Wherein the race has so far lost and gained, in being transplanted from
Europe to the New England soil and climate, is well illustrated by the
writings of Emerson. There is greater refinement and sublimation of
thought, greater clearness and sharpness of outline, greater audacity of
statement, but, on the other hand, there is a loss of bulk, of unction,
of adipose tissue, and shall we say of power?
Emerson is undoubtedly a master on the New England scale,--such a master
as the land and race are capable of producing. He stands out clear and
undeniable. The national type, as illustrated by that section of the
country, is the purest and strongest in him of any yet. He can never
suffer eclipse. Compared with the English or German master, he is
undoubtedly deficient in viscera, in moral and intellectual stomach;
but, on the other hand, he is of a fibre and quality hard to match
in any age or land. From first to last he strikes one as something
extremely pure and compact, like a nut or an egg. Great matters and
tendencies lie folded in him, or rather are summarized in his pages. He
writes short but pregnant chapters on great themes, as in his "English
Traits," a book like rich preserves put up pound for pound, a pound
of Emerson to every pound of John Bull. His chapter on Swedenborg in
"Representative Men" is a good sample of his power to abbreviate and
restate with added force. His mind acts like a sun-lens in gathering the
cold pale beams of that luminary to a focus which warms and stimulates
the reader in a surprising manner. The gist of the whole matter is here;
and how much weariness and dullness and plodding is left out!
In fact, Emerson is an essence, a condensation; more so, perhaps, than
any other man who has appeared in literature. Nowhere else is there such
a preponderance of pure statement, of the very attar of thought, over
the bulkier, circumstantial, qualifying, or secondary elements. He gives
us net results. He is like those strong artificial fertilizers. A pinch
of him is equivalent to a page or two of Johnson, and he is pitched many
degrees higher as an essayist than even Bacon. He has had an immediate
stimulating effect upon all the best minds of the country; how deep or
lasting this influence will be remains to be seen.
This point and brevity has its convenience and value especially in
certain fields of literature. I by no means would wish to water Emerson;
yet it will not do to lose sight of the fact that mass and inertia are
indispensable to the creator. Considering him as poet alone, I have
no doubt of his irremediable deficiency here. You cannot have broad,
massive effect, deep light and shade, or a torrent of power, with such
extreme refinement and condensation. The superphosphates cannot take the
place of the coarser, bulkier fertilizers. Especially in poetry do
we require pure thought to be well diluted with the human, emotional
qualities. In the writing most precious to the race, how little is
definition and intellectual formula, and how much is impulse, emotion,
will, character, blood, chyle! We must have liquids and gases and
solvents. We perhaps get more of them in Carlyle. Emerson's page
has more serene astral beauty than Carlyle's, but not that intense
blast-furnace heat that melts down the most obdurate facts and
characters into something plastic and poetical. Emerson's ideal is
always the scholar, the man of books and ready wit; Carlyle's hero is a
riding or striding ruler, or a master worker in some active field.
The antique mind no doubt affords the true type of health and wholeness
in this respect. The Greek could see, and feel, and paint, and carve,
and speak nothing but emotional man. In nature he saw nothing but
personality,--nothing but human or superhuman qualities; to him the
elements all took the human shape. Of that vague, spiritual, abstract
something which we call Nature he had no conception. He had no
sentiment, properly speaking, but impulse and will-power. And the
master minds of the world, in proportion to their strength, their spinal
strength, have approximated to this type. Dante, Angelo, Shakespeare,
Byron, Goethe, saw mainly man, and him not abstractly but concretely.
And this is the charm of Burns and the glory of Scott. Carlyle has
written the best histories and biographies of modern times, because he
sees man with such fierce and steadfast eyes. Emerson sees him also,
but he is not interested in him as a man, but mainly as a spirit, as a
demigod, or as a wit or a philosopher.
Emerson's quality has changed a good deal in his later writings. His
corn is no longer in the milk; it has grown hard, and we that read have
grown hard, too. He has now ceased to be an expansive, revolutionary
force, but he has not ceased to be a writer of extraordinary gripe and
unexpected resources of statement. His startling piece of advice, "Hitch
your wagon to a star," is typical of the man, as combining the most
unlike and widely separate qualities. Because not less marked than his
idealism and mysticism is his shrewd common sense, his practical bent,
his definiteness,--in fact, the sharp New England mould in which he is
cast. He is the master Yankee, the centennial flower of that thrifty and
peculiar stock. More especially in his later writings and speakings
do we see the native New England traits,--the alertness, eagerness,
inquisitiveness, thrift, dryness, archness, caution, the nervous energy
as distinguished from the old English unction and vascular force. How he
husbands himself,--what prudence, what economy, always spending up, as
he says, and not down! How alert, how attentive; what an inquisitor;
always ready with some test question, with some fact or idea to match
or to verify, ever on the lookout for some choice bit of adventure or
information, or some anecdote that has pith and point! No tyro basks and
takes his ease in his presence, but is instantly put on trial and must
answer or be disgraced. He strikes at an idea like a falcon at a bird.
