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RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
MAS
•
EMERSON AND HIS
PHILOSOPHY
BY
必要
​6
#
J. ARTHUR HILL
Author of "Psychical Investigations"
"Spiritualism: Its History, Phenomena, and Doctrine”
etc.
LONDON:
WILLIAM RIDER & SON, LIMITED
8-11 PATERNOSTER ROW, E.C.
!
1
TOREKON
}
!
Preface
WHEN Emerson was in Paris in 1833, he visited the
famous cemetery of Père La Chaise. There he
came across the tomb of Auguste Colignon, who,
said the monument, "lived to do right, and had
formed himself to virtue on the Essays of
Montaigne." I cannot claim for myself so high an
achievement, but I can at least say that I owe to
Emerson's Essays, very largely, any virtue (in the
wider Biblical and etymological sense) that I may
possess. To me, Emerson was the most inspired
writer of the nineteenth century. He showed me,
more than any other, what man can do and be, and
how he may put himself in the way of such
inspiration as his capacity permits. And, being so
keenly conscious of the help received from him,
I want others to try the same source. Hence the
present little volume, in the hope that it may be
useful as an introduction to the greatest thinker of
the transatlantic millions of our race, to whom the
iv
PREFACE
whole world now owes so much for their help in
overthrowing military tyranny.
All, of us now realise, as never before, how
tremendously important it is that the British and
their American cousins should be united in unbreak-
able amity. Together, they can almost (or quite)
secure the peace of the world, even without help;
with the other nations which are joining the League
they will be able to secure it beyond doubt, so far
as any extensive war is concerned. And the best
way of bringing about close friendship is mutual
understanding, to which a reading of each other's
literature is an important contributory. Americans
know English literature, for it is the parent of
their own; but the British do not know American
literature as they ought. And it seems to me that
anything tending to increase this knowledge is
entirely good. If my little volume sends a few
readers to sit at the feet of America's greatest
Prophet, I shall be well content. They will be
rivets in the World-Peace, and they may also find
much help for their individual souls.
THORNTON,
BRADFORD,
July 25th, 1919.
J. A. H.
S
!
j
Chapter
I. BIOGRAPHY
II. LITERARY TASTES
III. PROPHET AND PHILOSOPHER
IV. RELIGION
V. SCIENCE
VI. SOCIAL
Contents
VII. STYLE
VIII. EMERSON THE POET .
IX. PERSONAL CHARACTER
X. EMERSON AS CRITIC .
XI. CONCLUSION
Page
7
16
26
39
48
57
67
78
87
99
113
:
;
2.
}
Emerson and his Philosophy
CHAPTER I.
BIOGRAPHY.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON was born on May 25th,
1803, in Boston, Massachusetts. His father,
William Emerson, pastor of the Second Church
(Unitarian), died eight years later, leaving his
family in straitened circumstances. The five little
Emerson boys had one great-coat among them,
and their schoolfellows would say: "This is Ralph's
day to-morrow it will be Edward's turn." How-
ever, Harvard was somehow made possible, no
doubt by much maternal scheming and self-sacrifice,
and Emerson graduated in 1821, after an undis-
tinguished college career, having been a hopeless
failure in mathematics, though winning prizes for
composition and speaking. For some time he
¹ Works, vol. vi., p. 376. References throughout are to the
excellent and authoritative Centenary Edition (12 vols.) of
Messrs. Houghton Mifflin Co., but in quoting from an essay
I give its title, so that it can easily be looked up in other editions
such as the cheap and handy one-in 5 vols.-in Messrs. Dent's
Everyman" Library.
"
8
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
assisted his elder brother William in a school for
young ladies in Boston, but studied meanwhile
for the ministry. At the age of twenty-six he
became co-pastor with Mr. Henry Ware at the
Second Church, taking full duty only a few weeks
later, when his senior's health failed; but he
resigned at the end of four years, the reason being
a point of difficulty concerning ritual. In its
concrete form, the sacramental rite was distasteful
to him, and he wished to see it either abolished or
converted into a purely spiritual act by dispensing
with the material elements. The people of his
church were not prepared to accept either of these
revolutionary suggestions, and though on other
counts they wished to retain him, and though he
on his part had no desire to leave them, it became
clear that no compromise was possible, and that
his resignation was the only solution. For some
time he continued to wear clerical dress, preaching,
indeed, to a small congregation at East Lexington;
but with his severance from the Second Church
at Boston his clerical period may be said to have
ended. Henceforward he was to be known more
as lecturer and writer than as preacher.
On December 25th, 1832-a few months after
his retirement from the Second Church pastorate-
Emerson set out on a tour which in those days
must have seemed a great undertaking. He wished
to see and speak with those leaders of English
thought whose writings had influenced him. Being
now free from 'pastoral ties, and moreover needing
change to turn his mind from grief-for his wife
had died (February, 1831), after only a year and
a half of married life-he found himself free
BIOGRAPHY
9
¦
to go in search of intellectual kin.¹ Sailing on
Christmas day in the brig Jasper, laden with West
Indian produce, he reached Malta on February
2nd. From Malta he crossed to Sicily and Syra-
cuse; thence to Rome and Florence, where he met
Landor; then to Venice, Geneva, and Paris, and
thus to London, where he met J. S. Mill and
Coleridge. The last-named inveighed against
Unitarianism: Emerson remarked that he himself
was a Unitarian : "Yes," said Coleridge,
"I supposed so."
From London, the traveller went north, via
York, in search of the man whose articles in Fraser's
Magazine had greatly impressed him, and who was
destined soon to take literary England by storm.
After some difficulty, he found the solitary hill-top
where the "lonely scholar nourished his mighty
heart," and stayed there as guest one night. This
visit to Carlyle is described by Emerson in English
Traits; but there is no mention of J. S. Mill, who-
as Froude tells us-supplied him with a letter of
introduction. Probably the logician and the
transcendentalist did not think much of each other.
And it was probably fortunate that Emerson did
not stay long at Craigenputtock; for Carlyle and
he were temperamentally very different from each
other. To the Scotchman's grim and stormy soul,
serenity and contemplativeness seemed like vacuity
and laziness. Accordingly-later on-Emerson was
dubbed a gymnosophist sitting on a flowery
tr
¹ Dr. Holmes gives February, 1832, as the date of Mrs.
Emerson's death, but this is evidently a mistake. (Life of
Emerson, p. 56.)
:
:
ΙΟ
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
bank." Before leaving Liverpool, he visited Edin-
burgh, preaching in the Unitarian church of that
city, and afterwards paying a visit to Wordsworth,
whose personality disappointed him. The poet was
narrow-minded and ludicrously egotistic, and when
he proceeded to declaim some of his own lines,
Emerson-he himself tells
66
us-was near to
laugh."
Arrived home (after a voyage of thirty-five days,
for the first steam-boat was still five years below
the horizon) Emerson found himself in request
both for pulpit and platform. But his theological
position did not permit a regular pastorate, and he
became more and more of a lecturer. His first
subjects were scientific; but he soon found his true
métier in the fields of literature and mystical religion.
A course of biographical lectures in Boston, on
Michael Angelo, Luther, Milton, George Fox, and
Burke; a course of ten lectures in the same town,
on English literature; the slow composition of the
tract Nature; the editing of Sartor for Carlyle;
and frequent preaching at Lexington,-these
occupied Emerson's time until 1836, when Nature
was published. With the appearance of this
magnificent essay which, however, aroused little
immediate attention and of which only five hundred
copies sold in twelve years-Emerson may be said
to have definitely taken upon himself the mantle
of prophet and teacher. And from this time forth
he was recognized as the greatest literary man,
the most original and most influential thinker, of
the American continent. He had married again in
1835, and had set up house at Concord-a town
founded and named by his ancestor Edward
BIOGRAPHY
II
Bulkeley, about 1640-where he lived for the
remainder of his life, writing during the summer
and reading lectures during the winter, to Lyceum
and other audiences throughout the Eastern States.
This was how he made his living-and it was not
a fat one. A course of ten lectures which had
taken months to prepare might bring in $500 in
Boston, but the county lyceums could only afford
$10 a lecture, with expenses. Once he had the
offer of a remunerative engagement for an evening
which was already filled. He went to O. W. Holmes
and asked him if he could take the lower-paying
job off his hands, but unfortunately Holmes him-
self had an engagement for that evening. "Well,
well!" said Emerson, "I shall have to do without
that new stove."
66
In 1842 he took over the editorship of The Dial,
in place of Margaret Fuller, who had been editor
since its inception in 1840. He contributed to it
over thirty articles in prose and verse other
contributors were Margaret Fuller, Theodore
Parker, Alcott, and Thoreau, but the magazine
died of superiority to its public in 1844, and
Emerson lost several hundred dollars, for he was
its banker as well as its editor. In this year also
he suffered a far greater loss in the death of his
son Waldo, at five years of age.
In October, 1847, he sailed for Liverpool to fulfil
lecturing engagements, chiefly in the northern
Mechanics' Institutes. He went straight from
Liverpool to Chelsea, and spent a week with
Carlyle, then north again to lecture in Manchester,
where he had large audiences to hear some of the
Representative Men" readings. Those on
12
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
Napoleon and Shakespeare were given later on, in
Exeter Hall, London. In February he gave four
lectures in Edinburgh, then six in London. He
had an audience of a thousand people to hear the
lecture on Montaigne. Everywhere he was received.
with enthusiasm. Several volumes of his Essays.
had appeared in England, also a volume of poems
(in 1847), and Carlyle had done his best to introduce
his friend's writings to those capable of appreciation.
Consequently he found a public ready for him, and
the lectures had a great effect in stimulating interest
in the best literature. He spent a few days with
Miss Martineau at Rydal Mount, and in London
he met many celebrities-Macaulay, Tennyson,
Hallam, Milman, Dickens, Arnold, Faraday, Leigh
Hunt, Lyell. He made friends with Arthur Hugh
Clough at Oxford, and spent a week with him in
Paris, though warned against going, Paris being
then in the throes of revolution. In autumn, 1848,
he returned home and began working up the
material gathered for English Traits. .
In the eighteen-fifties he took a fairly prominent
part in the anti-slavery movement. John Brown
visited him, but he was not a very vigorous
abolitionist until roused by the Fugitive Slave
Law, which made it felonious to succour an escaped
slave. Then he spoke out with vigour. It was
the "duty of every gentleman to break the law."
In 1866 he wrote Terminus, his last poem, and
evidently felt his powers failing. In July, 1872,
the accidental burning of his house caused shock
and illness. Eleven thousand dollars were sub-
scribed by the public, and conveyed to him with
tact and delicacy. "The list of my benefactors,"
BIOGRAPHY
13
he said, “cannot be read with dry eyes or pronounced
with articulate voice. I ought to be in high health
to meet such a call on heart and mind, and not
the thoughtless invalid I happen to be at present."1
In October, 1872, he left America to pass the
winter in Italy and on the Nile with his daughter.
He also spent a few weeks in Paris and a month
in
London, seeing Carlyle and other friends.
Returning in May, 1873, he found that his fellow-
townsmen had built and furnished a new house
for him. Here he lived happily among books and
friends, but with no power of work, his memory
being almost gone. In 1874 he was nominated for
the Lord Rectorship of Glasgow University, but
was beaten by Disraeli. He still occasionally gave
a reading, even going as far as Richmond in 1876,
to speak before the University of Virginia, being
unwilling to refuse an invitation which seemed like.
an overture of reconciliation to the North. On
April 27th, 1882, he died of pneumonia.
A remarkable number of great men died about
this time. Carlyle had gone to his rest in February,
1881, Lord Beaconsfield in April, Longfellow in
February, 1882, Rossetti and Darwin in April.
Emerson had attended Longfellow's funeral, making
the pathetic and often-quoted remark: "The
gentleman who lies there was a beautiful soul; but
I cannot remember his name." Mrs. Emerson
survived her husband for twenty years, dying at
the age of ninety. His house at Concord is now
occupied by friends of the late Miss Emerson.
¹ Garnett's Life of Emerson, p. 181.
14
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
The library is kept as in her father's life-Carlyle's
portrait on the wall.
Ability and scholarship were hereditary in
Emerson, for he came of a long line of cultivated
and liberal clergymen. Also there was a strong
vein of original genius in the family. It was always
considered that Ralph Waldo's younger brother
Edward (born 1805) was the most brilliant of the
five sons: strikingly handsome, an eloquent
speaker, and high-minded in the extreme, he was
a general favourite. A poem of his is included
in vol. ix. (p. 258) along with In Memoriam, Ralph
Waldo's tribute to this "brother of the brief but
blazing star." Edward was easily first in all his
college classes, but his health broke down, a warmer
climate was ordered, and he went to Porto Rico,
where he died in 1834. Charles was almost equally
gifted, but died in 1836. William studied theology
in Germany, became heterodox and turned to the
law, which he practised successfully. Robert
Bulkeley Emerson remained imbecile or at least
feeble-minded through life, and it is noteworthy
that Edward's brilliant mind gave way temporarily
during the early part of his illness. Great wits to
madness were ever near allied, as we may admit,
without accepting the Nordau theory that genius
itself is a disease.

