CRITICALMISCELLANIES

BY

JOHN MORLEY

VOL. I. 

Essay 5: Emerson

LondonMACMILLAN AND CO. , LIMITEDNEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY1904

Introductory 293

I. 

Early days 296

Takes charge of an Unitarian Church in Boston (1829) 297

Resigns the charge in 1832 298

Goes to Europe (1833) 299

Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Carlyle 300

Settles in Concord (1834) 301

Description of Concord by Clough 301

Death of his first wife 302

Income 303

Hawthorne 305

Thoreau 305

Views on Solitude 306

Effect of his address in the Divinity School of Harvard(1838) 307

Contributes to the _Dial_ (1840) 309

First series of his Essays published in 1841 310

Second series three years later 310

Second visit to England (1847), and delivers lectures on'Representative Men, ' collected and published in 1850 310

Poems first collected in 1847; final version made in 1876 310

Essays and Lectures published in 1860, under general titleof _The Conduct of Life_ 310

And the Civil War 310

General retrospect of his life 312

Died April 27, 1882 312

II. 

Style of his writings 313

Manner as a lecturer 314

Dr. Holmes 314

His use of words 314

Sincerity 316

And Landor 316

Mr. Lowell 316

Description of his library 317

A word or two about his verses 319

III. 

Hawthorne 322

And Carlyle 323

The friends of Universal Progress in 1840 323

Bossuet 324

Remarks on New England 325

One of the few moral reformers 327

Essays on 'Domestic Life, ' on 'Behaviour, ' and on'Manners' 329

Compared to Franklin and Chesterfield 330

Is for faith before works 333

A systematic reasoner 335

The Emersonian faith abundantly justified 337

Carlyle's letter to (June 4, 1871) 337

One remarkable result of his idealism 341

On Death and Sin 342, 344

Conclusion 346

EMERSON. 

A great interpreter of life ought not himself to need interpretation, least of all can he need it for contemporaries. When time has wroughtchanges of fashion, mental and social, the critic serves a useful turnin giving to a poet or a teacher his true place, and in recovering ideasand points of view that are worth preserving. Interpretation of thiskind Emerson cannot require. His books are no palimpsest, 'the prophet'sholograph, defiled, erased, and covered by a monk's. ' What he haswritten is fresh, legible, and in full conformity with the manners andthe diction of the day, and those who are unable to understand himwithout gloss and comment are in fact not prepared to understand what itis that the original has to say. Scarcely any literature is so entirelyunprofitable as the so-called criticism that overlays a pithy text witha windy sermon. For our time at least Emerson may best be left to be hisown expositor. 

Nor is Emerson, either, in the case of those whom the world has failedto recognise, and whom therefore it is the business of the critic tomake known and to define. It is too soon to say in what particularniche among the teachers of the race posterity will place him; enoughthat in our own generation he has already been accepted as one of thewise masters, who, being called to high thinking for generous ends, didnot fall below his vocation, but, steadfastly pursuing the pure searchfor truth, without propounding a system or founding a school orcumbering himself overmuch about applications, lived the life of thespirit, and breathed into other men a strong desire after the rightgovernance of the soul. All this is generally realised and understood, and men may now be left to find their way to the Emersonian doctrinewithout the critic's prompting. Though it is only the other day thatEmerson walked the earth and was alive and among us, he is already oneof the privileged few whom the reader approaches in the mood of settledrespect, and whose names have surrounded themselves with an atmosphereof religion. 

It is not particularly profitable, again, to seek for Emerson one of thelabels out of the philosophic handbooks. Was he the prince ofTranscendentalists, or the prince of Idealists? Are we to look for thesources of his thought in Kant or Jacobi, in Fichte or Schelling? Howdoes he stand towards Parmenides and Zeno, the Egotheism of the Sufis, or the position of the Megareans? Shall we put him on the shelf with theStoics or the Mystics, with Quietist, Pantheist, Determinist? If lifewere long, it might be worth while to trace Emerson's affinities withthe philosophic schools; to collect and infer his answers to theeverlasting problems of psychology and metaphysics; to extract a set ofcoherent and reasoned opinions about knowledge and faculty, experienceand consciousness, truth and necessity, the absolute and the relative. But such inquiries would only take us the further away from the essenceand vitality of Emerson's mind and teaching. In philosophy properEmerson made no contribution of his own, but accepted, apparentlywithout much examination of the other side, from Coleridge after Kant, the intuitive, _à priori_ and realist theory respecting the sources ofhuman knowledge, and the objects that are within the cognisance of thehuman faculties. This was his starting-point, and within its own sphereof thought he cannot be said to have carried it any further. What he didwas to light up these doctrines with the rays of ethical and poeticimagination. As it has been justly put, though Emersoniantranscendentalism is usually spoken of as a philosophy, it is morejustly regarded as a gospel. [1] But before dwelling more on this, let uslook into the record of his life, of which we may say in all truth thatno purer, simpler, and more harmonious story can be found in the annalsof far-shining men. 

[Footnote 1: Frothingham's _Transcendentalism in New England: aHistory_--a judicious, acute, and highly interesting piece of criticism. ]

I. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born at Boston, May 25, 1803. He was of anancient and honourable English stock, who had transplanted themselves, on one side from Cheshire and Bedfordshire, and on the other from Durhamand York, a hundred and seventy years before. For seven or eightgenerations in a direct and unbroken line his forefathers had beenpreachers and divines, not without eminence in the Puritan tradition ofNew England. His second name came into the family with Rebecca Waldo, with whom at the end of the seventeenth century one Edward Emerson hadintermarried, and whose family had fled from the Waldensian valleys andthat slaughter of the saints which Milton called on Heaven to avenge. Every tributary, then, that made Emerson what he was, flowed not onlyfrom Protestantism, but from 'the Protestantism of the Protestantreligion. ' When we are told that Puritanism inexorably locked up theintelligence of its votaries in a dark and straitened chamber, it isworthy to be remembered that the genial, open, lucid, and mostcomprehensive mind of Emerson was the ripened product of a genealogicaltree that at every stage of its growth had been vivified by Puritan sap. 

Not many years after his birth, Emerson's mother was left a widow withnarrow means, and he underwent the wholesome training of frugality inyouth. When the time came, he was sent to Harvard. When Clough visitedAmerica a generation later, the collegiate training does not appear tohave struck him very favourably. 'They learn French and history andGerman, and a great many more things than in England, but onlyimperfectly. ' This was said from the standard of Rugby and Balliol, andthe method that Clough calls imperfect had merits of its own. The pupillost much in a curriculum that had a certain rawness about it, comparedwith the traditional culture that was at that moment (1820) justbeginning to acquire a fresh hold within the old gray quadrangles ofOxford. On the other hand, the training at Harvard struck fewer of thosesuperfluous roots in the mind, which are only planted that they may bepresently cast out again with infinite distraction and waste. 

When his schooling was over, Emerson began to prepare himself for theministrations of the pulpit, and in 1826 and 1827 he preached in diversplaces. Two years later he was ordained, and undertook the charge of animportant Unitarian Church in Boston. It was not very long before thestrain of forms, comparatively moderate as it was in the Unitarian body, became too heavy to be borne. Emerson found that he could no longeraccept the usual view of the Communion Service, even in its leastsacramental interpretation. To him the rite was purely spiritual inorigin and intent, and at the best only to be retained as acommemoration. The whole world, he said, had been full of idols andordinances and forms, when 'the Almighty God was pleased to qualify andsend forth a man to teach men that they must serve him with the heart;that only that life was religious which was thoroughly good; thatsacrifice was smoke and forms were shadows. This man lived and died trueto that purpose; and now with his blessed word and life before us, Christians must contend that it is a matter of vital importance, reallya duty, to commemorate him by a certain form, whether that form beagreeable to their understandings or not. Is not this to make vain thegift of God? Is not this to make men forget that not forms butduties--not names but righteousness and love--are enjoined?'

He was willing to continue the service with that explanation, and oncondition that he should not himself partake of the bread and wine. Thecongregation would fain have kept one whose transparent purity of soulhad attached more than his heresy had alienated. But the innovation wastoo great, and Emerson resigned his charge (1832). For some five or sixyears longer he continued occasionally to preach, and more than onecongregation would have accepted him. But doubts on the subject ofpublic prayer began to weigh upon his mind. He suspected the practice bywhich one man offered up prayer vicariously and collectively for theassembled congregation. Was not that too, like the Communion Service, aform that tended to deaden the spirit? Under the influence of this andother scruples he finally ceased to preach (1838), and told his friendsthat henceforth he must find his pulpit in the platform of thelecturer. 'I see not, ' he said, 'why this is not the most flexible ofall organs of opinion, from its popularity and from its newness, permitting you to say what you think, without any shackles ofproscription. The pulpit in our age certainly gives forth an obstructedand uncertain sound; and the faith of those in it, if men of genius, maydiffer so much from that of those under it as to embarrass theconscience of the speaker, because so much is attributed to him from thefact of standing there. ' The lecture was an important discovery, and ithas had many consequences in American culture. Among the moreundesirable of them has been (certainly not in Emerson's own case) theimportation of the pulpit accent into subjects where one would behappier with out it. 