His great fear seems to be lest there be some fact or point worth
knowing that will escape him. He is a close-browed miser of the
scholar's gains. He turns all values into intellectual coin. Every book
or person or experience is an investment that will or will not warrant
a good return in ideas. He goes to the Radical Club, or to the literary
gathering, and listens with the closest attention to every word that is
said, in hope that something will be said, some word dropped, that has
the ring of the true metal. Apparently he does not permit himself a
moment's indifference or inattention. His own pride is always to have
the ready change, to speak the exact and proper word, to give to every
occasion the dignity of wise speech. You are bartered with for your
best. There is no profit in life but in the interchange of ideas, and
the chief success is to have a head well filled with them. Hard cash at
that; no paper promises satisfy him; he loves the clink and glint of the
real coin.
His earlier writings were more flowing and suggestive, and had reference
to larger problems; but now everything has got weighed and stamped and
converted into the medium of wise and scholarly conversation. It is of
great value; these later essays are so many bags of genuine coin, which
it has taken a lifetime to hoard; not all gold, but all good, and the
fruit of wise industry and economy.
I know of no other writing that yields the reader so many strongly
stamped medallion-like sayings and distinctions. There is a perpetual
refining and recoining of the current wisdom of life and conversation.
It is the old gold or silver or copper, but how bright and new it looks
in his pages! Emerson loves facts, things, objects, as the workman his
tools. He makes everything serve. The stress of expression is so great
that he bends the most obdurate element to his purpose; as the bird,
under her keen necessity, weaves the most contrary and diverse
materials into her nest. He seems to like best material that is a little
refractory; it makes his page more piquant and stimulating. Within
certain limits he loves roughness, but not at the expense of harmony.
He has wonderful hardiness and push. Where else in literature is there
a mind, moving in so rare a medium, that gives one such a sense of
tangible resistance and force? It is a principle in mechanics that
velocity is twice as great as mass: double your speed and you double
your heat, though you halve your weight. In like manner this body we
are considering is not the largest, but its speed is great, and the
intensity of its impact with objects and experience is almost without
parallel. Everything about a man like Emerson is important. I find his
phrenology and physiognomy more than ordinarily typical and suggestive.
Look at his picture there,--large, strong features on a small face and
head,--no blank spaces; all given up to expression; a high predaceous
nose, a sinewy brow, a massive, benevolent chin. In most men there is
more face than feature, but here is a vast deal more feature than face,
and a corresponding alertness and emphasis of character. Indeed, the
man is made after this fashion. He is all type; his expression is
transcendent. His mind has the hand's pronounced anatomy,--its cords
and sinews and multiform articulations and processes, its opposing and
coordinating power. If his brain is small, its texture is fine and
its convolutions are deep. There have been broader and more catholic
natures, but few so towering and audacious in expression and so rich
in characteristic traits. Every scrap and shred of him is important
and related. Like the strongly aromatic herbs and simples,--sage, mint,
wintergreen, sassafras,--the least part carries the flavor of the whole.
Is there one indifferent or equivocal or unsympathizing drop of blood
in him? Where he is at all, he is entirely,--nothing extemporaneous;
his most casual word seems to have lain in pickle a long time, and is
saturated through and through with the Emersonian brine. Indeed, so
pungent and penetrating is his quality that even his quotations seem
more than half his own.
He is a man who occupies every inch of his rightful territory; he is
there in proper person to the farthest bound. Not every man is himself
and his best self at all times and to his finger points. Many great
characters, perhaps the greatest, have more or less neutral or waste
ground. You must penetrate a distance before you reach the real quick.
Or there is a good wide margin of the commonplace which is sure to put
them on good terms with the mass of their fellow-citizens. And one would
think Emerson could afford to relax a little; that he had earned the
right to a dull page or two now and then. The second best or third best
word sometimes would make us appreciate his first best all the more.
Even his god-father Plato nods occasionally, but Emerson's good breeding
will not for a moment permit such a slight to the reader.
Emerson's peculiar quality is very subtle, but very sharp and firm
and unmistakable. It is not analogous to the commoner, slower-going
elements, as heat, air, fire, water, but is nearer akin to that
elusive but potent something we call electricity. It is abrupt, freaky,
unexpected, and always communicates a little wholesome shock. It darts
this way and that, and connects the far and the near in every line.