Another relative of very original mind was Mary
Moody Emerson, Ralph Waldo's aunt, who lived
from 1775 to 1863. She was a woman of wide
culture, and of eccentric dress and habits. Being
erratic and exacting, she was generally seeking a
new boarding-house. She often visited her brother's
widow and children, exerting over the latter
BIOGRAPHY
15
66
a great and beneficent influence,-awakening their
interest in literature, spurring their ambition, and
giving much sound advice and unsparing criticism.
Emerson often said that he owed much to this
aunt. Aunt Mary is a genius always new, subtle,
frolicsome, musical, unpredictable. . She is
embarrassed by no Moses or Paul, no Angelo or
Shakspeare after whose type she is to fashion her
speech; her wit is the wild horse of the desert,
who snuffs the sirocco and scours the palm-grove
without having learned his paces in the Stadium
or at Tattersall's." Evidently he had an Emerson
precursor in the Self-reliance doctrine! Also in his
mystical psychology, for in his Journal he notes
(1866): "read M. M. E.'s MSS. yesterday many
pages. They keep for me the old attraction. ..
The central theme of these endless diaries is, her
relation to the Divine Being.' And again:
"Yesterday I read an old file of Aunt Mary's letters,
and felt how she still gains by all comparison with
later friends." This is high praise, when we
remember who those later friends were—the most
distinguished group of literary men then living in
the world. The grave of this remarkable woman
is near that of her nephew, in Sleepy Hollow
Cemetery. Over Emerson's grave there lies a
colossal boulder of rose-quartz, fit emblem of his
pure and crystalline soul.
1 x., p. 597.
2 ibid, p. 601.
""
CHAPTER II.
LITERARY TASTES.
A MAN is known by the company he keeps. He is
known still better by the books he reads. Emerson
was a wide reader, was indeed one of the most
catholic minds of his century, sucking nutriment
from Darwin as from à Kempis, from Swedenborg
as from Hafiz, and-unlike Coleridge and Words-
worth-he could appreciate Faust and Wilhelm
Meister; but he had strong likes and dislikes, which
shed much light on the character of his mind. It
is worth while to glance at them.
Emerson's cardinal principle in reading was to
follow his own instinct and not to force himself to
read what did not appeal to him. With Shakespeare
he says (in his essay on Books) :-
No profit goes where is no pleasure ta'en:
In brief, sir, study what you most affect.
And he advocated a deliberate restraint, even with
favourites. Do not become too much a disciple.
Retain your personal integrity :—
Reading long at one time anything, no matter how
it fascinates, destroys thought... Do not permit this.
LITERARY TASTES
17
•
Stop if you find yourself becoming absorbed, at even
the first paragraph. Keep yourself out and watch for
your impressions.1
To the same questioner he said: "Recollect you
only read to start your own team ; " and he himself
often said that he read only to "make his top
spin." After he became famous, he would protest,
with a certain shame, against the enthusiasm and
hero-worship which he evoked. "If they had read
the same things," he would say, "they would think
much less of me." No doubt he felt that many of
his thoughts, even the most original and inspired
ones, were the outcome of reflections which had
been initiated by his reading; and, with character-
istic humility, he thought that a course of reading
just like his own would make other tops spin just
as well as his. His readers will probably think
that the material and build of the top count for
something, as well as the kind of stimulus that is
applied.
But though Emerson seems to slight the value
of reading, it is plain that his own range in literature
was enormous. In youth particularly he was
almost a bookworm, as some lines of his (written
about 1835) attest:-
I
When shall I be tired of reading?
When the moon is tired of waxing and waning,
When the cloud is tired of raining,
When the sea of ebbing and flowing,
1 Woodbury's Talks with Emerson, p. 29.
с
18
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
When the grass is weary of growing,
When the planets tire of going,
And when Death is sick of feeding,
Then shall I be tired of reading.1
O. W. Holmes once made a list of the references
in Emerson's works, and found that they totalled
3,393, the number of different individuals being
8682. Shakespeare, Plato, and Napoleon headed the
list. Napoleon's name sounds queerly in this
connexion, but Emerson had a sort of personal
interest in him. When he visited Florida for his
health in 1827, he became friendly with a planter,
Napoleon Achille Murat, who was the son of no
less a person than Joachim Murat, Napoleon's
brilliant cavalry leader, who married the Emperor's
sister Caroline and was made King of Naples. No
doubt this acquaintance was the nearest approach
of Emerson to an actual king or ruler; and, how-
ever democratic we may be, we should be more
than human if we could regard a king's son as
quite like other men-particularly a king of such
romantic history. After Plato, Shakespeare, and
Napoleon, came Plutarch, with seventy references. 3
And probably this does not fully represent Emerson's
devotion to old Plutarch,-in which he followed
Montaigne, another favourite of his for as a
matter of fact his reading was very largely
biographical, and Plutarch is the king of that
territory. Read Plutarch, and the world is
1 vii., p. 399.
2 viii., p. 403.
³ ii., P. 392.
(Notes to Books.)
"
"
Quotation and Originality.)
"}
,, Self-Reliance.)
"
LITERARY TASTES
19
a proud place, peopled with men of positive quality,
with heroes and demi-gods standing around us,
who will not let us sleep."¹ And in a note to this
passage, Dr. Edward Emerson says that his father
introduced the following sentence into the lecture
as first delivered: "And Plutarch: if the world's
library were burning, I should fly to save that,
with our Bible and Shakespeare and Plato."2 It
is interesting to remember, in this connexion, the
great use that Shakespeare made of Plutarch's
Lives as sources for his Julius Cæsar, Antony and
Cleopatra, Timon of Athens, and Pericles; also that
Florio's translation of Montaigne's Essays is about
the only book known to have been possessed by
him-for there is a copy containing his autograph,
in the British Museum. It is of course absurd to
compare minds so different as Emerson and Shakes-
peare, but it is all the more significant to find
them rating the same books so high. The fact is,
Plutarch and Montaigne are so thoroughly human
that they touch all sides of common life; and the
greater the mind that reads them, the greater is
the admiration and affection evoked.
Of the philosophical classics, Emerson's favourite
was Plato. In the essay Success he speaks of the
healthy youth reading Plato "covered to his chin
with a cloak in a cold upper chamber, though he
should associate the Dialogues ever after with a
woollen smell, "-and this is a piece of exact auto-
biography. In the essay on Books, he says:
3
1 Essay on Books, vii., p. 191.
2 vii., p. 406; notes to Books.
3 vii., pp. 297, 439 (Success.)
X., p. 572, notes to Plutarch.
C 2
20
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
E
“Of Plato I hesitate to speak, lest there should be
no end,” and in Works and Days there is an eloquent
passage about reading the Timæus in the early
dawn, the only proper time-" as of a world just
created and still becoming "-for the reading of
that book. The Neo-Platonists, also, were favourites
with him: Proclus, Jamblicus, Porphyry. These
he read for stimulation and for their large strange
atmosphere. The reader may obtain "gleams and
glimpses of a more excellent illumination from their
genius, outvaluing the most distinct information he
owes to other books." The grandeur of the starry
heavens' impression on us is more valuable than
our exact perception of a tub.1 Of modern
philosophers he has little to say, and probably did
not read them with either care or interest. He
praises Kant, thinking that the transcendentalism
of Königsberg supported that of New England;
but he has no patience with the logicians. The
highest species of reasoning upon divine subjects
is rather the fruit of a sort of moral imagination
than of the reasoning machines, such as Locke and
Clarke and David Hume."
66
Fiction of the novel kind he rarely read after
his youth, though he always liked The Bride of
Lammermoor and Consuelo! 2 He had no pleasure
in the contemporary favourites, Dickens and
Thackeray, and he alludes to "the poor Pickwick
stuff (into which I have only looked and with no
1
¹ vii., p. 409. (Notes to Books.)
Co
2 Journal, i., p. 72. Works, iv., p. 278. In later years he
compared The Bride of Lammermoor with Aeschylus as the
highest and purest tragedy." (Journal, ii., p. 203.)

LITERARY TASTES
2I
F
wish for more) "1 with a mixture of boredom and
contempt. His mind was too fastidious and
delicate to appreciate humour of the tap-room
kind, either of Dickens or Aristophanes. Thackeray
he no doubt found cynical, and of the earth earthy.
Emerson had no wish to consort with Becky Sharps.
He read to start his own Pegasus, and wanted
something to uplift. not to depress his mind.
Consequently he turned away from the realistic
novel which was then in fashion, to the more re-
freshing and elevated regions of mythology, epic and
oriental poetry, and philosophy. It is curious to
note, by the way, that he attributes the popularity
of Jane Eyre to the interest of its moral problem-
the rightness or wrongness of setting aside an
unsatisfactory marriage and forming other
associations according to the impulse of the heart.ª
But surely this is the mistake of a philosopher and
moralist, interested chiefly in ideas. Probably the
majority of readers of Jane Eyre care little for its
moral problem. The human interest is the
attraction, the personalities of Rochester and Jane,
and the development of their love as drawn in
what they say and in the minor incidents. It
may be called a problem novel, but the problem is
not the reason of its popularity.
In poetry, Emerson read omnivorously. Homer,
Aeschylus, Dante, Chaucer, the Edda, Elizabethan
poetry and drama, Wordsworth, Goethe, Saadi,—
these are the books which he revelled in. It is
.7
¹ v., p. 383. (Notes to Literature, in English Traits.) vii.;
P. 412. (Notes to Books.)
2 vii., p. 215, Books.