Earlier in the same year in which he retired from his church at Boston, Emerson had lost his young wife. Though we may well believe that he borethese agitations with self-control, his health suffered, and in thespring of 1833 he started for Europe. He came to be accused of sayingcaptious things about travelling. There are three wants, he said, thatcan never be satisfied: that of the rich who want something more; thatof the sick who want something different; and that of the traveller whosays, Anywhere but here. Their restlessness, he told his countrymen, argued want of character. They were infatuated with 'the rococo toy ofItaly. ' As if what was true anywhere were not true everywhere; and asif a man, go where he will, can find more beauty or worth than hecarries. All this was said, as we shall see that much else was said byEmerson, by way of reaction and protest against instability of soul inthe people around him. 'Here or nowhere, ' said Goethe inversely tounstable Europeans yearning vaguely westwards, 'here or nowhere is thineAmerica. ' To the use of travel for its own ends, Emerson was of courseas much alive as other people. 'There is in every constitution a certainsolstice when the stars stand still in our inward firmament, and whenthere is required some foreign force, some diversion or alteration, toprevent stagnation. And as a medical remedy, travel seems one of thebest. ' He found it so in 1833. But this and his two other voyages toEurope make no Odyssey. When Voltaire was pressed to visit Rome, hedeclared that he would be better pleased with some new and free Englishbook than with all the glories of amphitheatre and of arch. Emerson inlike manner seems to have thought more of the great writers whom he sawin Europe than of buildings or of landscapes. 'Am I, ' he said, 'who havehung over their works in my chamber at home, not to see these men in theflesh, and thank them, and interchange some thoughts with them?' The twoEnglishmen to whom he owed most were Coleridge and Wordsworth; and theyounger writer, some eight years older than himself, in whom hisliveliest interest had been kindled, was Carlyle. He was fortunateenough to have converse with all three, and he has told the world howthese illustrious men in their several fashions and degrees impressedhim. [2] It was Carlyle who struck him most. 'Many a time upon the sea, in my homeward voyage, I remembered with joy the favoured condition ofmy lonely philosopher, ' cherishing visions more than divine 'in hisstern and blessed solitude. ' So Carlyle, with no less cordiality, declares that among the figures that he could recollect as visiting hisNithsdale hermitage--'all like Apparitions now, bringing with them airsfrom Heaven, or the blasts from the other region, there is not one of amore undoubtedly supernal character than yourself; so pure and still, with intents so charitable; and then vanishing too so soon into theazure Inane, as an Apparition should. '

[Footnote 2: _English Traits_, 7-18. _Ireland_, 143-152. Froude's_Carlyle_, ii. 355-359. ]

 * * * * *

In external incident Emerson's life was uneventful. Nothing could besimpler, of more perfect unity, or more free from disturbing episodesthat leaves scars on men. In 1834 he settled in old Concord, the home ofhis ancestors, then in its third century. 'Concord is very bare, ' wroteClough, who made some sojourn there in 1852, 'and so is the country ingeneral; it is a small sort of village, almost entirely of wood houses, painted white, with Venetian blinds, green outside, with two whitewooden churches. There are some American elms of a weeping kind, andsycamores, i. E. Planes; but the wood is mostly pine--white pine andyellow pine--somewhat scrubby, occupying the tops of the low banks, andmarshy hay-land between, very brown now. A little brook runs through tothe Concord River. '[3] The brook flowed across the few acres that wereEmerson's first modest homestead. 'The whole external appearance of theplace, ' says one who visited him, 'suggests old-fashioned comfort andhospitality. Within the house the flavour of antiquity is still morenoticeable. Old pictures look down from the walls; quaint blue-and-whitechina holds the simple dinner; old furniture brings to mind thegenerations of the past. At the right as you enter is Mr. Emerson'slibrary, a large square room, plainly furnished, but made pleasant bypictures and sunshine. The homely shelves that line the walls are wellfilled with books. There is a lack of showy covers or rich bindings, andeach volume seems to have soberly grown old in constant service. Mr. Emerson's study is a quiet room upstairs. '

[Footnote 3: Clough's _Life and Letters_, i. 185. ]

Fate did not spare him the strokes of the common lot. His first wifedied after three short years of wedded happiness. He lost a little son, who was the light of his eyes. But others were born to him, and in allthe relations and circumstances of domestic life he was one of the bestand most beloved of men. He long carried in his mind the picture ofCarlyle's life at Craigenputtock as the ideal for the sage, but his ownchoice was far wiser and happier, 'not wholly in the busy world, norquite beyond it. '

'Besides my house, ' he told Carlyle in 1838, 'I have, I believe, 22, 000dollars, whose income in ordinary years is six per cent. I have no othertithe or glebe except the income of my winter lectures, which was lastwinter 800 dollars. Well, with this income, here at home, I am a richman. I stay at home and go abroad at my own instance, I have food, warmth, leisure, books, friends. Go away from home, I am rich no longer. I never have a dollar to spend on a fancy. As no wise man, I suppose, ever was rich in the sense of _freedom to spend_, because of theinundation of claims, so neither am I, who am not wise. But at home I amrich--rich enough for ten brothers. My wife Lidian is an incarnation ofChristianity, --I call her Asia, --and keeps my philosophy fromAntinomianism; my mother, whitest, mildest, most conservative of ladies, whose only exception to her universal preference for old things is herson; my boy, a piece of love and sunshine, well worth my watching frommorning to night;--these, and three domestic women, who cook and sew andrun for us, make all my household. Here I sit and read and write, withvery little system, and, as far as regards composition, with the mostfragmentary result: paragraphs incompressible, each sentence aninfinitely repellent particle. 

'In summer, with the aid of a neighbour, I manage my garden; and a weekago I set out on the west side of my house forty young pine trees toprotect me or my son from the wind of January. The ornament of the placeis the occasional presence of some ten or twelve persons, good and wise, who visit us in the course of the year. '

As time went on he was able to buy himself 'a new plaything'--a piece ofwoodland, of more than forty acres, on the border of a little lake halfa mile wide or more, called Walden Pond. 'In these May days, ' he toldCarlyle, then passionately struggling with his _Cromwell_, with theslums of Chelsea at his back, 'when maples, poplars, oaks, birches, walnut, and pine, are in their spring glory, I go thither everyafternoon, and cut with my hatchet an Indian path through the thicket, all along the bold shore, and open the finest pictures' (1845). 

He loved to write at 'large leisure in noble mornings, opened by prayeror by readings of Plato, or whatsoever else is dearest to the MorningMuse. ' Yet he could not wholly escape the recluse's malady. He confessesthat he sometimes craves 'that stimulation which every capricious, languid, and languescent study needs. ' Carlyle's potent concentrationstirs his envy. The work of the garden and the orchard he found veryfascinating, eating up days and weeks; 'nay, a brave scholar should shunit like gambling, and take refuge in cities and hotels from thesepernicious enchantments. '

In the doings of his neighbourhood he bore his part; he took a manlyinterest in civil affairs, and was sensible, shrewd, and helpful inmatters of practical judgment. Pilgrims, sane and insane, the beardlessand the gray-headed, flocked to his door, far beyond the dozen personsgood and wise whom he had mentioned to Carlyle. 'Uncertain, troubled, earnest wanderers through the midnight of the moral world beheld hisintellectual fire as a beacon burning on a hill-top, and climbing thedifficult ascent, looked forth into the surrounding obscurity morehopefully than hitherto' (_Hawthorne_). To the most intractable ofTranscendental bores, worst species of the genus, he was neverimpatient, nor denied himself; nor did he ever refuse counsel where thecase was not yet beyond hope. Hawthorne was for a time his neighbour(1842-45). 'It was good, ' says Hawthorne, 'to meet him in thewood-paths, or sometimes in our avenue, with that pure intellectualgleam diffused about his presence like the garment of a shining one; andhe so quiet, so simple, so without pretension, encountering each manalive as if expecting to receive more than he could impart. '

The most remarkable of all his neighbours was Thoreau, who for a coupleof years lived in a hut which he had built for himself on the shore ofWalden Pond. If he had not written some things with a considerable charmof style, Thoreau might have been wisely neglected as one of the crazy. But Emerson was struck by the originality of his life, and thought itwell in time to edit the writings of one 'who was bred to no profession;never married; lived alone; never went to Church; never voted; refusedto pay a tax to the State; ate no flesh, drank no wine, never knew theuse of tobacco; had no temptations to fight against, no appetites, nopassions, refused all invitations, preferred a good Indian to highlycultivated people, and said he would rather go to Oregon than toLondon. ' The world has room for every type, so that it be not activelynoxious, and this whimsical egotist may well have his place in thecatalogue. He was, after all, in his life only a compendium, on a scalelarge enough to show their absurdity, of all those unsocial notionswhich Emerson in other manifestations found it needful to rebuke. Yet wemay agree that many of his paradoxes strike home with Socratic force tothe heart of a civilisation that wise men know to be too purelymaterial, too artificial, and too capriciously diffused. 