There is always a leaping thread of light, and there is always a kind
of answering peal or percussion. With what quickness and suddenness
extremes are brought together! The reader is never prepared for what is
to come next; the spark will most likely leap from some source or
fact least thought of. His page seldom glows and burns, but there is a
never-ceasing crackling and discharge of moral and intellectual force
into the mind.
His chief weapon, and one that he never lays down, is identical with
that of the great wits, namely, surprise. The point of his remark or
idea is always sprung upon the reader, never quietly laid before him.
He has a mortal dread of tameness and flatness, and would make the very
water we drink bite the tongue.
He has been from the first a speaker and lecturer, and his style has
been largely modeled according to the demand of those sharp, heady New
England audiences for ceaseless intellectual friction and chafing. Hence
every sentence is braided hard, and more or less knotted, and, though
of silk, makes the mind tingle. He startles by overstatement, by
understatement, by paradox, by antithesis, and by synthesis. Into
every sentence enters the unexpected,--the congruous leaping from the
incongruous, the high coming down, the low springing up, likeness or
relation suddenly coming into view where before was only difference or
antagonism. How he delights to bring the reader up with a short turn,
to impale him on a knotty point, to explode one of his verbal bombshells
under his very nose! Yet there is no trickery or rhetorical legerdemain.
His heroic fibre always saves him.
The language in which Taine describes Bacon applies with even more force
to Emerson:--
"Bacon," he says, "is a producer of conceptions and of sentences. The
matter being explored, he says to us: 'Such it is; touch it not on that
side; it must be approached from the other.' Nothing more; no proof, no
effort to convince; he affirms, and nothing more; he has thought in the
manner of artists and poets, and he speaks after the manner of prophets
and seers. 'Cogita et visa,'--this title of one of his books might be
the title of all. His process is that of the creators; it is intuition,
not reasoning.... There is nothing more hazardous, more like fantasy,
than this mode of thought when it is not checked by natural and good
strong common sense. This common sense, which is a kind of natural
divination, the stable equilibrium of an intellect always gravitating
to the true, like the needle to the north pole, Bacon possesses in the
highest degree. He has a preeminently practical, even an utilitarian
mind."
It is significant, and is indeed the hidden seed or root out of which
comes the explanation of much, if not the main part, of his life and
writings, that Emerson comes of a long line of clergymen; that the blood
in his veins has been teaching, and preaching, and thinking, and
growing austere, these many generations. One wonders that it is still so
bounding and strong, so red with iron and quick with oxygen. But in
him seems to be illustrated one of those rare cases in the genealogy
of families where the best is carried forward each time, and steadily
recruited and intensified. It does not seem possible for any man to
become just what Emerson is from the stump, though perhaps great men
have been the fruit of one generation; but there is a quality in him, an
aroma of fine manners, a propriety, a chivalry in the blood, that dates
back, and has been refined and transmitted many times. Power is born
with a man, and is always first hand, but culture, genius, noble
instincts, gentle manners, or the easy capacity for these things, may
be, and to a greater or a lesser extent are, the contribution of the
past. Emerson's culture is radical and ante-natal, and never fails him.
The virtues of all those New England ministers and all those tomes of
sermons are in this casket. One fears sometimes that he has been too
much clarified, or that there is not enough savage grace or original
viciousness and grit in him to save him. How he hates the roysterers,
and all the rank, turbulent, human passions, and is chilled by the
thought that perhaps after all Shakespeare led a vulgar life!
When Tyndall was here, he showed us how the dark, coarse, invisible heat
rays could be strained out of the spectrum; or, in other words, that
every solar beam was weighted with a vast, nether, invisible side, which
made it a lever of tremendous power in organic nature. After some such
analogy, one sees how the highest order of power in the intellectual
world draws upon and is nourished by those rude, primitive, barbaric
human qualities that our culture and pietism tend to cut off and strain
out. Our culture has its eye on the other end of the spectrum, where
the fine violet and indigo rays are; but all the lifting, rounding,
fructifying powers of the system are in the coarse, dark rays--the
black devil--at the base. The angel of light is yoked with the demon of
darkness, and the pair create and sustain the world.