22
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
noteworthy that he does not mention Virgil in the
essay on Books. The Mantuan's melancholy grace.
must surely have appealed to one of Emerson's
cast of mind, but perhaps he found the Latin
stateliness a poor substitute for originality and
freshness of simple statement. Of Shakespeare he
says:
Shakespeare is as much out of the category of eminent
authors, as he is out of the crowd. He is inconceivably
wise; the others, conceivably. A good reader can, in
a sort, nestle into Plato's brain and think from thence;
but not into Shakespeare's. . . He was the farthest
reach of subtlety compatible with an individual self..
With this wisdom of life is the equal endowment of
imaginative and of lyric power... His mind is the
horizon beyond which, at present, we do not see. Our
ears are educated to music by his rhythm . . . there
is in all cultivated minds a silent appreciation of his
superlative power and beauty, which, like Christianity,
qualifies the period.¹
Of Milton he says:-
It is the prerogative of this great man to stand at
this hour foremost of all men in literary history, and
so (shall we not say?) of all men, in the power to
inspire. Virtue goes out of him into others. . . As
a poet, Shakespeare undoubtedly transcends, and far
surpasses him in his popularity with foreign nations;
but Shakespeare is a voice merely; who and what he
was that sang, that sings, we know not. Milton stands
erect, commanding, still visible as a man among men.²
(Shakespeare.)
¹ iv., pp. 204, 211.
2 xii., p. 253. (Milton.)
*.
LITERARY TASTES
23
،،
Of the modern poets, he ranked Wordsworth as
the best since Milton, and knew most of The Prelude
by heart. The "Ode on Intimations of Immortality
is the best modern essay on the subject." From
Blake he often quoted The Tiger with approval,
but probably did not care to wrestle with
the mystical books. Tennyson he described as
"factitious" and a posture-maker," but admitted
that "the colour of the dawn flows over the horizon
from his pencil."1 From Browning he quoted
The Lost Leader, applying it to Daniel Webster
after his defection on the question of slavery. It
is pleasant to find that he greatly liked Burns'
poem To the Deil; evidently he could appreciate
Burns' pathetico-whimsical wish that the Devil
should get converted and become a respectable
member of society. Shelley he did not like:
2
When people tell me they do not relish poetry, and
bring me Shelley, or Aikin's Poets, or I know not what
volumes of rhymed English, to show that it has no
charm, I am quite of their mind.³
Shelley, though a poetic mind, is never a poet. His
muse is uniformly imitative; all his poems composite.
A good English scholar he is, with ear, taste and
memory; much more, he is a character full of noble.
and prophetic traits; but imagination, the original,
authentic fire of the bard, he has not.4
There is an old story of an undergraduate who
asked his tutor for a final maxim of good advice,
¹ Woodbury's
2 xii., p. 289.
3 viii., p. 25.
4 xii., p. 319.
Talks with Emerson, p. 53.
(Art and Criticism.)
(Imagination.)
(Modern Literature.)
+
i
24
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
on leaving the University. The don pondered
long: then with fervent emphasis said: My boy,
my best counsel is : Always verify your
quotations!"" Emerson, apparently, was not that
undergraduate. His quotations are not always to
be relied on. In Education he insists on accuracy
in small things, but in this one instance he failed
to live up to his doctrine. In Spiritual Laws he
quotes Byron's 'Jack Bunting':
He knew not what to say, and so he swore.¹
But the character in question was Jack Sky-
scrape, not Bunting-the gentleman of that name,
by the way, was Ben and not Jack-and what
Byron did say was :—
Jack was embarrassed,―never hero more,
And, as he knew not what to say, he swore.2
The pulses of her iron heart
Go beating through the storm,
66
Another instance is referred to by Dr. Holmes.
Emerson, in a fine passage about the ship, in
Civilisation, quotes a couplet :-
The beating of her restless heart
Still sounding through the storm.
A
but gives no reference. Holmes points out that
this is apparently an incorrect version of two of
his own lines in a poem called The Steamboat :
1 ii., p. 164.
2 Island, canto iii., 5.
3 Ralph Waldo Emerson, p. 251.
3
LITERARY Tastes
25
And in Heroism he quotes :-
Let them rave,
Thou art quiet in thy grave,
without reference, and obviously from memory,
for though it certainly gives the sense of Tennyson's
Dirge, with the refrain "Let them rave," the second
line is Emerson and not Tennyson.¹
1
In allusions, also, as well as quotations, he some-
times tripped,—as indeed what writer does not?
In Art (vii., p. 42) he says,-pointing out how we
make the forces of nature work for us, putting
mills by streams or making water expand and
contract to run our machinery-that "we do not
grind corn or lift the loom by our own strength."
It is dangerous for bookish men to wander into
other domains. F. W. H. Myers-that wonderful
writer and pioneer in psychology-once spoke of
a weaver changing the pattern of the cloth by
"shifting the loom!" Apparently neither Emerson
nor Myers had ever seen a loom, or they would
have known that the weaver neither lifts nor shifts
it. And, even if the loom were shifted, it would
not in the least degree alter the pattern.
But these are spots in the sun. It is good to
take note of them, for the sake of truth and lest
an unspotted perfection should too much discourage
us but they are small spots, hardly affecting the
light-giving and life-giving power which is what
we are mostly concerned with and thankful for.
CC
¹ Emerson was fond of quoting a line about Love: All
other pleasures are not worth its pains." (Love, ii., p. 176.)
No source seems discoverable.
I
Boteraper!
"leasure of
understanding?
CHAPTER III.
PROPHET AND PHILOSOPHER.
BUT though it is interesting to know what books
Emerson read, and though he said that his reading
made his top spin, it is arguable that he was more
independent of books than almost any writer of
his time. He was inspired, in the strict sense of
the word. Thoughts came to him, he did not make
them. Almost every day he went to the woods to
listen," as he said. The thoughts that came to
him were jotted down in his Journal, and woven
into lectures afterwards. A certain incoherence is
consequently sometimes observable, and unsympa-
thetic critics say that it is all the same whether you
begin at the beginning or in the middle of an essay;
that the sentences are gems, perhaps, but that
there is no connecting thread, and no organic
whole is formed. The criticism is partly true.
Emerson himself knew that it was so. Writing to
Carlyle he says:-
16
“I dot evermore in my endless journal, a line on
every knowable in nature; but the arrangement loiters
long, and I get a brick-kiln instead of a house."
Speaking of his next book as a raft :-
Expect nothing more of my powers of construction,-
no ship-building, no clipper, smack, nor skiff even, only
boards and logs tied together.
PROPHET AND PHILOSOPHER
27
I
66
But this was inevitable. He looked on each
man as a conduit-pipe of God, a ray of the Primal
Light; and he held it as the cardinal point of
literary ethics that a man should write nothing
but that which is known only to himself,"-
should tell his own experience, express his own
individuality, avoid being a mere echo. Each man
is born to do something which no one else can
do, and God wants it done. Let him do it, and not
skulk about, quoting others, hiding behind them
in fear of his individuality being seen. Let him
talk with his mind, not out of his memory:
Insist on yourself; never imitate. . . Whoso would
be a man must be a nonconformist. Nothing is at
last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. . . It
is only as a man puts off all foreign support, and stands
alone, that I see him to be strong and to prevail.¹
I see not any road of perfect peace which a man can
walk, but after the counsel of his own bosom. Let
him quit too much association, let him go home much,
and stablish himself in those courses he approves."
2
•
I cannot find language of sufficient energy to convey
my sense of the sacredness of private integrity. All
men, all things, the state, the church, yea, the friends
of the heart are phantasms and unreal beside the
sanctuary of the heart.3
It is simpler to be self-dependent. . . . Everything
real is self-existent.4
at is s
1 ii., pp. 50, 83, 89. (Self-Reliance.)
2 ibid., p. 262. (Heroism.)
Some men appear to feel that they belong to a Pariah
caste. They fear to offend, they bend and apologize,
3 i., p. 279. (Lecture on the times.)
• ibid., p. 334. (The Transcendentalist.)
ま
​
>
S

28
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
F
and walk through life with a timid step. . . The hero
should find himself at home, wherever he is.¹
Adhere to your own act, and congratulate yourself if
you have done something strange and extravagant, and
broken the monotony of a decorous age.2
One soul is a counterpoise of all souls, as a capillary
column of water is a balance for the sea. If Æschylus
be that man he is taken for, he has not yet done his
office when he has educated the learned of Europe for
a thousand years. He is now to approve himself a
master of delight to me also. If he cannot do that,
all his fame shall avail him nothing with me. I were
a fool not to sacrifice a thousand Eschyluses to my
intellectual integrity.3
I
not so.
All this may seem at first sight a laudation of
principles which will lead to anarchy. But it is
For mankind exists in a social order, and
Nature sees to it that anarchy is impossible. As
soon as anarchy in a community is approached,
the community begins to die. Order is a condition
of corporate life. And order is attained by indi-.
viduals respecting the self-respect of others. Self-
reliance is good, but you must grant to others
what you claim for yourself, and must be tolerant
where you disagree. Perpetual compromise is
enforced. Even Thoreau could not return to the
animal completely, for he continued to wear clothes
and to shelter himself with roof and walls. If he
had not done so, Nature would have eliminated
him by pneumonia or other means. And society
acts as second nature, eliminating those whose self-
****
MODELS
1 vi., p. 186. (Behavior.)
2 ii., p. 260. (Heroism.)
3 ibid., p. 344. (Intellect.)

PROPHET AND PHILOSOPHER
29
!
reliance injures other units (e.g., murderers) and
discouraging in various ways such modes of action
as are socially harmful. This is not inconsistent
with a self-reliance doctrine. The individual selves,
though real selves, form a stable whole by their
mutual influences, as a solar system is stable though
its members swing each in its own path and at its
own speed; for their mutual perturbations cancel
out into perfect balance, e.g., in education:-
I hear the outcry :-Would you verily throw up the
reins of public and private discipline; would you leave
the young child to the mad career of his own passions
and whimsies, and call this anarchy a respect for the
child's nature? I answer,-Respect the child, respect
him to the end, but also respect yourself. Be the
companion of his thought, the friend of his friendship,
the lover of his virtue,-but no kinsman of his sin.
Let him find you so true to yourself that you are the
irreconcilable hater of his vice and the imperturbable
slighter of his trifling.¹

Self-trust, then, is the first lesson. But, it may be
asked, what is it that we trust,-who is the Trustee?
Here Emerson, though no system-builder, is inevit-
ably driven into philosophy.
In attempts to explain the universe, there are
two ways of beginning,-two ends, so to speak,
and you can please yourself as to which end you
start at. You can begin with matter and work up
to mind, or you can begin with mind and work
down to matter. Either way, however, a chasm is
reached, which has never yet been bridged.
1 X., p. 144. (Education.)
30
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSC™LY
66
Between the physics of the brain and the corres-
ponding facts of consciousness, said Tyndall, there
is a gap which is not bridged. The materialist,
arguing up, cannot explain where mind comes
from, and has to leave it unexplained, as a
property" of certain forms of matter. an
"epi-phenomenon " or the like. The spiritualist,¹
arguing down, cannot explain matter, and tends to
regard it as illusory or at most temporary. Both
fail: but the spiritualist has the advantage, for he
is on firmer ground. He remains within his own
immediate experience or extensions of it similar in
kind; the materialist goes out of himself into
matter-crosses the chasm with the help of what
he denies as primal entity-and cannot get back
with any appliance that matter can provide.
Emerson starts at the spirit-end, taking his
immediate experience as his standing-ground.
Examining that experience, he finds that a prominent
and as it seems to him the most valuable part of it
is made up of thoughts, ideas, which "came" to
him. He did not originate them. Yet they must-
have come from somewhere. Somebody or Some-
thing must have made them. Consequently his
philosophy takes the shape of a psychology, and
a mystical psychology. The soul, he thinks-with
Wordsworth-must be greater than we know.
The present consciousness must be only a small
part of our total mind. Inspiration comes from
a large background into a small brightly-lit fore-
ground :-
ول - دیه

