II

One of the penalties Emerson pays for his sharp decision, his mental

pertinence and resistance, is the curtailment of his field of vision and

enjoyment. He is one of those men whom the gods drive with blinders on,

so that they see fiercely in only a few directions. Supreme lover as he

is of poetry,--Herrick's poetry,--yet from the whole domain of what may

be called emotional poetry, the poetry of fluid humanity, tallied by

music, he seems to be shut out. This may be seen by his reference

to Shelley in his last book, "Letters and Social Aims," and by

his preference of the metaphysical poet throughout his writings.

Wordsworth's famous "Ode" is, he says, the high-water mark of English

literature. What he seems to value most in Shakespeare is the marvelous

wit, the pregnant sayings. He finds no poet in France, and in his

"English Traits" credits Tennyson with little but melody and color. (In

our last readings, do we not surely come to feel the manly and robust

fibre beneath Tennyson's silken vestments?) He demands of poetry that

it be a kind of spiritual manna, and is at last forced to confess that

there are no poets, and that when such angels do appear, Homer and

Milton will be tin pans.

One feels that this will not do, and that health, and wholeness, and

the well-being of man are more in the keeping of Shakespeare than in the

hands of Zoroaster or any of the saints. I doubt if that rarefied air

will make good red blood and plenty of it.

But Emerson makes his point plain, and is not indebted to any of his

teachers for it. It is the burden of all he writes upon the subject. The

long discourse that opens his last volume [footnote: _Letters and Social

Aims_] has numerous subheadings, as "Poetry," "Imagination," "Creation,"

"Morals," and "Transcendency;" but it's all a plea for transcendency. I

am reminded of the story of an old Indian chief who was invited to some

great dinner where the first course was "succotash." When the second

course was ready the old Indian said he would have a little more

succotash, and when the third was ready he called for more succotash and

so with the fourth and fifth, and on to the end. In like manner Emerson

will have nothing but the "spiritual law" in poetry, and he has an

enormous appetite for that. Let him have it, but why should he be so

sure that mankind all want succotash? Mankind finally comes to care

little for what any poet has to _say,_ but only for what he has to

_sing._ We want the pearl of thought dissolved in the wine of life. How

much better are sound bones and a good digestion in poetry than all the

philosophy and transcendentalism in the world!

What one comes at last to want is power, mastery; and, whether it be

mastery over the subtleties of the intellect, as in Emerson himself, or

over the passions and the springs of action, as in Shakespeare, or over

our terrors and the awful hobgoblins of hell and Satan, as in Dante, or

over vast masses and spaces of nature and the abysms of aboriginal man,

as in Walt Whitman, what matters it? Are we not refreshed by all? There

is one mastery in Burns, another in Byron, another in Rabelais, and in

Victor Hugo, and in Tennyson; and though the critic has his preferences,

though he affect one more than another, yet who shall say this one is

a poet and that one is not? "There may be any number of supremes," says

the master, and "one by no means contravenes another." Every gas is

a vacuum to every other gas, says Emerson, quoting the scientist; and

every great poet complements and leaves the world free to every other

great poet.

Emerson's limitation or fixity is seen also in the fact that he has

taken no new step in his own direction, if indeed another step could be

taken in that direction and not step off. He is a prisoner on his

peak. He cannot get away from the old themes. His later essays are

upon essentially the same subjects as his first. He began by writing

on nature, greatness, manners, art, poetry, and he is still writing on

them. He is a husbandman who practices no rotation of crops, but submits

to the exhaustive process of taking about the same things from his soil

year after year. Some readers think they detect a falling off. It is

evident there is not the same spontaneity, and that the soil has to be

more and more stirred and encouraged, which is not at all to be wondered

at.