Emerson himself was too sane ever to fall into the hermit's trap ofbanishment to the rocks and echoes. 'Solitude, ' he said, 'isimpracticable, and society fatal. ' He steered his way as best he couldbetween these two irreconcilable necessities. He had, as we have seen, the good sense to make for himself a calling which brought him intohealthy contact with bodies of men, and made it essential that he shouldhave his listeners in some degree in his mind, even when they were notactually present to the eye. As a preacher Emerson has been described asmaking a deep impression on susceptible hearers of a quiet mind, by 'thecalm dignity of his bearing, the absence of all oratorical effort, andthe singular simplicity and directness of a manner free from the leasttrace of dogmatic assumption. ' 'Not long before, ' says this witness, 'Ihad listened to a wonderful sermon by Chalmers, whose force and energy, and vehement but rather turgid eloquence, carried for the moment allbefore him--his audience becoming like clay in the hands of the potter. But I must confess that the pregnant thoughts and serene self-possessionof the young Boston minister had a greater charm for me than all therhetorical splendours of Chalmers' (_Ireland_, 141). 

At the lecturer's desk the same attraction made itself still moreeffectually felt. 'I have heard some great speakers and someaccomplished orators, ' Mr. Lowell says, 'but never any that so moved andpersuaded men as he. There is a kind of undertone in that rich barytoneof his that sweeps our minds from their foothold into deep waters with adrift that we cannot and would not resist. Search for his eloquence inhis books and you will perchance miss it, but meanwhile you will findthat it has kindled all your thoughts. ' The same effect was felt in itsdegree wherever he went, and he took pains not to miss it. He had made astudy of his art, and was so skilful in his mastery of it that it seemedas if anybody might do all that he did and do it as well--if only ahundred failures had not proved the mistake. 

In 1838 Emerson delivered an address in the Divinity School of Harvard, which produced a gusty shower of articles, sermons, and pamphlets, andraised him without will or further act of his to the high place of theheresiarch. With admirable singleness of mind, he held modestly aloof. 'There is no scholar, ' he wrote to a friend, 'less willing or less ableto be a polemic. I could not give account of myself if challenged. Idelight in telling what I think, but if you ask me how I dare say so, orwhy it is so, I am the most helpless of men, ' The year before, hisoration on the American Scholar had filled Carlyle with delight. It wasthe first clear utterance, after long decades of years, in which he had'heard nothing but infinite jangling and jabbering, and inarticulatetwittering and screeching. ' Then Carlyle enjoined on his American friendfor rule of life, 'Give no ear to any man's praise or censure; know thatthat is _not_ it; on the one side is as Heaven, if you have strength tokeep silent and climb unseen; yet on the other side, yawning always atone's right hand and one's left, is the frightfullest Abyss andPandemonium' (Dec. 8, 1837). Emerson's temperament and his whole methodmade the warning needless, and, as before, while 'vociferous platitudewas dinning his ears on all sides, ' a whole world of thought was'silently building itself in these calm depths. ' But what would thosetwo divinities of his, Plato and Socrates, have said of a man who 'couldnot give an account of himself if challenged'? Assuredly not every onewho saith Plato, Plato, is admitted to that ideal kingdom. 

It was soon after this that the _Dial_ was projected. It had its originin the Transcendental Club, a little knot of speculative students atBoston, who met four or five times a year at one another's houses todiscuss questions mainly theological, from more liberal points of viewthan was at that time common, 'the air then in America getting a littletoo close and stagnant. ' The Club was first formed in 1836. The _Dial_appeared in 1840, and went on for four years at quarterly intervals. Emerson was a constant contributor, and for the last half of itsexistence he acted as editor. 'I submitted, ' he told Carlyle, 'to whatseemed a necessity of petty literary patriotism--I know not what else tocall it--and took charge of our thankless little _Dial_ here, withoutsubscribers enough to pay even a publisher, much less any labourer; ithas no penny for editor or contributor, nothing but abuse in thenewspapers, or, at best, silence; but it serves as a sort of portfolio, to carry about a few poems or sentences which would otherwise betranscribed or circulated, and we always are waiting until somebodyshall come and make it good. But I took it, and it took me and a greatdeal of good time to a small purpose' (July 1, 1842). On the whole onemust agree that it was to small purpose. Emerson's name has reflectedlustre on the _Dial_, but when his contributions are taken out, and, say, half a dozen besides, the residuum is in the main very poor stuff, and some of it has a droll resemblance to the talk between Mrs. Hominyand the Literary Ladies and the Honourable Elijah Pogram. MargaretFuller--the Miranda, Zenobia, Hypatia, Minerva of her time, and a trulyremarkable figure in the gallery of wonderful women--edited it for twoyears, and contributed many a vivid, dashing, exuberant, ebullient page. Her criticism of Goethe, for example, contains no final or valid word, but it is fresh, cordial, and frank, and no other prose contributor, again saving the one great name, has anything to say that is soreadable. Nearly all the rest is extinct, and the _Dial_ now findsitself far away from the sunshine of human interest. 

In 1841 the first series of Emerson's Essays was published, and threeyears later the second. The Poems were first collected in 1847, but thefinal version was not made until 1876. In 1847 Emerson paid his secondvisit to England, and delivered his lectures on Representative Men, collected and published in 1850. The books are said to have had a veryslow sale, but the essays and lectures published in 1860, with thegeneral title of _The Conduct of Life_, started with a sale of 2, 500copies, though that volume has never been considered by the Emersonianadept to contain most of the pure milk of the Word. 

Then came that great event in the history of men and institutions, theCivil War. We look with anxiety for the part played by the serenethinker when the hour had struck for violent and heroic action. Emersonhad hitherto been a Free Soiler; he had opposed the extension ofslavery; and he favoured its compulsory extinction, with compensation onthe plan of our own policy in the West Indies. He had never joined theactive Abolitionists, nor did he see 'that there was any particularthing for him to do in it then. ' 'Though I sometimes accept a popularcall, and preach on Temperance or the Abolition of Slavery, I am sure tofeel, before I have done with it, what an intrusion it is into anothersphere, and so much loss of virtue in my own' (_To Carlyle_, 1844). Buthe missed no occasion of showing that in conviction and aim he was withgood men. The infirmities of fanatics never hid from him either thetranscendent purity of their motives or the grandeur of their cause. This is ever the test of the scholar: whether he allows intellectualfastidiousness to stand between him and the great issues of his time. 'Cannot the English, ' he cried out to Carlyle, 'leave cavilling at pettyfailures and bad manners and at the dunce part, and leap to thesuggestions and finger-pointings of the gods, which, above theunderstanding, feed the hopes and guide the wills of men?' Thesefinger-pointings Emerson did not mistake. He spoke up for Garrison. JohnBrown was several times in Concord, and found a hearty welcome inEmerson's house. When Brown made his raid at Harper's Ferry, and thecrisis became gradually sharper, Emerson felt that the time had come, and his voice was raised in clear tones. After the sword is drawn, it isdeeds not words that interest and decide; but whenever the word of thestudent was needed Emerson was ready to give the highest expression toall that was best in his countrymen's mood during that greatest ordealof our time. The inward regeneration of the individual had ever been thekey to his teaching, and this teaching had been one of the forces that, like central fire in men's minds, nourished the heroism of the North inits immortal battle. 

The exaltation of national character produced by the Civil War openednew and wider acceptance for a great moral and spiritual teacher, andfrom the close of the war until his death in 1882, Emerson's ascendencywithin his own sphere of action was complete, and the public recognitionof him universal. Of story, there is no more to tell. He pursued his oldway of reading, meditating, conversing, and public lecturing, almost tothe end. The afternoon of his life was cloudless as the earlier day, andthe shades of twilight fell in unbroken serenity. In his last yearsthere was a partial failure of his memory, and more than one patheticstory is told of this tranquil and gradual eclipse. But 'to the last, even when the events of yesterday were occasionally obscured, his memoryof the remote past was unclouded; he would tell about the friends of hisearly and middle life with unbroken vigour. ' So, tended in his home bywarm filial devotion, and surrounded by the reverent kindness of hisvillage neighbours, this wise and benign man slowly passed away (April27, 1882). [4]

[Footnote 4: The reader who seeks full information about Emerson's lifewill find it scattered in various volumes: among them are--

_Ralph Waldo Emerson_; by George Willis Cooke (Sampson Low & Co. , 1882)--a very diligent and instructive work. 