1 In the true sense of the word, as opposed to materialisi.
Not necessarily an adherent of what is known popularly as
Spiritualism.
!
PROPHET AND PHILOSOPHER
31
Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being
is descending into us from we know not whence.
All goes to show that the soul of man is not an organ,
but animates and exercises all the organs; is not a
function like the power of memory, of calculation, of
comparison, but uses these as hands and feet; is not
a faculty but a light; is not the intellect or the will,
but the master of the intellect and the will; is the back-
ground of our being, in which they lie-an immensity
not possessed and that cannot be possessed. . . 1
we know . . . that we are much more;
•
2
. in
my trivial conversation with my neighbors, somewhat
higher in each of us overlooks this by-play, and Jove
nods to Jove from behind each of us.
2
•
The soul is superior to its knowledge, wiser than any
of its works.
When I watch that flowing river, which, out of regions
I see not, pours for a season its streams into me, I see
that I am a pensioner; not a cause but a surprised
spectator of this ethereal water; that I desire and
look up and put myself in the attitude of reception,
but from some alien energy the visions come.4
A man is the façade of a temple wherein all wisdom
and all good abide. . . him we do not respect, but the
soul, whose organ he is, would he let it appear through
his action, would make our knees bend. When it
breathes through his intellect it is genius; when it
breathes through his will it is virtue; when it flows
through his affection it is love. And the blindness of
the intellect begins, when it would be something of
itself. The weakness of the will begins, when the

pp. 268, 270.
ibid., n. 278.
8 3?T.
9 xii.. p. 3?
ii.,
, p. 268.
(The Over-Soul.)
(The Over-Soul.)
(Modern Literature.)
(The Over-Soul.)
32
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSOFn
ما
individual would be something of himself. All reform
aims, in some one particular, to let the soul have its
way through us. . .*1
<+ MODO CALTERUS DOGM
STING MEMEME
now
Quotations such as these could be multiplied
indefinitely from Emerson's writings. The idea is
his second main doctrine. The first was: Trust
yourself. The second is in answer to the question
Why should I? how dare I? and says: "Because
you, the real you, are trustworthy, your soul being
far greater than you know." And it is to be noted
that Emerson's mystical psychology is
supported by data of which he knew little or nothing.
Without some such conception of the soul there
seems no explanation possible of the host of facts
which psychical research is authenticating. The
late F. W. H. Myers's great work, Human Personality
and its Survival of Bodily Death, may be cited as
the first and—so far-the most important attempt:
at an experimental, objective, inductive enquiry
into the nature and proximate destiny of the soul.
To those who are concerned in this work of psychical
research, much of Emerson's teaching appeals with
an almost startling appearance of prophetic insight.
Souls, then, are greater than the conscious
personalities of individual people. In the language
of modern psychology, there is a large subliminal
region, below the threshold of consciousness. We
are like icebergs, which float with only one-twelfth
of their bulk above water. The largest part of us
is hidden we are not conscious of it.



1 ibid., p. 271. (The Over-Soul.)
PROPHET AND PHILOSOPHER
33
"
ť
15
But there is more than that to be said. Somehow
or other, souls are connected, not only by com-
municating through the senses, but in a more subtle went's
way,-more subtle even than telepathy, which
Emerson would have accepted as some small further sl
confirmation of his doctrine. This more subtle Con
connexion seems to be in the subliminal or submerged
part. It is indicated, for instance, in Conscience :—
I seek my satisfaction at my neighbor's cost, and
I find that he has an advocate in my own breast,
interfering with my private action.
In other words, somehow or other that which is
in him is also in me. All souls are related to each
other. Sundered here, they are in contact
merged higher up. There is a universal soul behind
our individual life. We are inlets of the same sea.
And
the heart and soul of all men being one, this bitterness
of His and Mine ceases. His is mine. I am my
brother and my brother is me.¹
And, to take the next step, this soul merges on
the farther side into a far greater spirit; into God.
Behind the whole material universe, which is His
body, the Spirit of God dwells, immanent and
transcendent, both at once, for He saturates the
visible universe, while not limited by its limits.
In this spirituality, this beginning at the right
end, Emerson was probably the most powerful
1 ., p. 134. (Compensation.)
D
V
no!
تریش
34
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
For th
anti-materialistic influence of the nineteenth century.
Thought is before things; it produces them. Forth
Bridges, Panama Canals, aeroplanes, super-Dread-
noughts and submarines and wireless telegraphy
exist first in the idea of inventor and constructor,
before they take shape in matter, becoming visible
to others :-
You admire this tower of granite, weathering the
hurts of so many ages. Yet a little waving hand built.
this huge wall, and that which builds is better than
that which is built. . . Better than the hand and
nimbler was the invisible thought which wrought
through it; and thus ever, behind the coarse effect, is
a fine cause, which, being narrowly seen, is itself the
effect of a finer cause.¹
Earth proudly wears the Parthenon,
As the best gem upon her zone,
And Morning opes with haste her lids
To gaze upon the Pyramids;
O'er England's abbeys bends the sky,
As on its friends, with kindred eye;
For out of Thought's interior sphere
These wonders rose to upper air.2
This idealistic placing of reality in the noumenal,
not the phenomenal, is characteristic of deep minds.
The seen things are temporal, the unseen things
eternal
1 ii., p. 302. (Circles.)
ix., p. 7. (The Problem.)
PROPHET AND PHILOSOPHER
35
៤
-
O what are heroes, prophets, men,
But pipes through which the breath of Pan doth blow
A momentary music. Being's tide
Swells hitherward, and myriads of forms.
Live, robed with beauty, painted by the sun;
Their dust, pervaded by the nerves of God,
Throbs with an overmastering energy
Knowing and doing. Ebbs the tide, they lie.
White hollow shells upon the desert shore,
But not the less the eternal wave rolls on
To animate new millions, and exhale
Races and planets, its enchanted foam.
The earlier figure-of music and instrument-
has been a favourite with other seers. Leibnitz
speculates on "un seul esprit, qui est universel et
qui anime tout l'univers,-comme un même souffle
de vent fait sonner différemment divers tuyaux
d'orgue."1 Burns asks: “Are we a piece of
machinery which, like the Æolian harp, passive,
takes the impression of the passing accident?"
And Coleridge versifies it in The Eolian Harp:
And what if all of animated nature
Be but organic harps divinely framed,
That tremble into thought as o'er them sweeps,
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
At once the soul of each, and God of all?
This poem, or perhaps something of Emerson's-
whose writings he called his Bible, carrying them
everywhere-probably inspired William Sharp in
some early lines :-
¹ Considérations sur la Doctrine d'un Esprit universel.
P
D 2
36
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
We all are wind-harps casemented on Earth,
And every breath of God that falls may fetch
Some dimmest echo of a faint refrain
From even the worst strung of all of us.¹
The idea has no doubt presented itself to many
minds, but few have been so possessed by it as
Emerson. And his daily experience proved the
truth of it to him. He was not a thinker so much
as a receiver. He kept his strings in order, and
let the breeze of God play on them: going daily
to the woods to listen for the thoughts, not originated
by him, he held, though coloured by the tempera-
ment of the individual through which these
inspirations of the Universal Mind passed. He
believed, with Carlyle, that it is the direct inspiration
of the Almighty that giveth us understanding :
We lie open on one side to the deeps of spiritual
nature, to the attributes of God.2
As there is no screen or ceiling between our heads
and the infinite heavens, so is there no bar or wall in
the soul, where man the effect ceases, and God the
cause begins.3
To return for the moment to the Eolian harp
idea, it is noteworthy that Emerson was peculiarly
sensitive to natural music of this kind. He writes
of the gale making the pines into wind-harps, and
he had an Æolian harp fixed in his study window;
this is referred to in his poem The Harp. His ear
1 Amid the Uplands. See the Memoir by Mrs. Sharp, p. 20.
2 ii., p. 272. (The Over-Soul.)
3 ibid., p. 271. (The Over-Soul.)
PROPHET AND PHILOSOPHER
37
for music was not keen, and his highest praise was
that "it sounded more like an Eolian harp than
anything else," which is what he said of the
singing in the Sistine Chapel at Rome, where he
heard the Miserere sung before the Pope and
Cardinals.1
It is almost amusing to note the half-irritated,
half-admiring tone of Carlyle, with regard to his
friend's shining abstractions. "How you go on,'
he says in a letter, "as if altogether on the Over-
Soul, the Ideal, the Perfect or Universal and
Eternal in this life of ours; and take so little heed
of the frightful quantities of friction and perverse
impediment there everywhere are; the reflections.
upon which in my own poor life made me now and
then very sad, as I read you."2 The difference was
temperamental. Both men were prophets, but one
saw the shadows and the other saw the light; and
though war on the former is, in a way, much the
same thing as praise of the latter, there is great
subjective difference for the prophet himself. The
man who can look at the light is greatly the happier.
Emerson was pre-eminently gifted with this serene
optimism. He was a man of unshakable faith.
Whatever happened, he could believe that all
was well. “Before all such questions," says Lord
Gifford, "he stands uncovered and reverently
silent. No proud denial, no cynic scoff, no heartless
sneer escapes him; and without a theory of the
universe he clings to its moral meaning." Life is
for our education: the universe exists for the
1 ix., p. 484.
2 vii., p. 345.
(Notes to The Harp.)
(Notes to Society and Solitude.)
38
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
weal of souls; and though this may not be a
philosophical system, it is enough to live by, if
held by strong faith. And indeed this faith followed
naturally from Emerson's Platonism. Believing
existence to be ultimately spiritual and One, within
which we individuals are made to work together,
like feet, like hands, like the rows of the upper and
lower teeth," as Marcus Aurelius has it,¹ he could
give up his small finite self to the wider purposes of
that great and incomprehensible One, assured that
if a man does his best he need not worry about his
own finitude. The One knows :
66
One Life through all the immense creation runs,
One Spirit is the Moon's, the sea's, the sun's;
All forms in the air that fly, on the earth that creep,
And the unknown nameless monsters of the deep,-
Each breathing thing obeys one Mind's control,
And in all substance is a single Soul.2
1 Myers's Classical Essays, p. 215.
2 ibid., p. 173. (Virgil: Æneid.)
1

CHAPTER IV.
RELIGION.
""
DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES once spoke of
Emerson as "an iconoclast without a hammer,
who took down our idols from their pedestals so
tenderly that it seemed like an act of worship.
Mr. Cabot, commenting, says: "I am not sure that
he took them down, or ever thought it worth while
that they should come down so long as they were
really objects of worship. What he wished to
disturb was formalism the gazing after past
revelations until we are blind to the present."1
This is very true. Emerson had no hostility
to any faith that is really alive. He knew perfectly
well that there will be different forms of religion as
long as there are different human minds, and that
comparatively low forms are the only ones that are
comprehensible and acceptable to minds in a low
stage of development. The main thing is to trust
our own best leadings, and not to regard with too
abject an eye the leadings expressed by others.
God is not dead; He speaks in each living soul;
and truth and good are better received at first hand
from Him, than at secondhand through this or that
*•..
1 ii., p. 432. (Notes to The Over-Soul.)

40
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
other experient, who too often in past times has
tried to put his experience into logical form
a creed-and then demanded "acceptance" thereof,
not realising that the creed, though perhaps
expressing his own experience as well as words may,
nevertheless cannot carry over that experience into
the soul of another. Emerson says: Get your own
experience listen to your own best self, which is
an inlet of the deep of God. "Trust thyself;
every heart vibrates to that iron string."
And he practised his own precept. He gave out
his message, full of faith, and left people to make
what they could of it. He declined to argue. He
felt that argument is mean. The reasoners have
no vision, the two things are incompatible.
"Argument burns up perception." It makes the
mind busy and fussy, and destroys the placidity
which is a condition of inspiration. Also, by
introducing passion, bias, desire to convince, joy
of victory, anger at defeat, it contracts the visual
field-as in a hysteric's eyes-and disables the
disputants for seeing all round the question.
Truth ceases to be truth when polemically
stated.”1
CC
7
This prophetic and non-argumentative method
resulted in situations humorous to look back on,
though serious enough at the time. In 1838 Emerson
gave an Address to the Divinity School in Cambridge.