In rare souls like Emerson, the fruit of extreme culture, it is
inevitable that at least some of the heat rays should be lost, and we
miss them especially when we contrast him with the elder masters. The
elder masters did not seem to get rid of the coarse or vulgar in human
life, but royally accepted it, and struck their roots into it, and drew
from it sustenance and power: but there is an ever-present suspicion
that Emerson prefers the saints to the sinners; prefers the prophets and
seers to Homer, Shakespeare, and Dante. Indeed, it is to be distinctly
stated and emphasized, that Emerson is essentially a priest, and that
the key to all he has said and written is to be found in the fact
that his point of view is not that of the acceptor, the
creator,--Shakespeare's point of view,--but that of the refiner and
selector, the priest's point of view. He described his own state rather
than that of mankind when he said, "The human mind stands ever in
perplexity, demanding intellect, demanding sanctity, impatient equally
of each without the other."
Much surprise has been expressed in literary circles in this country
that Emerson has not followed up his first off-hand indorsement of Walt
Whitman with fuller and more deliberate approval of that poet, but has
rather taken the opposite tack. But the wonder is that he should have
been carried off his feet at all in the manner he was; and it must
have been no ordinary breeze that did it. Emerson shares with his
contemporaries the vast preponderance of the critical and discerning
intellect over the fervid, manly qualities and faith. His power of
statement is enormous; his scope of being is not enormous. The prayer
he uttered many years ago for a poet of the modern, one who could see in
the gigantic materialism of the times the carnival of the same deities
we so much admire in Greece and Rome, seems to many to have even been
explicitly answered in Whitman; but Emerson is balked by the cloud of
materials, the din and dust of action, and the moving armies, in which
the god comes enveloped.
But Emerson has his difficulties with all the poets. Homer is too
literal, Milton too literary, and there is too much of the whooping
savage in Whitman. He seems to think the real poet is yet to appear; a
poet on new terms, the reconciler, the poet-priest,--one who shall unite
the whiteness and purity of the saint with the power and unction of the
sinner; one who shall bridge the chasm between Shakespeare and St. John.
For when our Emerson gets on his highest horse, which he does only on
two or three occasions, he finds Shakespeare only a half man, and
that it would take Plato and Manu and Moses and Jesus to complete him.
Shakespeare, he says, rested with the symbol, with the festal beauty of
the world, and did not take the final step, and explore the essence
of things, and ask, "Whence? What? and Whither?" He was not wise for
himself; he did not lead a beautiful, saintly life, but ate, and drank,
and reveled, and affiliated with all manner of persons, and quaffed the
cup of life with gusto and relish. The elect, spotless souls will always
look upon the heat and unconscious optimism of the great poet with deep
regret. But if man would not become emasculated, if human life is to
continue, we must cherish the coarse as well as the fine, the root as
well as the top and flower. The poet-priest in the Emersonian sense
has never yet appeared, and what reason have we to expect him? The poet
means life, the whole of life,--all your ethics and philosophies, and
essences and reason of things, in vital play and fusion, clothed with
form and color, and throbbing with passion: the priest means a part, a
thought, a precept; he means suppression, expurgation, death. To have
gone farther than Shakespeare would have been to cease to be a poet, and
to become a mystic or a seer.
Yet it would be absurd to say, as a leading British literary journal
recently did, that Emerson is not a poet. He is one kind of a poet. He
has written plenty of poems that are as melodious as the hum of a wild
bee in the air,--chords of wild aeolian music.
Undoubtedly his is, on the whole, a bloodless kind of poetry. It
suggests the pale gray matter of the cerebrum rather than flesh and
blood. Mr. William Rossetti has made a suggestive remark about him. He
is not so essentially a poet, says this critic, as he is a Druid that
wanders among the bards, and strikes the harp with even more than bardic
stress.
Not in the poetry of any of his contemporaries is there such a burden
of the mystery of things, nor are there such round wind-harp tones, nor
lines so tense and resonant, and blown upon by a breeze from the highest
heaven of thought. In certain respects he has gone beyond any other. He
has gone beyond the symbol to the thing signified. He has emptied poetic
forms of their meaning and made poetry of that. He would fain cut the
world up into stars to shine in the intellectual firmament. He is more
and he is less than the best.
He stands among other poets like a pine-tree amid a forest of oak and
maple. He seems to belong to another race, and to other climes and
conditions. He is great in one direction, up; no dancing leaves, but
rapt needles; never abandonment, never a tossing and careering, never
an avalanche of emotion; the same in sun and snow, scattering his cones,
and with night and obscurity amid his branches. He is moral first and
last, and it is through his impassioned and poetic treatment of the
moral law that he gains such an ascendency over his reader. He says, as
for other things he makes poetry of them, but the moral law makes poetry
of him. He sees in the world only the ethical, but he sees it through
the aesthetic faculty. Hence his page has the double charm of the
beautiful and the good.