_R. W. E. _; by Alexander Ireland (Simpkin, Marshall, & Co. 1882), described by Carlyle, and known by others, as 'full of energy and broadsagacity and practicality; infinitely well affected to the man Emersontoo, '--and full moreover of that intellectual enthusiasm which in hisScotch countrymen goes so often with their practicalities. 

_Emerson, at Home and Abroad_; by Moncure D. Conway (Trübner & Co. , 1883): the work of a faithful disciple, who knew Emerson well, and hashere recorded many interesting anecdotes and traits. ]

II. 

It cannot be truly said that Emerson is one of the writers who maketheir way more easily into our minds by virtue of style. That hiswriting has quality and flavour none but a pure pedant would deny. Hismore fervent votaries, however, provoke us with a challenge that goesfar beyond this. They declare that the finish, charm, and beauty of thewriting are as worthy of remark as the truth and depth of the thought. It is even 'unmatchable and radiant, ' says one. Such exaggerations canhave no reference to any accepted standard. It would in truth, have beena marvel if Emerson had excelled in the virtues of the written page, formost of his published work was originally composed and used for theplatform. Everybody knows how different are the speaker's devices forgaining possession of his audience, from the writer's means of winning, persuading, and impressing the attention of his reader. The key to thedifference may be that in the speech the personality of the oratorbefore our eyes gives of itself that oneness and continuity ofcommunication, which the writer has to seek in the orderly sequence andarray of marshalled sentence and well-sustained period. One of thetraits that every critic notes in Emerson's writing, is that it is soabrupt, so sudden in its transitions, so discontinuous, soinconsecutive. Dislike of a sentence that drags made him unconscious ofthe quality, that French critics name _coulant_. Everything is thrown injust as it comes, and sometimes the pell-mell is enough to persuade usthat Pope did not exaggerate when he said that no one qualification isso likely to make a good writer, as the power of rejecting his ownthoughts. 

His manner as a lecturer, says Dr. Holmes, was an illustration of hisway of thinking. 'He would lose his place just as his mind would dropits thought and pick up another, twentieth cousin or no relation at allto it. ' The same manner, whether we liken it to mosaic or tokaleidoscope, marks his writing. It makes him hard to follow, oracular, and enigmatical. 'Can you tell me, ' asked one of his neighbour, whileEmerson was lecturing, 'what connection there is between that lastsentence and the one that went before, and what connection it all haswith Plato?' 'None, my friend, save in God!' This is excellent in aseer, but less so in the writer. 

Apart from his difficult staccato, Emerson is not free from secondaryfaults. He uses words that are not only odd, but vicious inconstruction; he is not always grammatically correct; he is sometimesoblique, and he is often clumsy; and there is a visible feeling afterepigrams that do not always come. When people say that Emerson's stylemust be good and admirable because it fits his thought, they forget thatthough it is well that a robe should fit, there is still something to besaid about its cut and fashion. 

No doubt, to borrow Carlyle's expression, 'the talent is not the chiefquestion here: the idea--that is the chief question. ' We do not professto be of those to whom mere style is as dear as it was to Plutarch; ofhim it was said that he would have made Pompey win the battle ofPharsalia, if it could have given a better turn to a phrase. It wouldnot be worth while to speak of form in a thinker to whom our debt is solarge for his matter, if there were not so much bad literary imitationof Emerson. Dr. Holmes mournfully admits that 'one who talks likeEmerson or like Carlyle soon finds himself surrounded by a crowd ofwalking phonographs, who mechanically reproduce his mental and oralaccents. Emerson was before long talking in the midst of a babblingSimonetta of echoes. ' Inferior writers have copied the tones of theoracle without first making sure of the inspiration. They forget that aplatitude is not turned into a profundity by being dressed up as aconundrum. Pithiness in him dwindles into tenuity in them; honestdiscontinuity in the master is made an excuse for finical incoherenciesin the disciples; the quaint, ingenious, and unexpected collocations ofthe original degenerate in the imitators into a trick of unmeaningsurprise and vapid antithesis; and his pregnant sententiousness set thefashion of a sententiousness that is not fertility but only hydropsy. This curious infection, which has spread into divers forms of Americanliterature that are far removed from philosophy, would have beenimpossible if the teacher had been as perfect in expression as he waspure, diligent, and harmonious in his thinking. 

Yet, as happens to all fine minds, there came to Emerson ways ofexpression deeply marked with character. On every page there is set thestrong stamp of sincerity, and the attraction of a certain artlessness;the most awkward sentence rings true; and there is often a pure andsimple note that touches us more than if it were the perfection ofelaborated melody. The uncouth procession of the periods discloses thetravail of the thought, and that too is a kind of eloquence. An honestreader easily forgives the rude jolt or unexpected start, when it showsa thinker faithfully working his way along arduous and unworn tracks. Even at the roughest, Emerson often interjects a delightful cadence. Ashe says of Landor, his sentences are cubes which will stand firm, placethem how or where you will. He criticised Swedenborg for beingsuperfluously explanatory, and having an exaggerated feeling of theignorance of men. 'Men take truths of this nature, ' said Emerson, 'veryfast;' and his own style does no doubt very boldly take this capacityfor granted in us. In 'choice and pith of diction, ' again, of which Mr. Lowell speaks, he hits the mark with a felicity that is almost his ownin this generation. He is terse, concentrated, and free from theimportant blunder of mistaking intellectual dawdling for meditation. Norin fine does his abruptness ever impede a true urbanity. The accent ishomely and the apparel plain, but his bearing has a friendliness, acourtesy, a hospitable humanity, which goes nearer to our hearts thaneither literary decoration or rhetorical unction. That modest andlenient fellow-feeling which gave such charm to his companionshipbreathes in his gravest writing, and prevents us from finding any pageof it cold or hard or dry. 

Though Emerson was always urgent for 'the soul of the world, clean fromall vestige of tradition, ' yet his work is full of literature. He atleast lends no support to the comforting fallacy of the indolent, thatoriginating power does not go with assimilating power. Few thinkers onhis level display such breadth of literary reference. Unlike Wordsworth, who was content with a few tattered volumes on a kitchen shelf, Emersonworked among books. When he was a boy he found a volume of Montaigne, and he never forgot the delight and wonder in which he lived with it. His library is described as filled with well-selected authors, withcurious works from the eastern world, with many editions in both Greekand English of his favourite Plato; while portraits of Shakespeare, Montaigne, Goethe, Dante, looked down upon him from the walls. Produce avolume of Plato or of Shakespeare, he says somewhere, or '_only remindus of their names_, ' and instantly we come into a feeling of longevity. That is the scholar's speech. Opening a single essay at random, we findin it citations from Montesquieu, Schiller, Milton, Herodotus, Shelley, Plutarch, Franklin, Bacon, Van Helmont, Goethe. So little does Emersonlend himself to the idle vanity of seeking all the treasures of wisdomin his own head, or neglecting the hoarded authority of the ages. It istrue that he held the unholy opinion that a translation is as good asthe original, or better. Nor need we suppose that he knew that pioussensation of the book-lover, the feel of a library; that he had any ofthe collector's amiable foolishness about rare editions; or that henourished festive thoughts of 'that company of honest old fellows intheir leathern jackets in his study, ' as comrades in a sober old-worldconviviality. His books were for spiritual use, like maps and charts ofthe mind of man, and not much for 'excellence of divertisement. ' He hadthe gift of bringing his reading to bear easily upon the tenor of hismusings, and knew how to use books as an aid to thinking, instead ofletting them take the edge off thought. There was assuredly nothing ofthe compiler or the erudite collegian in him. It is a graver defect thathe introduces the great names of literature without regard for truehistorical perspective in their place, either in relation to oneanother, or to the special phases of social change and shifting time. Still let his admirers not forget that Emerson was in his own wayScholar no less than Sage. 

A word or two must be said of Emerson's verses. He disclaimed, for hisown part, any belief that they were poems. Enthusiasts, however, havebeen found to declare that Emerson 'moves more constantly than anyrecent poet in the atmosphere of poesy. Since Milton and Spenser noman--not even Goethe--has equalled Emerson in this trait. ' _TheProblem_, according to another, 'is wholly unique, and transcends allcontemporary verse in grandeur of style. ' Such poetry, they say, is likeWestminster Abbey, 'though the Abbey is inferior in boldness. ' Yet, strangely enough, while Emerson's poetic form is symbolised by theflowing lines of Gothic architecture, it is also 'akin to Doricseverity. ' With all the good will in the world, I do not find myselfable to rise to these heights; in fact, they rather seem to deserveWordsworth's description, as mere obliquities of admiration. 