¹ v., p. 337. (Notes to "Race" in English Traits.) Emerson
once gave a lecture in a Western city, and was subjected to cross-
questioning by dialecticians present, who sought to make him
prove his thesis. Arrived home, he remarked, with rueful
amusement: "Their logicians rolled me in the dust." X.,
P. 524. (Notes to Aristocracy.)
RELIGION
41
He spoke his mind freely, dwelling on his favourite
theme that there may be revelation now, if we
will only have faith in a living God, and let Him
speak, instead of turning back to dubious history
and tradition, seeking to base religion on things
said to have happened two thousand years ago.
Religion is an inner thing; as soon as we seek
outside of us for bases and supports, in history
or church, we confess its absence within. Emerson
sought to stimulate this real religion in his young
hearers who were about to go forth as ministers,
and the Address is a magnificent monument of
piety and splendid English.
SPREN
4
CA, 1 1,
But it roused tremendous clamour. The "stern
old war-gods," as Emerson calls them in his poem
Uriel (i.e., the old brigade of theologians), thundered
at him from their various pulpits. The air was
full of pamphlets. Mr. Ware, his former colleague
at the Second Church, and himself a professor at
the college, wrote asking for his "arguments," to
which Emerson quite affably and candidly replied
that he hadn't any. He told the truth as he saw
it, but did not know "what arguments mean in
reference to any expression of a thought. I delight
in telling what I think; but if you ask me how
I dare say so, or why it is so, I am the most helpless
of mortal men.”1 The theologians discussed
whether Emerson was a Christian or not, and some
of them came to an unfavourable conclusion, even
labelling him atheist. In short, he had fluttered
the ecclesiastical dovecotes pretty badly, and it

1 Holmes's Ralph Waldo Emerson, p. 126.
<>.
A
42
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
was thirty years before the University decided that
he was a fit and proper person to be asked to take
any further part in its functions.
Meanwhile Emerson, though somewhat annoyed
by the notoriety, was not seriously disturbed. He
withdrew to Concord and went on with other work,
leaving the hurricane to blow itself out. Dr.
Holmes wittily remarked that "Emerson had little
more than the part of Patroclus when the Greeks
and Trojans fought over his body." It is curious
that the Address made such a stir in the supposedly
liberal Unitarian circles of New England, but
evidently the liberals were very conservative. The
present situation between the European liberal
theologians and the school of Drews, is almost an
exact repetition of that created by Emerson's
famous Address in 1838-which, by the way,
stimulated Theodore Parker to enthusiastic activity,
and thus had far-reaching indirect effects in the
fostering of a real religious revival.
Most people confuse Religion and Theology.
They think the former cannot exist without an
intellectually-devised theological scheme. And
indeed, in history, the one generally leads to the
other. But the religion comes_first. It is the
first-hand experience of the soul. As soon as we
begin to reason about it, it has gone as experience,-
the fire is cold. The two cannot exist together.
You cannot feel deeply and argue coldly at the
same time. Emerson knew this, and urges a bold
throwing overboard of the mechanical reasoning
processes, when the higher inspirations visit us :-
NRES
1 Ralph Waldo Emerson, p. 116.


ܐܕܣ
-
--
RELIGION
43
In your metaphysics you have denied personality
to the Deity; yet when the devout motions of the soul
come, yield to them heart and life, though they should
clothe God with shape and colour. Leave your theory,
as Joseph his coat in the hands of the harlot, and flee.1
(C
2
It is worth mentioning here, that this "denial of
God's personality" has been much misunderstood.
As Emerson often said, he denied personality to
God because it was too little, not too much.'
Personality is an affair of limitations. The idea
of personality arises from the experience of our
own little self; and to attribute the quality
to God is blasphemous anthropomorphism. Any
attribute that we can conceive, must be inadequate
as applied to Him. He is high as heaven, what
canst thou know? He taketh up the earth as a
very little thing. Arcturus and Pleiades obey His
word. The deep of Space is nowhere void of His
presence. Therefore in our philosophy we must
confess that God is too great for us to understand.
In Him we live and move and have our being, and
the part cannot understand the whole. A phagocyte
in my blood cannot understand me. Agnosticism
is intellect's duty.
1-no difference
But we are not all intellect. ' We feel and act as
well as know. And on this side of our nature we
may quite legitimately think of God in our own
idiom. If it helps us-as it often does-to pray
to God as to a great person, to feel out after Him,
seeking communion and inspiration, we are justified
RAKA

D

1 ii., p. 57. (Self-Reliance.)
2 ibid., p. 391. (Notes to Self-Reliance.)
Spas Mally you" it'
44
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
1.
in temporarily attributing human qualities to Him—
the best qualities that we can conceive. They will
be inadequate, but it is the best we can do, and
therefore we cannot be held responsible for not
doing better. And the qualities so to be attributed,
as Emerson himself says, are best summed up in
the great word of Jesus: "Father."
As regards preaching, Emerson was chiefly
insistent that the preacher shall speak from his own
experience, first-hand, giving what wisdom life may
have taught him, and not quoting that of others as
a makeshift. In the famous Address he refers to
a preacher who "sorely tempted me to say I would
go to church no more." The man had lived in
vain-had nothing of his own to say :-
He had no one word intimating that he had laughed
or wept, was married or in love, had been commended,
or cheated, or chagrined. If he had ever lived and
acted, we were none the wiser for it. The capital
secret of his profession, namely, to convert life into
truth, he had not learned. Not one fact in all his
experience had he yet imported into his doctrine.
This man had ploughed and planted and talked and
bought and sold ; he had read books; he had eaten and
drunken; his head aches, his heart throbs; he smiles
and suffers; yet was there not a surmise, a hint, in all
the discourse, that he had ever lived at all.¹
Annoying, truly; yet Emerson himself says in his
Journal that "the next best thing to good preaching
is bad preaching. I have even more thoughts
during or enduring it than at other times."2
1 i., p. 138.
2 i., p. 428. (Notes to the Address.)

RELIGION
45
Probably we all have; but the thoughts are
unfortunately not the right sort, being homicidal
rather than devotional.
A curious thing about Emerson is that he never
seems to have gone through any particular struggle
or even depression, in attaining the saving faith.
He had none of Goethe's suicidal tendencies, no
Shelleyan atheistic revolt. He had faith from the
beginning; threw himself on his own intuitions
from the start. Carlyle had to make his exodus
from Houndsditch, get rid of the Jewish old clothes
and the Calvinism in which he had been brought
up, before he could even get within sight of any
restful Canaan. Emerson had scarcely any
difficulty. It was partly temperamental, for he
naturally relied more completely on his intuitions.
than Carlyle did, and was therefore less disturbed
by external systems; but the temperament itself
was largely the result of his heredity and environ-
ment. The religious atmosphere of Boston was
much milder than that of Ecclefechan. Emerson's
father was a cultivated clergyman, Carlyle's was
a working mason: and their environment differed
to the same extent. There was little insistence on
dogma-comparatively-in Boston Unitarianism;
and Emerson freed himself with little effort, and
with maintenance of perfect serenity.
The differences, nevertheless, were vital.
Channing, the greatest of the Unitarian divines,
once said: "I am little of a Unitarian," for he
realised that New England Unitarianism, though
learned and polished and eminently respectable,
was an external and intellectual religion, an affair
chiefly of logic and copy-book morals: while he
I

46
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
himself felt that no religion is true if it does not
come from the heart. Here Emerson and Channing
are at one. The former said: “I am more of a
Quaker than anything else," and it was true. He
waited on the Lord,-waited for Divine leadings.
There was no salvation for him in a book, however
ancient; or in a cultus, however respectable. The
Spirit saith to us individually: Is it well with
thee? Souls are not saved in bundles.
To every-
one, therefore, he says: Trust your own best
self: it is the only Way.
His tolerance, however, was complete. He could
find some good in all systems and all people. He
"took them by their best handle." He could write
lovingly of Montaigne the Sceptic, but he preferred
an earnest priest to a narrow denier. Always it
was affirmation that attracted him, not negation.
Consequently he could praise any positive system,
even the ecclesiastical, which moreover affected his
sense of beauty by its stateliness :-
I like a church; I like a cowl;
I love a prophet of the soul;
And on my heart monastic aisles
Fall like sweet strains, or pensive smiles.1
If he had been at Oxford, England, instead of
Cambridge, Mass., he would probably have been
associated with Pusey or Newman; though whether
he would have been logical enough to follow the
latter to the only rational halting-place if external
authority be admitted, is doubtful. He was not
1
¹ ix., p. 6. The Problem.
RELIGION
47
logically endowed: but if he had been at Oxford
he might have developed his reason and lost some
of his confidence in intuition, and the world would
have been the poorer for it.
As it was, he was indeed more of a Quaker than
anything else, if one had to class him with any of
the sects. He used language very like theirs, with
regard to "leadings.
""
:
I do not pretend to any commandment or large
revelation. But if at any time I form a plan, propose
a journey or a course of conduct, I find, perhaps, a
silent obstacle in my mind that I cannot account for.
Very well; I let it lie, think it may pass away; if it does
not pass away, I yield to it, obey it. You ask me to
describe it. I cannot describe it. It is not an oracle,
not an angel, not a dream, not a law; it is too simple
to be described; it is but a grain of mustard seed. But
such as it is, it is something which the contradiction of
all mankind could not shake.¹
How like the daimon of Socrates! The fact that
two of the wisest of mankind had this warning
inner Voice, should be an effective deterrent to
a too vigorous intellectualism.
1 Charles J. Woodbury's Talks with Emerson, p. 115.
T
CHAPTER V
SCIENCE.
IT is often remarked how up-to-date Emerson is,
in matters of science. The principle of evolution
was basic to his thought, even in his earliest
published work. As motto to Nature (second
edition, published 1849, though the thought is in
the whole essay, first published in 1836) he puts
this verse:
A subtle chain of countless rings
The next unto the farthest brings ;
The eye reads omens where it goes,
And speaks all languages the rose,
And, striving to be man, the worm
Mounts through all the spires of form.
This was ten years before The Origin of Species
was published. It seems probable that Emerson
acquired his evolutionary thought from Leibnitz,
Schelling, and Oken (via Coleridge), in the first
instance. He had also read Lee's Life of Cuvier,
Chambers' Vestiges of Creation, and some of Buffon.
In 1835 he read Lyell's Geology, which would greatly
confirm him in the acceptance of Continuity as
against catastrophism in inorganic nature, and
SCIENCE
49
he evidently carried the idea right through, for we
find constantly such statements as these :-
The gases gather to the solid firmament; the chemic
lump arrives at the plant, and grows; arrives at the
quadruped, and walks; arrives at the man, and thinks.¹
The fossil strata show us that Nature began with
rudimental forms and rose to the more complex as
fast as the earth was fit for their dwelling-place; and
that the lower perish as the higher appear. Very few
of our race can be said to be yet finished men. We
still carry sticking to us some remains of the preceding
inferior quadruped organisation.2
Plants are the young of the world, vessels of health
and vigour; but they grope ever upward towards
consciousness; the trees are imperfect men, and seem
to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the ground.
He (Leibnitz) says to the caterpillar, How dost thou,
brother? Please God, you shall yet be a philosopher.4
The book of Nature is the book of Fate. She turns
the gigantic pages,-leaf after leaf,-never re-turning
one. One leaf she lays down, a floor of granite; then
a thousand ages, and a bed of slate; a thousand ages,
and a measure of coal; a thousand ages, and a layer of
marl and mud vegetable forms appear; her first
misshapen animals, zoöphyte, trilobium, fish; then
saurians,―rude forms, in which she has only blocked
her future statue, concealing under these unwieldy
monsters the fine type of her coming king. The face
of the planet cools and dries, the races meliorate, and
man is born. But when a race has lived its term, it
comes no more again.5
1 iv., p. II.
2 vi., p. 165.
³ iii., p. 181.
4 ix., p. 457.
5 vi., p. 15.
(Uses of Great Men.)
(Culture.)
(Nature.)
(Notes on an unpublished lecture.)
(Fate.)
E
50
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
It is a long way from granite to the oyster; farther
yet to Plato and the preaching of the immortality of
the soul. Yet all must come.1
On the darker side of evolution-so to speak-the
pains and penalties of heredity,-Emerson has a
finely expressive paragraph, which the eugenists
of to-day might take as a text :
How shall a man escape from his ancestors, or draw
off from his veins the black drop which he drew from
his father's or his mother's life? It often appears in
a family as if all the qualities of the progenitors were
potted in several jars,—some ruling quality in each
son or daughter of the house; and sometimes the unmixed
temperament, the rank unmitigated elixir, the family
vice is drawn off in a separate individual, and the others
are proportionally relieved. We sometimes see a change
of expression in our companion and say his father or
his mother comes to the windows of his eyes, and
sometimes a remote relative.2
This was apparently written about 1850, and seems
to have been the inspiration of Holmes's novel The
Guardian Angel, in which we find the variegated
ancestry of Myrtle Hazard, including a famous
beauty, an Indian, and a witch who was burned at
the stake, coming to the windows of her eyes in
turn. These ideas were very much in the air about
this time in New England, for The House of the
Seven Gables similarly portrays the outcropping of
the puritan Pyncheon in his descendants. Prob-
ably this interest in heredity, of which Holmes's
1 iii., p. 180. (Nature.)
2 vi., pp. 9, 10.
(Fate.)
SCIENCE
51
Elsie Venner is another example, was largely due to
Lyell's Geology, which was published in 1835. But
it is curious how prophetically Emerson accepts
the full Darwinian doctrine of twenty years later.
No doubt he was prepared for it temperamentally
and by his reading of the Greek thinkers who so
strenuously sought to explain Nature by One
principle. Heraclitus and Zenophanes in particular
were favourites with him. His conceptions_were
dynamic, not static. He must see Nature as
continual advance and rise. Then, as is his Plato-
like habit, lifting and translating the material into
the spiritual, extending evolution to the whole
history of the soul, inner as well as outer, he finely
says:-