But if Emerson has not advanced, he has not receded, at least in

conviction and will, which is always the great danger with our bold

prophets. The world in which he lives, the themes upon which he writes,

never become hackneyed to him. They are always fresh and new. He has

hardened, but time has not abated one jot or tittle his courage and

hope,--no cynicism and no relaxing of his hold, no decay of his faith,

while the nobleness of his tone, the chivalry of his utterance, is even

more marked than at first. Better a hundred-fold than his praise of fine

manners is the delicacy and courtesy and the grace of generous breeding

displayed on every page. Why does one grow impatient and vicious when

Emerson writes of fine manners and the punctilios of conventional life,

and feel like kicking into the street every divinity enshrined in the

drawing-room? It is a kind of insult to a man to speak the word in his

presence. Purify the parlors indeed by keeping out the Choctaws, the

laughers! Let us go and hold high carnival for a week, and split the

ears of the groundlings with our "contemptible squeals of joy." And when

he makes a dead set at praising eloquence, I find myself instantly on

the side of the old clergyman he tells of who prayed that he might never

be eloquent; or when he makes the test of a man an intellectual one, as

his skill at repartee, and praises the literary crack shot, and defines

manliness to be readiness, as he does in this last volume and in the

preceding one, I am filled with a perverse envy of all the confused and

stammering heroes of history. Is Washington faltering out a few broken

and ungrammatical sentences, in reply to the vote of thanks of the

Virginia legislature, less manly than the glib tongue in the court-room

or in the club that can hit the mark every time? The test of a wit or of

a scholar is one thing; the test of a man, I take it, is quite another.

In this and some other respects Emerson is well antidoted by Carlyle,

who lays the stress on the opposite qualities, and charges his hero to

hold his tongue. But one cheerfully forgives Emerson the way he puts his

thumb-nail on the bores. He speaks feelingly, and no doubt from as deep

an experience as any man in America.

I really hold Emerson in such high esteem that I think I can safely

indulge myself in a little more fault-finding with him.

I think it must be admitted that he is deficient in sympathy. This

accounts in a measure for his coolness, his self-possession, and that

kind of uncompromising rectitude or inflexibleness that marks his

career, and that he so lauds in his essays. No man is so little liable

to be warped or compromised in any way as the unsympathetic man.

Emerson's ideal is the man who stands firm, who is unmoved, who never

laughs, or apologizes, or deprecates, or makes concessions, or assents

through good-nature, or goes abroad; who is not afraid of giving

offense; "who answers you without supplication in his eye,"--in fact,

who stands like a granite pillar amid the slough of life. You may

wrestle with this man, he says, or swim with him, or lodge in the same

chamber with him, or eat at the same table, and yet he is a thousand

miles off, and can at any moment finish with you. He is a sheer

precipice, is this man, and not to be trifled with. You shrinking,

quivering, acquiescing natures, avaunt! You sensitive plants, you

hesitating, indefinite creatures, you uncertain around the edges, you

non-resisting, and you heroes, whose courage is quick, but whose wit is

tardy, make way, and let the human crustacean pass. Emerson is moulded

upon this pattern. It is no mush and milk that you get at this table. "A

great man is coming to dine with me; I do not wish to please him; I wish

that he should wish to please me." On the lecture stand he might be

of wood, so far as he is responsive to the moods and feelings of his

auditors. They must come to him; he will not go to them: but they do not

always come. Latterly the people have felt insulted, the lecturer showed

them so little respect. Then, before a promiscuous gathering, and in

stirring and eventful times like ours, what anachronisms most of his

lectures are, even if we take the high ground that they are pearls

before swine! The swine may safely demand some apology of him who offers

them pearls instead of corn.

Emerson's fibre is too fine for large public uses. He is what he is, and

is to be accepted as such, only let us _know_ what he is. He does not

speak to universal conditions, or to human nature in its broadest,

deepest, strongest phases. His thought is far above the great sea level

of humanity, where stand most of the world's masters. He is like one of

those marvelously clear mountain lakes whose water-line runs above

all the salt seas of the globe. He is very precious, taken at his real

worth. Why find fault with the isolation and the remoteness in view of

the sky-like purity and depth?

Still I must go on sounding and exploring him, reporting where I touch

bottom and where I do not. He reaps great advantage from his want of

sympathy. The world makes no inroads upon him through this channel. He

is not distracted by the throng or maybe the mob of emotions that find

entrance here. He shines like a star undimmed by current events. He

speaks as from out the interstellar spaces. 'T is vulgar sympathy makes

mortals of us all, and I think Emerson's poetry finally lacks just that

human coloring and tone, that flesh tint of the heart, which vulgar

sympathy with human life as such imparts.

But after we have made all possible deductions from Emerson, there

remains the fact that he is a living force, and, tried by home

standards, a master. Wherein does the secret of his power lie? He is

the prophet and philosopher of young men. The old man and the man of the

world make little of him, but of the youth who is ripe for him he takes

almost an unfair advantage. One secret of his charm I take to be the

instant success with which he transfers our interest in the romantic,

the chivalrous, the heroic, to the sphere of morals and the intellect.