Taken as a whole, Emerson's poetry is of that kind which springs, notfrom excitement of passion or feeling, but from an intellectual demandfor intense and sublimated expression. We see the step that lifts himstraight from prose to verse, and that step is the shortest possible. The flight is awkward and even uncouth, as if nature had intended feetrather than wings. It is hard to feel of Emerson, any more thanWordsworth could feel of Goethe, that his poetry is inevitable. Themeasure, the colour, the imaginative figures, are the product of search, not of spontaneous movements of sensation and reflection combining in aharmony that is delightful to the ear. They are the outcome of adiscontent with prose, not of that high-strung sensibility which compelsthe true poet into verse. This must not be said without exception. _TheThrenody_, written after the death of a deeply loved child, is abeautiful and impressive lament. Pieces like _Musquetaquid_, the_Adirondacs_, the _Snowstorm_, _The Humble-Bee_, are pretty and pleasantbits of pastoral. In all we feel the pure breath of nature, and

 The primal mind, That flows in streams, that breathes in wind. 

There is a certain charm of _naiveté_, that recalls the unvarnishedsimplicity of the Italian painters before Raphael. But who shall saythat he discovers that 'spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling, ' whicha great poet has made the fundamental element of poetry? There are toofew melodious progressions; the melting of the thought with naturalimages and with human feeling is incomplete; we miss the charm ofperfect assimilation, fusion, and incorporation; and in the midst of allthe vigour and courage of his work, Emerson has almost forgotten that itis part of the poet's business to give pleasure. It is true thatpleasure is sometimes undoubtedly to be had from verse that is not abovemediocrity, and Wordsworth once designed to write an essay examining whybad poetry pleases. Poetry that pleases may be bad, but it is equallytrue that no poetry which fails to please can be really good. Some onesays that gems of expression make Emerson's essays oracular and hisverse prophetic. But, to borrow Horace's well-known phrase, 'tis notenough that poems should be sublime; _dulcia sunto_, --they must betouching and sympathetic. Only a bold critic will say that this is amark of Emerson's poems. They are too naked, unrelated, and cosmic; toolittle clad with the vesture of human associations. Light and shade donot alternate in winning and rich relief, and as Carlyle found it, theradiance is 'thin piercing, ' leaving none of the sweet and dim recessesso dear to the lover of nature. We may, however, well be content toleave a man of Emerson's calibre to choose his own exercises. It is bestto suppose that he knew what he was about when he wandered into thefairyland of verse, and that in such moments he found nothing better tohis hand. Yet if we are bidden to place him among the poets, it isenough to open Keats at the _Ode to a Nightingale_, or Shelley at _TheCloud_, the _Skylark_, or the _Sensitive Plant_, or Wordsworth at_Tintern Abbey_, or Goethe at _Das Göttliche_, or Victor Hugo in the_Contemplations_. Then in spite of occasional formality of rhythm andartifice in ornament, we cannot choose but perceive how tuneful is theirmusic, how opulent the resources of their imagination, how various, subtle, and penetrating their affinity for the fortunes and sympathiesof men, and next how modest a portion of all these rare and exquisitequalifications reveals itself in the verse of Emerson. 

III. 

Few minds of the first order that have busied themselves incontemplating the march of human fortunes, have marched forward in astraight line of philosophic speculation unbroken to the end. LikeBurke, like Coleridge, like Wordsworth, at a given point they have areturn upon themselves. Having mastered the truths of one side, theireyes open to what is true on the other; the work of revolution finishedor begun, they experience fatigue and reaction. In Hawthorne's romance, after Miles Coverdale had passed his spring and summer among theUtopians of Blithedale, he felt that the time had come when he must forsheer sanity's sake go and hold a little talk with the Conservatives, the merchants, the politicians, 'and all those respectable oldblockheads, who still in this intangibility and mistiness of affairskept a death-grip on one or two ideas which had not come into voguesince yesterday morning. ' 'No sagacious man, ' says Hawthorne, 'will longretain his sagacity if he lives exclusively among reformers andprogressive people, without periodically returning into the settledsystem of things, to correct himself by a new observation from that oldstand-point. ' Yet good men rightly hoped that 'out of the very thoughtsthat were wildest and most destructive might grow a wisdom, holy, calm, and pure, and that should incarnate itself with the substance of a nobleand happy life. ' Now that we are able to look back on the crisis of thetimes that Hawthorne describes, we perceive that it was as he expected, and that in the person of Emerson the ferment and dissolvency of thoughtworked itself out in a strain of wisdom of the highest and purest. 

In 1842 Emerson told Carlyle, in vindication of the _Dial_ and itstranscendentalisms, that if the direction of their speculations was asdeplorable as Carlyle declared, it was yet a remarkable fact for historythat all the bright young men and young women in New England, 'quiteignorant of each other, take the world so, and come and make confessionto fathers and mothers--the boys, that they do not wish to go intotrade; the girls, that they do not like morning calls and eveningparties. They are all religious, but hate the churches; they reject allthe ways of living of other men, but have none to offer in their stead. '

It is worth while to transcribe from the _Dial_ itself the scene at oneof the many Bostonian Conventions of that date--the Friends of UniversalProgress, in 1840:--'The composition of the Assembly was rich andvarious. The singularity and latitude of the summons drew together, fromall parts of New England, and also from the Middle States, men of everyshade of opinion, from the straightest orthodoxy to the wildest heresy, and many persons whose church was a church of one member only. A greatvariety of dialect and of costume was noticed; a great deal ofconfusion, eccentricity, and freak appeared, as well as of zeal andenthusiasm. If the Assembly was disorderly, it was picturesque. Madmen, madwomen, men with beards, Dunkers, Muggletonians, Come-outers, Groaners, Agrarians, Seventh-day Baptists, Quakers, Abolitionists, Calvinists, Unitarians, and philosophers, all came successively to thetop, and seized their moment, if not their _hour_, wherein to chide orpray or preach or protest. The faces were a study. The most daringinnovators, and the champions-until-death of the old cause, sat side byside. The still living merit of the oldest New England families, glowingyet after several generations, encountered the founders of families, fresh merit emerging and expanding the brows to a new breadth, andlighting a clownish face with sacred fire. The Assembly wascharacterised by the predominance of a certain plain sylvan strength andearnestness' (_Dial_, iii. 101). 

If the shade of Bossuet could have looked down upon the scene, he wouldhave found fresh material for the sarcasms which a hundred and fiftyyears before he had lavished on the Variations of the ProtestantChurches. Yet this curious movement, bleak and squalid as it may seem tomen nurtured in the venerable decorum of ecclesiastical tradition, wasat bottom identical with the yearning for stronger spiritual emotions, and the cravings of religious zeal, that had in older times filledmonasteries, manned the great orders, and sent wave upon wave ofpilgrims and crusaders to holy places. 'It is really amazing, ' as wassaid by Franklin or somebody else of his fashion of utilitarianism, 'that one of the passions which it is hardest to develop in man is thepassion for his own material comfort and temporal well-being. '

Emerson has put on record this mental intoxication of the progressivepeople around him, with a pungency that might satisfy the Philistinesthemselves. [5] From 1820 to 1844, he said, New England witnessed ageneral criticism and attack on institutions, and in all practicalactivities a gradual withdrawal of tender consciences from the socialorganisations. Calvinists and Quakers began to split into old school andnew school. Goethe and the Germans became known. Swedenborg, in spite ofhis taint of craziness, by the mere prodigy of his speculations, began'to spread himself into the minds of thousands'--including in nounimportant degree the mind of Emerson himself. [6] Literary criticismcounted for something in the universal thaw, and even the genialhumanity of Dickens helped to break up the indurations of old theology. Most powerful of all was the indirect influence of science. Geologydisclosed law in an unsuspected region, and astronomy caused men toapprehend that 'as the earth is not the centre of the Universe, so it isnot the special scene or stage on which the drama of divine justice isplayed before the assembled angels of heaven. '

[Footnote 5: _New England Reformers: Essays_, ii. 511-519. ]

[Footnote 6: The Swedenborgians--'a sect which, I think, must contributemore than all other sects to the new faith, which must come out ofall. '--_To Carlyle_, 1834. ]

A temper of scrutiny and dissent broke out in every direction. Inalmost every relation men and women asked themselves by what rightConformity levied its tax, and whether they were not false to their ownconsciences in paying it. 'What a fertility of projects for thesalvation of the world! One apostle thought that all men should go tofarming; and another thought that no man should buy or sell--that use ofmoney was the cardinal evil; another thought the mischief was in ourdiet--that we eat and drink damnation. These made unleavened bread, andwere foes to the death to fermentation. Others attacked the system ofagriculture, the use of animal manures in farming, and the tyranny ofman over brute instinct. These abuses polluted his food. The ox must betaken from the plough, and the horse from the cart; the hundred acres ofthe farm must be spaded, and the man must walk wherever boats andlocomotives will not carry him. . . . Others assailed particularvocations. . . . Others attacked the institution of marriage as thefountain of social evils. . . . Who gave me the money with which I boughtmy coat? Why should professional labour and that of the counting-housebe paid so disproportionately to the labour of the porter and thewoodsawer? Am I not too protected a person? Is there not a widedisparity between the lot of me and the lot of thee, my poor brother, mypoor sister?'