Within every man's thought is a higher thought-
within the character he exhibits to-day, a higher
character. The youth puts off the illusions of the
child, the man puts off the ignorance and tumultuous
passions of youth; proceeding thence puts off the
egotism of manhood, and becomes at last a public and
universal soul. He is rising to greater heights, but also
rising to realities; the outer relations and circumstances
dying out, he entering deeper into God, God into him,
until the last garment of egotism falls, and he is with
God-shares the will and the immensity of the First
Cause.1
1 viii., p. 348. (Immortality.) It is difficult to reconcile
this with the teaching of Emerson's favourite modern poet, for
Wordsworth in the " Ode" regards the child as nearer heaven
than the adult. No doubt Emerson would have declined to
attempt reconciliation, and would have said that both must
be true somehow.
E 2
52
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
66
It is noteworthy that Emerson, in his presentment
of Evolution, emphasises effort from within, to
which Lamarckian position we are now coming
back-partly in consequence of Samuel Butler's
teaching—after a period of too great emphasis on
Natural Selection. The form of a living thing is
determined not entirely by the unconscious weeding-
out process, but partly by the want" of the
thing and its ancestors. The giraffe has a long
neck because the short-necked ones were not so
well adapted to cropping high twigs, that is
the natural selection side; but also partly because
giraffes want a long neck, for that useful purpose.
There is impulse, effort; "striving to be man, the
worm mounts through all the spires of form.”
Remark the unceasing effort throughout nature at
somewhat better than the actual creatures.1
J
It is Bergson's doctrine of creative evolution, of
the élan vital which presses forward and ever for-
ward, pronounced long before the famous French
philosopher was heard of or even born.
It is dangerous to prophesy unless you know,
but Emerson risked a few predictions. He speaks
of transfusion of the blood, which shall enable
a man to change his blood as often as his linen.
And "steam . . . is ruddering the balloon, and the
next war will be fought in the air," a prediction
which Holmes treated with rather contemptuous
(Young American.)
1 i., p. 372.
2 v., p. 161. (Wealth.)
SCIENCE
53
incredulity.¹ This was in 1856. The next war
was to come very quickly-the American Civil
War-and it was not fought in the air, nor is it
steam that rudders our aeroplanes and dirigibles ;
but in essentials Emerson's vision was true, for the
Great War was largely fought in the air-not so
much as to actual combats as to information-
gaining, on which ranging and tactics depend.
There is a quaint scientific sentence in the second
essay called Nature:-
They say that by electro-magnetism, your salad
shall be grown from the seed, whilst your fowl is roasting
for dinner it is a symbol of our modern aims and
endeavors,—of our condensation and acceleration of
objects; but nothing is gained nature cannot be
cheated man's life is but seventy salads long, grow
they swift or grow they slow.
Holmes makes fun of the celeritous salad, and
refers to Jules Verne as a likely authority on the
subject; but in these days of Sir Oliver Lodge's
successful experiments in the electrification of
crops, Holmes's gibe falls flat, and Emerson would
have the laugh of him if they could discuss the
question now,—or at least they would be quits.2
The particular science to which Emerson was
most strongly drawn, was astronomy. The Essays
are full of references to the stars, both in their
scientific and so to
to speak-emotional aspect.
¹ Ralph Waldo Emerson, p. 257. "Possibly; but it is perhaps
as safe to predict that it will be fought on wheels; the soldiers
on bicycles, the officers on tricycles.
""
2 ibid., p. 186.
54
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
{
;
}
Speaking of creed-narrowness, and the widening of
mind brought about by the study of the immense
physical universe of which our planet is but a tiny
particle, he pithily says: "The narrow sectarian
cannot read astronomy with impunity." He him-
self had read Lives of Kepler and Newton, also
Herschel's Astronomy, and in his European tour of
1833 he had done homage at the tomb of Galileo in
Florence. He often said that he hoped old age
might bring him leisure to study the subject.2 Its
mathematics, however, would have been a barrier
to any close acquaintance with astronomical physics.
And indeed the stars were more to him as things
of remote, mysterious grandeur and beauty, than
as exemplifiers of law. Kant said that two things
filled him with ever new and increasing admiration
and awe,—the starry heavens above, and the moral
law within. Emerson had the same feeling :-
One might think the atmosphere was made trans-
parent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly
bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime. Seen in
the streets of cities, how great they are! If the stars
should appear one night in a thousand years, how
would men believe and adore; and preserve for many
generations the remembrance of the city of God which
had been shown! But every night come out these
envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their
admonishing smile.³
The stars awaken reverence, partly by their
1 viii., p. 211.
2 i., p. 405.
³ ibid., p. 7.
8
(Progress of Culture.)
(Notes to Nature.)
(Nature.)
SCIENCE
55
remoteness and inaccessibility, which assure their
continued mystery, leaving scope for the play of
imagination, wonder, awe :-
The ancients are only venerable to us because
distance has destroyed what was trivial; as the sun
and stars affect us only grandly, because we cannot
reach to their smoke and surfaces and say, Is that all?¹
Stars taunt us by a mystery
Which we could never spell.2
And probably the most-quoted sentence of all the
much-quoted epigrams of Emerson, is the famous
"Hitch your wagon to a star," in the essay
Civilization. Dr. Holmes says of this aphorism
that it is worthy to stand by the side of that which
Juvenal says came from heaven. It is indeed an
inspiration. Emerson uses it first in a material
way, pointing out how, in a sea-shore mill, the
tides are made to drive wheels and grind corn, the
moon being thus harnessed to our tasks. Then,
lifting the thought into the higher plane, he repeats
the maxim. Aim at the good. Be on the side of
the angels :-
Hitch your wagon to a star. Let us not fag in
paltry works which serve our pot and bag alone. Let
us not lie and steal. No god will help. We shall find
all their teams going the other way,-Charles's Wain,
1 xii., p. 387.
2 ix., p. 17. (The World-Soul.)
³ vii., pp. 28,
(Civilization.)
30.
4 Ralph Waldo Emerson, p. 252.
(Papers from the Dial. Past and Present.)
56
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
Great Bear, Orion, Leo, Hercules: every god will
leave us.
Work rather for those interests which the
divinities honor and promote,-justice, love, freedom,
knowledge, utility.¹
It would be difficult to frame a moral exhortation
more eloquently than that, maintaining at the same
time a complete truthfulness and absence of
rhapsody.
1 vii., p. 30.
Emerson tripped here, in a little matter of
detail: Charles's Wain and the Great Bear are the same
constellation.
CHAPTER VI.
A
SOCIAL.
CC
22
THE philosopher and seer is not usually a club-
able" man. His inner activities are not compatible
with gregarious habits. He must live mostly aloof
from the crowd, and must even deny himself the
indulgence of many desirable friendships. Thus it
was with Emerson. He attended the Saturday
Club with Hawthorne, Holmes, Longfellow, and
others-though he mostly sat silent-and he was
in the habit of speaking genially in passing
salutation to strangers whom he met in his walks;
but his life was essentially inner, and he was never
very sociable. Perhaps it was partly due to lack
of conversational fluency. He was so scrupulously
anxious to get just the right word to fit his thought,
that he spoke with hesitancy; O. W. Holmes says
that his talk was like a well-dressed woman picking
her way across a muddy road, or like someone
crossing a brook on stepping-stones.¹ He was
quite remarkably destitute of gift for extempore
speech. On several occasions when he apparently
spoke extempore, the fact was-as Mr. Woodbury
informs us, that the speech had been written out

