion

leaping on his prey, but no painter ever ventured to draw a man

eating. The difference seems to consist in the presence or absence of

the world at the feast. The diet is base, be it what it may, that is

hidden in caves or cellars or houses.... Did you ever eat your bread

on the top of a mountain, or drink water there? Did you ever camp out

with lumbermen or travellers in the prairie? Did you ever eat the

poorest rye or oatcake with a beautiful maiden in the wilderness? and

did you not find that the mixture of sun and sky with your bread gave

it a certain mundane savour and comeliness?"

I do not think Emerson hits on the true explanation of why man feeding

is not an attractive subject for the painter. It is not that the diet

is base and is hidden in caves and cellars, or that the world is not

present at the feast. It is because eating is a purely selfish animal

occupation; there is no touch of the noble or the idyllic or the

heroic in it. In the act man confesses his animal nature; he is no

longer an Emerson, a Dante, a Plato--he is simply a physiological

contrivance taking in nutriment. The highest and the lowest are for

the moment on the same level. The lady and her maid, the lord and his

lackey are all one. Eating your bread on a mountain-top or in the camp

of lumbermen or with a beautiful maiden in the wilderness adds a new

element. Here the picture has all nature for a background and the

imagination is moved. The rye and the oatcake now become a kind of

heavenly manna, or, as Fitzgerald has it, under such conditions the

wilderness is Paradise enow. The simple act of feeding does not now

engross the attention. Associate with the act of eating any worthy or

noble idea, and it is at once lifted to a higher level. A mother

feeding her child, a cook passing food to the tramp at the door or to

other hungry and forlorn wayfarers, or soldiers pausing to eat their

rations in the field, or fishermen beside the stream, or the haymakers

with their lunch under a tree--in all such incidents there are

pictorial elements because the least part of it all to the looker-on

is the act of eating.

In Da Vinci's "Last Supper" the mere animal act of taking food plays

no part; the mind is occupied with higher and more significant things.

A suggestion of wine or of fruit in a painting may be agreeable, but

from a suggestion of the kitchen and the cook we turn away. The

incident of some of Washington's officers during the Revolution

entertaining some British officers (an historical fact) on baked

potatoes and salt would appeal to the artistic imagination. All the

planting and reaping of the farmers is suggestive of our animal wants,

as is so much of our whole industrial activity; but art looks kindly

upon much of it, shows us more or less in partnership with primal

energies. People surrounding a table after all signs of the dinner

have been removed hold the elements of an agreeable picture, because

that suggests conversation and social intercourse--a feast of reason

and a flow of soul. We are no longer animals; we have moved up many

degrees higher in the scale of human values.

Emerson's deep love and admiration for Carlyle come out many times in

the Journals. No other literary man of his times moved and impressed

him so profoundly. Their correspondence, which lasted upwards of

forty years, is the most valuable correspondence known to me in

English literature. It is a history of the growth and development of

these two remarkable minds.

I lately reread the Correspondence, mainly to bring my mind again in

contact with these noble spirits, so much more exalted than any in our

own time, but partly to see what new light the letters threw upon the

lives of these two men.

There is little of the character of intimate and friendly letters in

these remarkable documents. It is not Dear Tom or Dear Waldo. It is

Dear Emerson or Dear Carlyle. They are not letters, they are epistles,

like Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians, or to the Thessalonians, or to

the Romans. Each of them contains the fragments of a gospel that both

were preaching, each in his own way, but at bottom the same--the

beauty and majesty of the moral law. Let the heavens fall, the moral

law and our duty to God and man will stand. These two men, so

different in character and temperament, were instantly drawn together

by that magnet--the moral sentiment. Carlyle's works were occupied

almost entirely with men--with history, biography, political events,

and government; Emerson's with ideas, nature, and poetry; yet the bed

rock in each was the same. Both preached an evangel, but how

different!