One of Emerson's glories is, that while wise enough to discern the periland folly of these excesses, he was under no temptation to fall back. Itwas giddy work, but he kept his eye on the fixed stars. CertainlyEmerson was not assailed by the stress of mighty and violent events, asBurke and Wordsworth were in some sense turned into reactionaries by thecalamities of revolution in France. The 'distemper of enthusiasm, ' asShaftesbury would have called it, took a mild and harmless form in NewEngland: there the work in hand was not the break-up of a social system, but only the mental evolution of new ideals, the struggle of an ethicalrevival, and the satisfaction of a livelier spirit of scruple. In faceof all delirations, Emerson kept on his way of radiant sanity andperfect poise. Do not, he warned his enthusiasts, expend all energy onsome accidental evil, and so lose sanity and power of benefit. '_It isof little moment that one or two or twenty errors of our social systembe corrected, but of much that the man be in his senses. _ Society gainsnothing whilst a man, not himself renovated, attempts to renovate thingsaround him; he has become tediously good in some particular, butnegligent or narrow in the rest, and hypocrisy and vanity are often thedisgusting result. It is handsomer to remain in the establishment, better than the establishment, and conduct that in the best manner, thanto make a sally against evil by some single improvement, withoutsupporting it by a total regeneration. '

Emerson, then, is one of the few moral reformers whose mission lay incalming men rather than in rousing them, and in the inculcation ofserenity rather than in the spread of excitement. Though he had beenardent in protest against the life conventional, as soon as the protestran off into extravagance, instead of either following or withstandingit with rueful petulancies, he delicately and successfully turned apassing agitation into an enduring revival. The last password given bythe dying Antonine to the officer of the watch was _Æquanimitas_. In abrighter, wider, and more living sense than was possible even to thenoblest in the middle of the second century, this, too, was thewatchword of the Emersonian teaching. Instead of cultivating thetormenting and enfeebling spirit of scruple, instead of multiplyingprecepts, he bade men not to crush their souls out under the burden ofDuty; they are to remember that a wise life is not wholly filled up bycommandments to do and to abstain from doing. Hence, we have in Emersonthe teaching of a vigorous morality without the formality of dogma andthe deadly tedium of didactics. If not laughter, of which onlyShakespeare among the immortals has a copious and unfailing spring, there is at least gaiety in every piece, and a cordial injunction to mento find joy in their existence to the full. Happiness is with him an aimthat we are at liberty to seek directly and without periphrasis. Provided men do not lose their balance by immersing themselves in theirpleasures, they are right, according to Emerson, in pursuing them. Butjoy is no neighbour to artificial ecstasy. What Emerson counsels thepoet, he intended in its own way and degree for all men. The poet'shabit of living, he says beautifully, should be set on a key so lowthat the commonest influences should delight him. 'That spirit whichsuffices quiet hearts, which seems to come forth to such from every dryknoll of sere grass, from every pine-stump and half-embedded stone onwhich the dull March sun shines, comes forth to the poor and hungry, andsuch as are of simple taste. If thou fill thy brain with Boston and NewYork, with fashion and covetousness, and wilt stimulate thy jaded senseswith wine and French coffee, thou shalt find no radiance of wisdom inthe lonely waste of the pinewoods' (ii. 328). 

It was perhaps the same necessity of having to guide men away from thedanger of transcendental aberrations, while yet holding up lofty idealsof conduct, that made Emerson say something about many traits of conductto which the ordinary high-flying moralist of the treatise or the pulpitseldom deigns to stoop. The essays on Domestic Life, on Behaviour, onManners, are examples of the attention that Emerson paid to the righthandling of the outer conditions of a wise and brave life. With himsmall circumstances are the occasions of great qualities. The parlourand the counting-house are as fit scenes for fortitude, self-control, considerateness, and vision, as the senate or the battlefield. Here-classifies the virtues. No modern, for example, has given soremarkable a place to Friendship among the sacred necessities ofwell-endowed character. Neither Plato nor Cicero, least of all Bacon, has risen to so noble and profound a conception of this most strangelycommingled of all human affections. There is no modern thinker, again, who makes Beauty--all that is gracious, seemly, and becoming--soconspicuous and essential a part of life. It would be inexact to saythat Emerson blended the beautiful with the precepts of duty or ofprudence into one complex sentiment, as the Greeks did, but his theoryof excellence might be better described than any other of modern timesby the [Greek: kalokagathia], the virtue of the true gentleman, as setdown in Plato and Aristotle. 

So untrue is it that in his quality of Sage Emerson always haunted theperilous altitudes of Transcendentalism, 'seeing nothing under him butthe everlasting snows of Himalaya, the Earth shrinking to a Planet, andthe indigo Firmament sowing itself with daylight stars. ' He never thinksit beneath his dignity to touch a point of minor morals, or to say agood word for what he somewhere calls subterranean prudence. Emersonvalues mundane circumspection as highly as Franklin, and gives tomanners and rules of daily behaviour an importance that might havesatisfied Chesterfield. In fact, the worldly and the selfish aremistaken when they assume that Common Sense is their special andexclusive portion. The small Transcendentalist goes in search of truthwith the meshes of his net so large that he takes no fish. Hislandscapes are all horizon. It is only the great idealists, likeEmerson, who take care not to miss the real. 

The remedy for the break-down of the old churches would, in the mind ofthe egotist, have been to found a new one. But Emerson knew well beforeCarlyle told him, that 'no truly great man, from Jesus Christ downwards, ever founded a sect--I mean wilfully intended founding one. ' Not onlydid he establish no sect, but he preached a doctrine that was positivelyincompatible with the erection of any sect upon its base. His whole hopefor the world lies in the internal and independent resources of theindividual. If mankind is to be raised to a higher plane of happinessand worth, it can only be by the resolution of each to live his own lifewith fidelity and courage. The spectacle of one liberated from themalign obstructions to free human character, is a stronger incentive toothers than exhortation, admonition, or any sum of philanthropicalassociation. If I, in my own person and daily walk, quietly resistheaviness of custom, coldness of hope, timidity of faith, then withoutwishing, contriving, or even knowing it, I am a light silently drawingas many as have vision and are fit to walk in the same path. Whether Ido that or not, I am at least obeying the highest law of my own being. 

In the appeal to the individual to be true to himself, Emerson does notstand apart from other great moral reformers. His distinction lies inthe peculiar direction that he gives to his appeal. All thoseregenerators of the individual, from Rousseau down to J. S. Mill, whoderived their first principles, whether directly or indirectly, fromLocke and the philosophy of sensation, experience, and acquisition, began operations with the will. They laid all their stress on theshaping of motives by education, institutions, and action, and placedvirtue in deliberateness and in exercise. Emerson, on the contrary, coming from the intuitional camp, holds that our moral nature isvitiated by any interference of our will. Translated into the languageof theology, his doctrine makes regeneration to be a result of grace, and the guide of conscience to be the indwelling light; though, unlikethe theologians, he does not trace either of these mysterious gifts tothe special choice and intervention of a personal Deity. Impulsive andspontaneous innocence is higher than the strength to conquer temptation. The natural motions of the soul are so much better than the voluntaryones. 'There is no such thing as manufacturing a strong will, ' for allgreat force is real and elemental. In all this Emerson suffers from thelimitations that are inseparable from pure spiritualism in all itsforms. As if the spiritual constitution were ever independent of thematerial organisation bestowed upon the individual at the moment when heis conceived, or of the social conditions that close about him from theinstant of his birth. The reaction, however, against what wassuperficial in the school of the eighteenth century went to its extremelength in Emerson, and blinded his eyes to the wisdom, the profundity, and the fruitfulness of their leading speculations. It is enough for usto note the fact in passing, without plunging into contention on themerits. All thoughts are always ready, potentially if not actually. Eachage selects and assimilates the philosophy that is most apt for itswants. Institutions needed regeneration in France, and so those thinkerscame into vogue and power who laid most stress on the efficacy of goodinstitutions. In Emerson's America, the fortunes of the country madeexternal circumstances safe for a man, and his chance was assured; so aphilosophy was welcomed which turned the individual inwards uponhimself, and taught him to consider his own character and spiritualfaculty as something higher than anything external could ever be. 