1 Ralph Waldo Emerson, P. 364.
MILĀ
58
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
and memorized. Once after hearing an able and
apt extempore speech from Phillips, he said he
would give "a thousand shekels for that man's
secret." Of Beecher's oratory he said: "What
will you do with an eloquent man? He makes you
laugh, and you cannot throw your egg.
>>1
But the lack of fluency was not the only reason
for his solitariness. His spirit dwelt remote from
the small-talk of average conversation. He lived
habitually on heights which others reach only by
spurts, in their best moments. If people have
nothing to say worth saying, let them be silent.
"Do not say things. What you are thunders at
me over what you say." The boring insect bores
for food or for egg-laying, and thus has some excuse ;
but the human equivalent bores that he may bore.
Especially was Emerson severe on querulousness
over slight ailments
... there is one topic 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, or sciatica, or leprosy,
or thunderstroke, I beseech you by all angels to hold
your peace, and not pollute the morning
.. by
corruption and groans.
•
If Emerson yielded to the pull downwards to average
levels, it spoilt his after-flight, weighted his wings.
"My doom and my strength is to be solitary," he
said, evidently realising that he missed much
1 Woodbury's Talks with Emerson, p. 160.
2 vi., p. 196. (Behavior.)
SOCIAL
59
pleasure thereby, but that the solitariness was a
condition of his power. It is significant that even
his intimates called him Mr. Emerson. His fine
and delicate spirit had to fence itself off from
familiarity :-
.
I prefer a tendency to stateliness to an excess of
fellowship... Let us not be too much acquainted. .
In all things I would have the island of a man inviolate.
Let us sit apart as the gods, talking from peak to peak
all round Olympus.1
Friendship should be surrounded with ceremonies and
respects.2
I do then with my friends as I do with my books,
I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom
use them. I cannot afford to speak much with my
friend. If he is great, he makes me so great that I can-
not descend to converse. In the great days, presenti-
ments hover before me in the firmament. I ought then
to dedicate myself to them. . . Then, though I prize
my friends, I cannot afford to talk with them and
study their visions, lest I lose my own. It would
indeed give me a certain household joy to quit this
lofty seeking, this spiritual astronomy, or search of
stars, and come down to warm sympathies with you;
but then I know well I shall mourn always the vanishing
of my mighty gods.3
If Emerson was like this with his friends, it is to
be expected that he was more so with mere
acquaintances. And truly, in spite of his serenity,
1 iii., pp. 136, 137. (Manners.)
2 vi., p. 187. (Behavior.)
³ ii., pp. 214, 215. (Friendship.)
60
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
he did not achieve the height of suffering fools
gladly. He was often pestered with visits from
celebrity-hunters, crank devotees of various brands,
as well as of genuine disciples of saner kind. Many
of them, though ostensibly coming as admirers,
proceeded to talk about themselves and their pet
subjects, at wearisome length. He was ordinarily
a good listener, and too kind-hearted to hurt a
tedious talker's feelings by winding the clock up
(as the present writer's grandfather used to do as
a gentle hint to a late visitor), and he suffered in
consequence :-
I weary of dealing with people, each cased in his
several insanity. . . I am not large man enough to
treat him firmly and unsympathetically as a patient,
and if treated equally and sympathetically as sane,
his disease makes him the worst of bores.1
2
And elsewhere he has said how he dreaded the
autobiography which usurped the largest part and
sometimes the whole of the discourse of very worthy
persons whom he knew. There is both tragedy
and comedy here. It seems pitiful to think that
a man of Emerson's qualities should have had
his time wasted and his nerves racked by thought-
less and stupid people. We can hardly estimate
how much he suffered at their hands. Yet all who
knew him were impressed by his perfect amiability;
and, as Holmes well says, such unfailing urbanity,
1 vi., p. 370. (Notes to Culture.)
2 ibid., p. 372. (Notes to Culture.)
egotists.' (vi., p. 132. Culture.)
("
The pest of society is
SOCIAL
61
in a nature fastidious as was his in its whole
organization, implies a power of self-command
quite out of the ordinary.
"1
It is always a significant fact when a man is most
loved and respected where he is best known. It
was so with Emerson. This prophet had most
honour in his own place and among his own folk.
"He was most of all believed in, honoured, beloved,
lamented, in the little village circle that centred
about his own fireside.' And he had a natural
human longing for human companionship and
intercourse, if the standard could be high.
"A new
person is to me a great event, and hinders me
from sleep."2 But the new person often turns out
disappointing; at first he is unknown, a sea to
swim in, but you speedily find his farther shore,—
the sea is a pond, and “ you care not if you never
see it again." Consequently he was slow to seek
further acquaintances, and when asked permission
to have presented to him some person for whom
he felt no affinity, he would answer, with a whimsical
smile: "Whom God hath put asunder, why should
man join together? "4
*
1 Holmes Life of Emerson, P. 417.
2 ii., p. 195. (Friendship.)
3 ibid., p. 308. (Circles.)
4 Talks with Emerson. (Woodbury.) p. 127.
But he did others many a good turn, and went
out of his way to be of service. The case of Whitman
is an example. Emerson recognised the good
qualities of Leaves of Grass, but thought the book
was spoiled by its very frank and unnecessarily
sexual imagery in such poems as "The Body
62
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
Electric." He visited Whitman and spent several
hours in discussing the point and urging
expurgation; but Whitman held to his own way,
and rather bragged of it afterwards-referring to
Emerson as too fastidious, over-sophisticated, caring
chiefly for elaborate finish, polish, style. However,
they remained on friendly terms, in spite of a rather
mean advertising dodge of Whitman's, which most
people would have resented. Without Emerson's
permission he printed, on the outside cover of
Leaves of Grass, the sentence "I greet you at
the beginning of a great career," from a letter just
received. Emerson's fame was at its height, and
his praise would have sufficed to sell any book.
So far as is known, he made no protest, though
his reputation suffered, and misunderstandings
arose; for it seemed as though he endorsed the
whole contents of the book, which was far from
being the case.
1
In labelling Emerson a recluse, a solitary, an
unsociable, we must not forget that as a matter
of fact he came in touch with a large number of
people of all sorts in his winter lecturing tours-
a larger number than many more sociable people
ever meet-and this saved him from any danger of
becoming un-human. He was always a good
listener, if the speaker had anything in the least
informing to say, and he listened with special
interest to the hard-working pioneer folk whom he
met in the remoter districts. And in those days.
there was little civilisation outside New England.
1 Cooke's R. W. Emerson, p. 233.
SOCIAL
63
His journeys were arduous. Three times he crossed
the Mississippi on foot, and once in a rowing boat
amid grinding ice-cakes. Long prairie-drives were
frequent, to make connexions for reaching his next
town, and he often had to stay in the rudest of
taverns. Twenty years of this were endured with
cheerful courage, and not without profit in increasing
catholicity of mind. From these people, uncouth
but virile, Emerson learnt a great respect for
the honest, blunt, hard-working, nation-making
pioneer;¹ and probably at times felt himself some-
what of a social parasite, unable to do anything for
himself, as most mere writers and talkers at times
do feel.
It must not, of course, be taken that Emerson,
even at home, was an actual hermit of the Thoreau
kind, or even as shy as Tennyson was. He often
invited friends in for a social evening. But the
friends were of a sort that were worth asking, for
the stimulation they supplied. The town of
Concord at that time was the home of a remarkable
number of more or less famous men, and of several
geniuses. Among those who gathered at Emerson's
fireside were Longfellow, Lowell, Hawthorne,
Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, O. W. Holmes, Bronson
Alcott and his daughter Louisa, and many lesser
lights; and, notwithstanding the hesitancy of
Emerson's speech, and the absent-minded silences
of Hawthorne—a remote and gloomy spirit-there
must have been many conversations worth reporting.


1 "Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is
this: Every man I meet is my master in some point, and in
that I learn of him." (Greatness.)
any.
Levoia
acographe