Emerson makes a note of the days on which he received a letter from,

or wrote one to, his great Scottish friend. Both were important events

with him. It is evident that Emerson makes more of an effort to write

his best in these letters than does Carlyle. Carlyle tosses his off

with more ease and unconscious mastery. The exchange is always in

favor of the Scot. Carlyle was, of course, the more prodigious

personality, and had the advantage in the richness and venerableness

of the Old World setting. But Emerson did not hesitate to discount him

in his letters and in his Journals, very wisely sometimes, not so

wisely at others.

"O Carlyle, the merit of glass is not to be seen, but to be seen

through; but every crystal and lamina of the Carlyle glass is

visible." Of course Carlyle might reply that stained glass has other

merits than transparency, or he might ask: Why should an author's

style be compared to glass anyhow, since it is impossible to

dissociate it from the matter of his discourse? It is not merely to

reveal truth; it is also to enhance its beauty. There is the charm and

witchery of style, as in Emerson's own best pages, as well as the

worth of the subject-matter. Is it not true that in the description of

any natural object or scene or event we want something more than to

see it through a perfectly transparent medium? We want the added charm

or illusion of the writer's own way of seeing it, the hue of his own

spirit.

I think we may admit all this--doubtless Emerson would admit it--and

yet urge that Carlyle's style had many faults of the kind Emerson

indicated. It thrusts itself too much upon the reader's attention. His

prose is at the best, as in the "Life of Stirling," when it is most

transparent and freest from mannerisms. Carlyle's manner at its best

is very pleasing; at its worst it becomes a wearisome mannerism. When

a writer's style gets into a rut his reader is not happy. Ease,

flexibility, transparency, though it be colored transparency, are

among the merits we want.

The most just and penetrating thing Emerson ever said about Carlyle is

recorded in his Journal in 1847: "In Carlyle, as in Byron, one is much

more struck with the rhetoric than with the matter. He has manly

superiority rather than intellectuality, and so makes good hard hits

all the time. There is more character than intellect in every

sentence, herein strongly resembling Samuel Johnson." Criticism like

this carries the force and conviction of a scientific analysis.

The Journals abound in similar illuminating bits of criticism directed

to nearly all the more noted authors of English literature, past and

present. In science we do want an absolutely colorless, transparent

medium, but in literature the personality of the writer is everything.

The born writer gives us facts and ideas steeped in his own quality as

a man. Take out of Carlyle's works, or out of Emerson's, or out of

Arnold's, the savor of the man's inborn quality--the savor of that

which acts over and above his will--and we have robbed them of their

distinctive quality. Literature is always truth of some sort, plus a

man. No one knew this better than Emerson himself. Another remark of

Emerson's, made when he was twenty-seven years old, has high literary

value:

"There is no beauty in words except in their collocation."

It is not beautiful words that make beautiful poetry, or beautiful

prose, but ordinary words beautifully arranged. The writer who hopes

by fine language to invoke fine ideas is asking the tailor to turn him

out a fine man. First get your great idea, and you will find it is

already fitly clothed. The image of the clothes in this connection is,

of course, a very inadequate and misleading one, since language is the

thought or its vital integument, and not merely its garment. We often

praise a writer for his choice of words, and Emerson himself says in

the same paragraph from which I quote the above: "No man can write

well who thinks there is no choice of words for him." There is always

a right word and every other than that is wrong. There is always the

best word, or the best succession of words to give force and vividness

to the idea. All painters use the same colors, all musicians use the

same notes, all sculptors use the same marble, all architects use the

same materials and all writers use essentially the same words, their

arrangement and combination alone making the difference in the various

products. Nature uses the same elements in her endless variety of

living things; their different arrangement and combinations, and some

interior necessity which we have to call the animating principle, is

the secret of the individuality of each.

Of course we think in words or images, and no man can tell which is

first, or if there is any first in such matters--the thought or the

word--any more than the biochemist can tell us which is first in the

living body, the carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and so on, or the living

force that weaves itself a corporeal garment out of these elements.