Again to make a use which is not uninstructive of the old tongue, Emerson is for faith before works. Nature, he says, will not have usfret and fume. She does not like our benevolences, our churches, ourpauper-societies, much better than she likes our frauds and wars. Theyare but so many yokes to the neck. Our painful labours are unnecessaryand fruitless. A higher law than that of our will regulates events. Ifwe look wider, things are all alike: laws and creeds and modes of livingare a travesty of truth. Only in our easy, simple, spontaneous actionare we strong, and by contenting ourselves with obedience we becomestrong. Our real action is in our silent moments. Why should we be awedby the name of Action? 'Tis a trick of the senses. [7]

[Footnote 7: _Essays_: Spiritual Laws, etc. ]

Justification by faith has had a savour of antinomianism andindifferency ever since the day when Saint Paul so emphatically deniedthat he made void the law through faith, and said of certaincalumniators that their damnation was just. Emerson was open to the samecharge, and he knew it. In a passage already quoted, Emerson saysgood-humouredly that his wife keeps his philosophy from running toantinomianism He could not mistake the tendency of saying that, if youlook wider, things are all alike, and that we are in the grasp of ahigher law than our own will. On that side he only paints over inrainbow colours the grim doctrine which the High Calvinist and theMaterialistic Necessarian hold in common. 

All great minds perceive all things; the only difference lies in theorder in which they shall choose to place them. Emerson, for good reasonof his own, dwelt most on fate, character, and the unconscious andhidden sources, but he writes many a page of vigorous corrective. It iswholesome, he says, to man to look not at Fate, but the other way; thepractical view is the other. As Mill says of his wish to disbelieve thedoctrine of the formation of character by circumstances--'Rememberingthe wish of Fox respecting the doctrine of resistance to governments, that it might never be forgotten by Kings nor remembered by subjects, Isaid that it would be a blessing if the doctrine of necessity could bebelieved by all _quoad_ the characters of others, and disbelieved inregard to their own. ' So Emerson knew well enough that man'sconsciousness of freedom, action, and power over outer circumstancesmight be left to take care of itself, as the practical view generallycan. The world did not need him to tell it that a man's fortunes are apart of his character. His task was the more far-reaching one of drawingthem to recognise that love is the important thing, not benevolentworks; that only impure men consider life as it is reflected in events, opinions, and persons; that they fail to see the action until it isdone, whereas what is far better worth considering is that its moralelement præ-existed in the actor. 

It would be easy to show that Emerson has not worked out his answers tothese eternal enigmas, for ever reproducing themselves in all ages, insuch a form as to defy the logician's challenge. He never shrinks frominconsistent propositions. He was unsystematic on principle. 'He thoughtthat truth has so many facets that the best we can do is to notice eachin turn, without troubling ourselves whether they agree. ' When weremember the inadequateness of human language, the infirmities of ourvision, and all the imperfections of mental apparatus, the wise men willnot disdain even partial glimpses of a scene too vast and intricate tobe comprehended in a single map. To complain that Emerson is nosystematic reasoner is to miss the secret of most of those who havegiven powerful impulses to the spiritual ethics of an age. It is not asyllogism that turns the heart towards purification of life and aim; itis not the logically enchained propositions of a _sorites_, but theflash of illumination, the indefinable accent, that attracts masses ofmen to a new teacher and a high doctrine. The teasing _ergoteur_ isalways right, but he never leads nor improves nor inspires. 

Any one can see how this side of the Emersonian gospel harmonised withthe prepossessions of a new democracy. Trust, he said, to leadinginstincts, not to traditional institutions, nor social ordering, nor theformulæ of books and schools for the formation of character; the greatforce is real and elemental. In art, Mr. Ruskin has explained thepalpable truth that semi-civilised nations can colour better than we do, and that an Indian shawl and China vase are inimitable by us. 'It istheir glorious ignorance of all rules that does it; the pure and trueinstincts have play, and do their work; and the moment we begin teachingpeople any rules about colour, and make them do this or that, we crushthe instinct, generally for ever' (_Modern Painters_, iii. 91). Emersonsaid what comes to the same thing about morals. The philosophy ofdemocracy, or the government of a great mixed community by itself, restson a similar assumption in politics. The foundations of a self-governedsociety on a great scale are laid in leading instincts. Emerson wasnever tired of saying that we are wiser than we know. The path ofscience and of letters is not the way to nature. What was done in aremote age by men whose names have resounded far, has no deeper sensethan what you and I do to-day. What food, or experience, or succour haveOlympiads and Consulates for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, for the Kanákain his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter? When he isin this vein Emerson often approaches curiously near to Rousseau'smemorable and most potent paradox of 1750, that the sciences corruptmanners. [8]

[Footnote 8: What so good, asks Rousseau, 'as a sweet and preciousignorance, the treasure of a pure soul at peace with itself, whichfinds all its blessedness in inward retreat, in testifying to itselfits own innocence, and which feels no need of seeking a warped andhollow happiness in the opinion of other people as to itsenlightenment?']

Most men will now agree that when the great fiery trial came, theEmersonian faith and the democratic assumption abundantly justifiedthemselves. Even Carlyle wrote to Emerson at last (June 4, 1871): 'In myoccasional explosions against Anarchy, and my inextinguishable hatred of_it_, I privately whisper to myself, "Could any Friedrich Wilhelm now, or Friedrich, or most perfect Governor you could hope to realise, guideforward what is America's essential task at present, faster or morecompletely than 'Anarchic America' is now doing?" Such "Anarchy" has agreat deal to say for itself. '

The traits of comparison between Carlyle and Emerson may be regarded ashaving been pretty nearly exhausted for the present, until time haschanged the point of view. In wit, humour, pathos, penetration, poeticgrandeur, and fervid sublimity of imagination, Carlyle is the superiorbeyond measure. But Emerson is as much his superior in that high andtransparent sanity, which is not further removed from midsummer madnessthan it is from a terrene and grovelling mediocrity. This sanity, amongother things, kept Emerson in line with the ruling tendencies of hisage, and his teaching brings all the aid that abstract teaching can, towards the solution of the moral problems of modern societies. Carlylechose to fling himself headlong and blindfold athwart the great currentsof things, against all the forces and elements that are pushing modernsocieties forward. Beginning in his earlier work with the same faith asEmerson in leading instincts, he came to dream that the only leadinginstinct worth thinking about is that of self-will, mastery, force, andviolent strength. Emerson was for basing the health of a moderncommonwealth on the only real strength, and the only kind of force thatcan be relied upon, namely, the honest, manly, simple, and emancipatedcharacter of the citizen. This gives to his doctrine a hold and a prizeon the work of the day, and makes him our helper. Carlyle's perversereaction had wrecked and stranded him when the world came to ask him fordirection. In spite of his resplendent genius, he had no direction togive, and was only able in vague and turbid torrents of words to hide ashallow and obsolete lesson. His confession to Emerson, quoted above, looks as if at last he had found this out for himself. 

If Emerson stood thus well towards the social and political drift ofevents, his teaching was no less harmoniously related to the new andmost memorable drift of science which set in by his side. It is amisconception to pretend that he was a precursor of the Darwiniantheory. Evolution, as a possible explanation of the ordering of theuniverse, is a great deal older than either Emerson or Darwin. WhatDarwin did was to work out in detail and with masses of minute evidencea definite hypothesis of the specific conditions under which new formsare evolved. Emerson, of course, had no definite hypothesis of thissort, nor did he possess any of the knowledge necessary to give itvalue. But it was his good fortune that some of his strongestpropositions harmonise with the scientific theory of the survival of thefittest in the struggle for material existence. He connects hisexhortation to self-reliance with the law working in nature forconservation and growth, --to wit, that 'Power is in nature the essentialmeasure of right, ' and that 'Nature suffers nothing to remain in herkingdom which cannot help itself. ' The same strain is constantlyaudible. Nature on every side, within us and without, is for everthrowing out new forms and fresh varieties of living and thinking. Toher experiments in every region there is no end. Those succeed whichprove to have the best adaptation to the conditions. Let, therefore, neither society nor the individual check experiment, originality, andinfinite variation. Such language, we may see, fits in equally well withdemocracy in politics and with evolution in science. If, moreover, modern science gives more prominence to one conception than another, itis to that of the natural universe of force and energy, as One and aWhole. This too is the great central idea with Emerson, repeated athousand times in prose and in verse, and lying at the very heart of hisphilosophy. Newton's saying that 'the world was made at one cast'delights him. 'The secret of the world is that its energies are_solidaires_. ' Nature 'publishes itself in creatures, reaching fromparticles and spicula, through transformation on transformation to thehighest symmetries. A little heat, that is, a little motion, is all thatdifferences the bald dazzling white and deadly cold poles of the earthfrom the prolific tropical climates. ' Not only, as Professor Tyndallsays, is Emerson's religious sense entirely undaunted by the discoveriesof science; all such discoveries he comprehends and assimilates. 'ByEmerson scientific conceptions are continually transmuted into the finerforms and warmer lines of an ideal world. '

That these transmutations are often carried by Emerson to the extent ofvain and empty self-mystifications is hard to deny, even for those whohave most sympathy with the general scope of his teaching. There arepages that to the present writer, at least, after reasonably diligentmeditation, remain mere abracadabra, incomprehensible and worthless. For much of this in Emerson, the influence of Plato is mainlyresponsible, and it may be noted in passing that his account of Plato(_Representative Men_) is one of his most unsatisfactory performances. 'The title of Platonist, ' says Mill, 'belongs by far better right tothose who have been nourished in, and have endeavoured to practisePlato's mode of investigation, than to those who are distinguished onlyby the adoption of certain dogmatical conclusions, drawn mostly from theleast intelligible of his works. ' Nothing is gained by concealing thatnot every part of Emerson's work will stand the test of the Elenchus, nor bear reduction into honest and intelligible English. 