We are let into another realm unlooked for, where daring and imagination

also lead. The secret and suppressed heart finds a champion. To the

young man fed upon the penny precepts and staple Johnsonianism of

English literature, and upon what is generally doled out in the schools

and colleges, it is a surprise; it is a revelation. A new world opens

before him. The nebulae of his spirit are resolved or shown to be

irresolvable. The fixed stars of his inner firmament are brought

immeasurably near. He drops all other books. He will gaze and wonder.

From Locke or Johnson or Wayland to Emerson is like a change from the

school history to the Arabian Nights. There may be extravagances and

some jugglery, but for all that the lesson is a genuine one, and to us

of this generation immense.

Emerson is the knight-errant of the moral sentiment. He leads, in

our time and country, one illustrious division, at least, in the holy

crusade of the affections and the intuitions against the usurpations of

tradition and theological dogma. He marks the flower, the culmination,

under American conditions and in the finer air of the New World, of the

reaction begun by the German philosophers, and passed along by later

French and English thinkers, of man against circumstance, of

spirit against form, of the present against the past. What splendid

affirmation, what inspiring audacity, what glorious egoism, what

generous brag, what sacred impiety! There is an _eclat_ about his words,

and a brave challenging of immense odds, that is like an army with

banners. It stirs the blood like a bugle-call: beauty, bravery, and a

sacred cause,--the three things that win with us always. The first essay

is a forlorn hope. See what the chances are: "The world exists for the

education of each man.... He should see that he can live all history in

his own person. He must sit solidly at home, and not suffer himself to

be bullied by kings or empires, but know that he is greater than all

the geography and all the government of the world; he must transfer the

point of view from which history is commonly read from Rome and Athens

and London to himself, and not deny his conviction that he is the court,

and, if England or Egypt have anything to say to him, he will try the

case; if not, let them forever be silent." In every essay that follows,

there are the same great odds and the same electric call to the youth

to face them. It is, indeed, as much a world of fable and romance that

Emerson introduces us to as we get in Homer or Herodotus. It is true,

all true,--true as Arthur and his knights, or Pilgrim's Progress, and I

pity the man who has not tasted its intoxication, or who can see nothing

in it.

The intuitions are the bright band, without armor or shield, that

slay the mailed and bucklered giants of the understanding. Government,

institutions, religions, fall before the glance of the hero's eye. Art

and literature, Shakespeare, Angelo, Aeschylus, are humble suppliants

before you, the king. The commonest fact is idealized, and the whole

relation of man to the universe is thrown into a kind of gigantic

perspective. It is not much to say there is exaggeration; the very start

makes Mohammed's attitude toward the mountain tame. The mountain _shall_

come to Mohammed, and, in the eyes of all born readers of Emerson, the

mountain does come, and comes with alacrity.

Some shrewd judges apprehend that Emerson is not going to last; basing

their opinion upon the fact, already alluded to, that we outgrow him, or

pass through him as through an experience that we cannot repeat. He is

but a bridge to other things; he gets you over. He is an exceptional

fact in literature, say they, and does not represent lasting or

universal conditions. He is too fine for the rough wear and tear of

ages. True, we do not outgrow Dante, or Cervantes, or Bacon; and I doubt

if the Anglo-Saxon stock at least ever outgrows that king of romancers,

Walter Scott. These men and their like appeal to a larger audience, and

in some respects a more adult one, at least one more likely to be found

in every age and people. Their achievement was more from the common

level of human nature than are Emerson's astonishing paradoxes. Yet I

believe his work has the seal of immortality upon it as much as that

of any of them. No doubt he has a meaning to us now and in this country

that will be lost to succeeding time. His religious significance will

not be so important to the next generation. He is being or has been so

completely absorbed by his times, that readers and hearers hereafter

will get him from a thousand sources, or his contribution will become

the common property of the race. All the masters probably had some

peculiar import or tie to their contemporaries that we at a distance

miss. It is thought by scholars that we have lost the key, or one key,

to Dante, and Chaucer, and Shakespeare,--the key or the insight that

people living under the same roof get of each other.

But, aside from and over and above everything else, Emerson _appeals

to youth and to genius._ If you have these, you will understand him and

delight in him; if not, or neither of them, you will make little of him.

And I do not see why this should not be just as true any time hence as

at present.