One remarkable result of Emerson's idealism ought not to be passed over. 'The visible becomes the Bestial, ' said Carlyle, 'when it rests not onthe invisible. ' To Emerson all rested on the invisible, and was summedup in terms of the invisible, and hence the Bestial was almost unknownin his philosophic scheme. Nay, we may say that some mighty phenomena inour universe were kept studiously absent from his mind. Here is one ofthe profoundest differences between Emerson and most of those who, on ashigh an altitude, have pondered the same great themes. A small traitwill serve for illustration. It was well known in his household that hecould not bear to hear of ailments. 'There is one topic, ' he writes, 'peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational mortals, namely, their distempers. If you have not slept, or if you have slept, or if you have headache, sciatica, or leprosy, or thunder-stroke, Ibeseech you by all angels to hold your peace, and not pollute themorning, to which all the housemates bring serene and pleasant thoughts, by corruption and groans. Come out of the azure. Love theday'--(_Conduct of Life_, 159). 

If he could not endure these minor perturbations of the fair and smilingface of daily life, far less did he willingly think of Death. Of nothingin all the wide range of universal topics does Emerson say so little asof that which has lain in sombre mystery at the very core of mostmeditations on life, from Job and Solon down to Bacon and Montaigne. Except in two beautiful poems, already mentioned, Death is almostbanished from his page. It is not the title or the subject of one of hisessays, only secondarily even of that on Immortality. Love, Friendship, Prudence, Heroism, Experience, Manners, Nature, Greatness, and a scoreof other matters--but none to show that he ever sat down to gather intoseparate and concentrated shape his reflections on the terrifyingphantom that has haunted the mind of man from the very birth of time. 

Pascal bade us imagine a number of men in chains and doomed to death;some of them each day butchered in sight of the others; those whoremained watching their own lot in that of their fellows, and awaitingtheir turn in anguish and helplessness. Such, he cried, is the pitifuland desperate condition of man. But nature has other cruelties morestinging than death. Mill, himself an optimist, yet declares the courseof natural phenomena to be replete with everything which, when committedby human beings is most worthy of abhorrence, so that 'one whoendeavoured in his actions to imitate the natural course of things wouldbe universally seen and acknowledged to be the wickedest of men. ' To manhimself, moreover, 'the most criminal actions are not more unnaturalthan most of the virtues. ' We need not multiply from poets and divines, from moralists and sages, these grim pictures. The sombre melancholy, the savage moral indignation, the passionate intellectual scorn, withwhich life and the universe have filled strong souls, some with oneemotion and some with another, were all to Emerson in his habitualthinking unintelligible and remote. He admits, indeed, that 'the diseaseand deformity around us certify that infraction of natural, intellectual, and moral laws, and often violation on violation to breedsuch compound misery. ' The way of Providence, he says in another place, is a little rude, through earthquakes, fever, the sword of climate, anda thousand other hints of ferocity in the interiors of nature. Providence has a wild rough incalculable road to its end, and 'it is ofno use to try to white-wash its huge mixed instrumentalities, or todress up that terrific benefactor in a clean shirt and white neckclothof a student of divinity. ' But he only drew from the thought of thesecruelties of the universe the practical moral that 'our culture mustnot omit the arming of the man. ' He is born into the state of war, andwill therefore do well to acquire a military attitude of soul. There isperhaps no better moral than this of the Stoic, but greaterimpressiveness might have marked the lesson, if our teacher had beenmore indulgent to the man's sense of tragedy in that vast drama in whichhe plays his piteous part. 

In like manner, Emerson has little to say of that horrid burden andimpediment on the soul, which the churches call Sin, and which, bywhatever name we call it, is a very real catastrophe in the moral natureof man. He had no eye, like Dante's, for the vileness, the cruelty, theutter despicableness to which humanity may be moulded. If he saw them atall, it was through the softening and illusive medium of generalisedphrases. Nor was he ever shocked and driven into himself by 'the immoralthoughtlessness' of men. The courses of nature, and the prodigiousinjustices of man in society, affect him with neither horror nor awe. Hewill see no monster if he can help it. For the fatal Nemesis or terribleErinnyes, daughters of Erebus and Night, Emerson substitutes afair-weather abstraction named Compensation. One radical tragedy innature he admits--'the distinction of More and Less. ' If I am poor infaculty, dim in vision, shut out from opportunity, in every sense anoutcast from the inheritance of the earth, that seems indeed to be atragedy. 'But see the facts clearly and these mountainous inequalitiesvanish. Love reduces them, as the sun melts the iceberg in the sea. Theheart and soul of all men being one, this bitterness of His and Mineceases. His is mine. ' Surely words, words, words! What can be more idle, when one of the world's bitter puzzles is pressed on the teacher, thanthat he should betake himself to an altitude whence it is not visible, and then assure us that it is not only invisible, but non-existent? Thisis not to see the facts clearly, but to pour the fumes of obscurationround them. When he comforts us by saying 'Love, and you shall beloved, ' who does not recall cases which make the Jean Valjean of VictorHugo's noble romance not a figment of the theatre, but an all too actualtype? The believer who looks to another world to redress the wrongs andhorrors of this; the sage who warns us that the law of life isresignation, renunciation, and doing-without (_entbehren sollstdu_)--each of these has a foothold in common language. But to say thatall infractions of love and equity are speedily punished--punished byfear--and then to talk of the perfect compensation of the universe, ismere playing with words, for it does not solve the problem in the termsin which men propound it. Emerson, as we have said, held the spirit ofSystem in aversion as fettering the liberal play of thought, just as inmorals, with greater boldness, he rebelled against a minute and crampinginterpretation of Duty. We are not sure that his own optimistic doctrinedid not play him the same tyrannical trick, by sealing his eyes to atleast one half of the actualities of nature and the gruesomepossibilities of things. It had no unimportant effect on Emerson'sthought that he was born in a new world that had cut itself loose fromold history. The black and devious ways through which the race hasmarched are not real in North America, as they are to us in old Europe, who live on the very site of secular iniquities, are surrounded bymonuments of historic crime, and find present and future entangled, embittered, inextricably loaded both in blood and in institutions withdesperate inheritances from the past. 

There are many topics, and those no mean topics, on which the bestauthority is not the moralist by profession, as Emerson was, but the manof the world. The world hardens, narrows, desiccates common natures, butnothing so enriches generous ones. For knowledge of the heart of man, wemust go to those who were closer to the passions and interests of actualand varied life than Emerson ever could have been--to Horace, Montaigne, La Bruyère, Swift, Molière, even to Pope. If a hostile critic were tosay that Emerson looked at life too much from the outside, as theclergyman is apt to do, we should condemn such a remark as adisparagement, but we should understand what it is in Emerson that thecritic means. He has not the temperament of the great humorists, underwhatever planet they may have been born, jovial, mercurial, orsaturnine. Even his revolt against formalism is only a new fashion ofcomposure, and sometimes comes dangerously near to moral dilettantism. The persistent identification of everything in nature with everythingelse sometimes bewilders, fatigues, and almost afflicts us. Though hewarns us that our civilisation is not near its meridian, but as yet onlyin the cock-crowing and the morning star, still all ages are much alikewith him: man is always man, 'society never advances, ' and he doesalmost as little as Carlyle himself to fire men with faith in socialprogress as the crown of wise endeavour. But when all these deductionshave been made and amply allowed for, Emerson remains among the mostpersuasive and inspiring of those who by word and example rebuke ourdespondency, purify our sight, awaken us from the deadening slumbers ofconvention and conformity, exorcise the pestering imps of vanity, andlift men up from low thoughts and sullen moods of helplessness andimpiety. 

END OF VOL. I. 

_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.