64
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSOPH
Unfortunately, the group had no Boswell. Dr.
Holmes would have best fulfilled that office, but he
evidently never felt quite at home on the mystic
heights reached by some of the group. He was
a very human man, with a sparkling wit and, if one
may say it without irreverence, an eye to the
commercial side of the literary craft; and he no
doubt regarded many of these people as the most
unmitigated of cranks. Alcott in particular was
a dreamer. Emerson says that he might have
considered the Platonic world as cloudland if he
had not known Alcott, "who is a native of that
country." In 1878 a sort of chapel was built,
through the generosity of a friend, in the grounds
of the Orchard House, where the Alcotts had lived
since 1857, and near "The Wayside," where Haw-
thorne lived. In this chapel a School of Philosophy
was held for six weeks each summer, until 1886.
Emerson gave a course of lectures there, each
summer as long as he lived, assisted by his daughter
Ellen, who sat by him and found the lost places in
his notes; for by this time he was seventy-five, and
failing in memory and mental power. Hither came
many seekers after Truth, and many cranks, such
as foregather in Summer Schools at Letchworth and
elsewhere. Strange beings were seen in Concord
streets, and were safely put down by the inhabitants
as belonging to the philosophic tribe. Portentous
subjects such as "The Genesis of the Maya" and
"Reminiscence as Related to Pre-existence" were
discussed in the "chapel," sometimes at an
astonishing length. Dr. McCosh, then president of
Princeton, lectured for five hours without stop,
and some of the weaker brethren drifted out and
tragal
10-95)
5, Johnsen
SOCIAL
65
sat under the elms to recover.¹ But in this crank
atmosphere Emerson retained complete balance and
sanity, as Holmes has well said. And no doubt he
exercised a wholesome influence on the other sages,
ballasting their Platonic flights into the empyrean.
Some of Emerson's humorous comments on the
freak reformers who swarmed in New England
about this time, are among the best of his lighter
utterances. In 1844, lecturing on "New England
Reformers," he drew a diverting picture of the
various conventions and their members :-
They defied each other like a congress of kings, each
of whom had a realm to rule, and a way of his own
that made concert unprofitable. . . One apostle thought
all men should go to farming, and another that no
man should buy or sell, that the use of money was the
cardinal evil; another that the mischief was in our
diet, that we eat and drink damnation. These made
unleavened bread, and were foes to the death to
fermentation. It was in vain urged by the housewife
that God made yeast, as well as dough, and loves
fermentation just as dearly as He loves vegetation;
that fermentation develops the saccharine element in
the grain, and makes it more palatable and more
digestible. No; they wish the pure wheat, and will
die but it shall not ferment. . . Others attacked the
system of agriculture, the use of animal manures in
farming, and the tyranny of man over brute nature.
Even the insect world was to be defended,—that had
been too long neglected, and a society for the protection
1 See an excellent article by Lilian Whiting,
Concord," in Munsey's Magazine, October, 1913.
"
The Idyl of
F
66
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
of ground-worms, slugs and mosquitoes was to be
incorporated without delay. . .1
But with all this, as Emerson goes on to say, there
was good done. All the din and debate indicated
and encouraged a keener scrutiny of institutions
and a strong desire for better things. The multi-
plicity of cross-purposes seemed to produce a welter
of confusion, but out of it there emerged the changes
best fitted to the time. No one of the various
fanatics was right, for-as Emerson says in
Experience-the individual is always mistaken;
but out of the push-and-pull something is effected,
though always an unlooked-for result.
He designed many things, and drew in other persons
as coadjutors, quarrelled with some or all, blundered
much, and something is done; all are a little advanced,
but the individual is always mistaken. It turns out
somewhat new and very unlike what he promised
himself.2
Emerson kept somewhat aloof from the crank
reformers, though watching their experiments, at
Brook Farm and elsewhere, with a sort of amused
yet half-serious interest. No doubt he was saved
from joining them by his perception of their
narrowness and by his distaste for the petty
bickerings which broke out within the folds. He
had no taste for quarrels. Yet his peaceableness
was not due to weakness. It is on record that he
once refused his hand to one who had spoken ill of
a friend. 3
¹ iii., p. 252.
2 ibid., pp. 69, 70.
3 Holmes's R. W. E., p. 234.
CHAPTER VII.
STYLE.
If a stylist is one who writes for effect, thinking
more of manner than matter, Emerson is not a
stylist. But he nevertheless achieves a style which
has no equal in its own field. His mastery of sound
English is supreme, but it is always the thought
that makes the form. He never uses a superfluous
word, and his choice is unerring. This was partly
his spontaneous genius, and partly a matter of
critical selection and lapidary polishing afterwards.
He carried a note book, writing down his thoughts
when he "found himself felicitous "; these sentences
were afterwards sorted and arranged, and woven
into lectures. This involved several siftings and
weighings, and only the best survived. And, being
first of all a speaker, preacher, and lecturer, he
developed an ear for the cadence of a prose sentence,
though his sense of rhythm in verse was always
defective. Consequently his prose is the finest of its
kind in English literature-perhaps the finest in
any literature. It is loaded with thought, yet carries
its burden lightly; is never tedious or ponderous
or pedantic. It is as condensed as Bacon, and as
human as Montaigne, but far outsoars both of
them in range. They are of the earth and the
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68
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
understanding, Emerson can either walk or soar.
They are utterly material; he is spiritual.
There is no writer so suggestive. Every sentence
takes us deeper into the subject than we were able
to see before, or shows us entirely new things, or
exhibits the old in a new aspect. The mind is
stimulated, and every paragraph-almost every
sentence-initiates fresh trains of thought. The
sentences would serve
serve for sermon-texts. The
amount of thought that is crammed into a few words
is miraculous. After Emerson has said his say, all
comment looks thin and dilute. He exhausts the
subject:-
N
Fate is a name for facts not yet passed under the
fire of thought; for causes that are unpenetrated.—
Fate.
The world exists for the education of each man.
History.
Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail
in.-Experience.
:
The incommunicable trees begin to persuade us to
live with them, and quit our life of solemn trifles.—
Nature (the short essay).
Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices.-
Social Aims.
I-this thought which is called I-is the mould into
which the world is poured like melted wax. The
mould is invisible, but the world betrays the shape of
the mould.-The Transcendentalist.
As a plant upon the earth, so a man rests upon the
bosom of God; he is nourished by unfailing fountains,
and draws, at his need, inexhaustible power.-Nature:
"
Spirit."
STYLE
69
God builds His temple in the heart on the ruins of
churches and religions.-Worship.
""
Somewhat like Carlyle, though less so, Emerson
instinctively used Anglo-Saxon forms, inclining to
the simpler of two alternatives. He corrected his
children if they said "commence " for "begin,'
and preferred "mend " to "improve." No doubt
this detail is but one instance of his studied
moderation in word and phrase. He hated high-
sounding phrases and purple passages. Carlyle,
writing about the second volume of Essays, which
he was seeing through the press for his friend,
compliments him on the style, while lamenting its
incoherence in places :-
Pure genuine Saxon; strong and simple; of a
clearness, of a beauty-But they did not, sometimes,
rightly stick to their foregoers and their followers;
the paragraph not as a beaten ingot, but as a beautiful
square bag of duck-shot held together by canvas !¹
-
The incoherency, as already said, was inevitable.
Emerson was very conscious of it, and once wittily
likened himself to the subordinate devil who was
put to twisting ropes of sand to keep him out of
mischief:
ADMA
ཀ
The Asmodean task is mine,
To twist my sand-heaps into twine,
1 iii., p. 290. (Notes.)
and he never quite succeeded. There is often a
chasm between sentences, which the reader must
get across as best he can.
:
70
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
CC
66
Carlyle mentions his Saxon style, very justly;
but it is also true that Emerson was a good Latinist,
and it is frequently noticeable that in using a word
derived from the Latin he is thinking of its true
etymological meaning, rather than of the meaning
which it conveys in modern use. For instance, in
his use of "" express," which means to press out."
In the lecture Farming, he commends nearness to
Nature, and slights mere drawing-room heroes,"
who, put beside the farmer, would shrivel in his
presence: "he solid
he solid and
and unexpressive, they
expressed to gold-leaf." Similarly, in Social Aims,
speaking of laughter, he remarks that it seems to
require several generations of education to train
a squeaking or a shouting habit out of a man, and
that "sometimes, when in almost all expressions
the Choctaw and the slave have been worked out
of him, a coarse nature still betrays itself in his
contemptible squeals of joy."2 So in Demonology
he uses "discovered" in its original sense of
showing, uncovering, revealing, rather than of
finding, when he says that "the poor ship-master
discovered a sound theology, when in the storm at
sea he made his prayer to Neptune, 'O God, thou
mayst save me if thou wilt, and if thou wilt thou
mayst destroy me; but, however, I will hold my
rudder true.' "3 In Uses of Great Men he similarly
says: "Our globe discovers its hidden virtues, not
only in heroes and archangels, but in gossips and
1 vii., p. 153.
2 viii., p. 87. Cf. "I may here express a general remark,"
xi., p. 117. (West India Emancipation.)
3 x., p. 14. The quotation is from Montaigne.
STYLE
JI
6C
66
nurses." Speaking of "a careful and gloomy
generation" in The Scholar,¹ he obviously means
a generation full of care, not a thrifty or conscien-
tiously task-fulfilling one. And in speaking of
great men as beacon-points of light he pushes
purism to the verge of unintelligibility by phrasing
it could we one day complete the immense figure
which these flagrant points compose! "2 Not all
of his readers can be expected to remember the
Latin flagrans and flagrare, to burn. Also he goes
perhaps too far when he lays down the law in these
matters: "Never use the word development, and be
wary of the whole family of Fero."3 Dr. Edward
Emerson says of his father that "as for the family
of fero and its participle latum, he would rather say
'choice' than preference,' 'give way' than
defer,' 'gather than infer,' bring together '
than 'collate,' ' render ' than translate.'
Rather curiously, he did not like the Teutonic
standpoint" for "point of view," but the word is
now domiciled in English, and even admitted into
good society. It is short, simple, and picturesque,
and deserves its position.
،
,"4
But these are details. In the larger matter of
style in general-that indefinable quality—we
continually have the delight, in reading Emerson,
of hearing the thing said in the best possible way.
His sentences are gems, as well they may be; for,
over and above the original inspiration, he was
1
X., p. 262.
2 iv., p. 33.
9 xii., p. 292.
• ibid., p. 464.
,
(Uses of Great Men.)
(Art and Criticism.)
(Notes to Art and Criticism.)
72
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
:
continually sorting, sifting, rearranging, improving.
He destroyed a large quantity of MS. notes which
he thought below the printable standard. This is
regrettable, for it is likely that he put the standard
too high, and that much good stuff has perished.
But anyhow these drastic methods assured us of
the survival of that only which was fittest of the
fit. There is no twaddle or platitude in Emerson's
Essays and Poems. It is all concentrated, full of
thought and beauty.
re
A feature of Emerson's writing is its concrete-
ness. Perhaps some readers will think that
concreteness" is the one thing, above all, that
the transcendentalist philosopher lacks. Neverthe-
less Emerson is above all things concrete. He will
have words to represent things. He ties language
closely to reality-as when, in his use of "
express,
discover,” etc., just commented on, he is clearly
thinking of the physical act of pressing out and
uncovering. In a note to a lecture he says :-
66
>>
Every thought must be expressed by some object in
nature, and 'tis the fault of metaphysics that they
endeavor to express themselves in words at as many
removes from nature as possible.¹
A profound remark. We forget the derivation
of words, forget that they all were primarily attached
to some action or natural object, and the result is
that sometimes we pay ourselves with words "—
as Hobbes said-and really say nothing, though
under the impression that we are very learned and
(6
1 viii., p. 408.
STYLE
73
lofty. Picturesque language is best—and simplest ;
language which calls up material images to the eye,
pictures of natural objects.
Thus, for the great creative writer, close
acquaintance with Nature is essential. Emerson
fulfilled the requirement. He lived in the country,
and spent much time out of doors. Though not so
keen an observer as Thoreau, he was quite as
receptive-or more so-to the spirit of nature, to
the influences of sky and wind and wood and flower.
His writings are full of this delight; and his language
is at its best when dealing with such themes :-
The simple perception of natural forms is a delight.
To the body and mind which have been cramped by
noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and
restores their tone. The
The tradesman, the attorney
comes out of the din and craft of the street and sees
the sky and the woods, and is a man again. In their
eternal calm, he finds himself. The health of the eye
seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so
long as we can see far enough.1
I see the spectacle of morning from the hilltop over
against my house, from daybreak to sunrise, with
emotions which an angel might share. The long
slender bars of cloud float like fishes in the sea of
crimson light. From the earth, as a shore, I look out
into that silent sea. I seem to partake its rapid
transformations; the active enchantment reaches my
dust, and I dilate and conspire with the morning wind.
How does Nature deify us with a few and cheap
elements? Give me health and a day, and I will
make the pomp of emperors ridiculous. The dawn is
1 i., p. 16. (Nature.)
74
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
my Assyria; the sunset and moonrise my Paphos, and
unimaginable realms of færie; broad noon shall be my
England of the senses and the understanding; the
night shall be my Germany of mystic philosophy and
dreams.1
A fine passage, though no longer true of Germany,
which has fallen like Lucifer-and like him through
pride-since Boehme, Jacobi, Novalis, Goethe,
Richter, Tieck, and Jung Stilling, from whom-
via Carlyle, mostly-Emerson got his notions of
the Teuton temperament.
In a lecture called "Country Life," Emerson
said that he could not find it in his heart to chide
the citizen who should ruin himself to buy a patch
of heavy oak-timber.2 This was almost auto-
biographical, for he had himself bought a wood-lot
when money was not plentiful with him, for use
chiefly as a retreat where he might listen to the
Voice. The poem Good-bye-partially quoted in
the next chapter, on his poetry,-is applicable
through his whole life: for when he could meet
with God in the bush, he had no need for the lore
of Greece and Rome.
In "Blight," he laments man's lapse from the
grace which gives friendliness with Nature, in
language of unusual rhythm and stateliness:
we are strangers to the stars,
And strangers to the mystic beast and bird,
And strangers to the plant and to the mine.
The injured elements say, 'Not in us;
1 i., p. 17. (Nature.)
2 vii., p. 346.
STYLE
75
And night and day, ocean and continent,
Fire, plant and mineral say, 'Not in us;
And haughtily return us stare for stare.
For we invade them impiously for gain;
We devastate them unreligiously,
And coldly ask their pottage, not their love.¹
66
He says
we," but he includes himself out of
kindness to us. He is really speaking to the
unregenerate, for the reproach does not apply to
himself. In many other parts of his writings he
shows plainly that he himself is quite at home.
with Nature:-
Because I was content with these poor fields,
Low, open meads, slender and sluggish streams,
And found a home in haunts which others scorned,
The partial wood-gods overpaid my love,
And granted me the freedom of their state,
And in their secret senate have prevailed
With the dear, dangerous lords who rule our life,
Made moon and planets parties to their bond,
And through my rock-like, solitary wont
Shot million rays of thought and tenderness.
For me, in showers, in sweeping showers, the Spring
Visits the valley ;-break away the clouds,———
I bathe in the morn's soft and silvered air,
And loiter willing by yon loitering stream.
*
*
*
*
The gentle deities
Showed me the lore of colors and of sounds,
The innumerable tenements of beauty..
*
*
*
1 ix., p. 140.
*
*
*
*
76
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
The polite found me impolite; the great
Would mortify me, but in vain ; for still
I am a willow of the wilderness,
Loving the wind that bent me. All my hurts
My garden spade can heal. A woodland walk,
A quest of river-grapes, a mocking thrush,
A wild-rose, or rock-loving columbine,
Salve my worst wounds.¹
""
The disjointedness of Emerson's style would be
more marked in his own day than it is now.
Literature was still suffering from the ponderosity
of the eighteenth century, and the rounded periods
of Gibbon and Johnson were the standard of
comparison. Addison, Dryden, Goldsmith, De
Quincey-all wrote ponderously, according to
modern standards. Emerson was one of the first
to break away.
"Refuse the good models was
one of his maxims, and he followed it out. Other
writers are good; but "I also am a man." The
result is a distinctive style which reads, moreover,
with an astonishing modernity, and is perhaps even
yet a little ahead of us. As stylist, Emerson was
to English what Nietzsche has been to German :
a simplifier, shortener of sentences and paragraphs,
bringing clarity and ease where before there was
cumbrousness and obscurity.
Contributing to this effect is his restraint. If
Emerson was intolerant of anything, it was of
looseness and intemperance of speech. He often
advised young writers to read through their
MSS., cutting out the adjectives and "very." He
¹ ix., p. 141 and foll. (Musketaquid.)
STYLE
-77
""
had no patience with people for whom everything
was either " enchanting
We
or "horrid."
do not live among such extremes. Plain fact
requires the positive degree. It was partly this
moderation in language that endeared Montaigne
to him. His St. Michel "never shrieks, or protests,
or prays; no weakness, no convulsion, no super-
lative does not wish to jump out of his skin.
It is a solidity and truthfulness which he admires,
follows, and on every occasion recommends.
""
CHAPTER VIII.
EMERSON THE POET.
BEFORE estimating any writer's precise altitude on
the Parnassian slopes, a preliminary question may
be asked,—viz., What is Poetry? Not long ago,
language was not considered poetry unless it was
measured off as with a yard-stick into the proper
number of syllables or feet per line; and the jog-
trot lilt of Pope and Dryden was the standard of
perfection. Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Wordsworth
followed their genius instead of playing the sedulous
ape to Pope, and broke the conventional mould.
Browning may be said to have smashed it into
smaller bits; and Whitman stamped on them,
shouting gleefully. Yet Browning and Whitman
are by general consent awarded the title of Poet,
even at their roughest. Poetry, therefore, is not
essentially a matter of form at all.
What it is, it is difficult to say. It does not
involve rime (I usually spell it rhyme) for this is
absent in the poetry of ancient Greece and Rome,
as also in most of Shakespeare: nor any regular
rhythm, if Leaves of Grass is poetry. The Greek
poiema in fact was a "thing made and finished "
only; the poet was a "maker," a creative craftsman,
like the sculptor, painter, musical composer.
EMERSON THE POET
79
C
Aristotle says that the superiority of poetry consists
"in its possessing a higher truth and a higher
seriousness," and from this comes the popular but
vague definition that poetry is "impassioned
truth." But such definitions emphasise too strongly
the moral side. Beautiful language, true poetry,
often contains little truth and not much passion:
we feel that the poetry is in the beauty of the
images evoked, or in the sheer unanalysable charm
of the words as sounds, or more generally-both
combined., The more thought" there is in
poetry, the less poetical it is. Pope's Essay on Man
has plenty of thought, but it thereby succeeds in
being tunefully versified metaphysics rather than
great poetry. Keats' Ode to the Nightingale has little
thought, and only a gentle melancholy for its
passion; and it is one of the gems of English poetry.
T
On the whole, we may say that poetry is to be
judged by the mood that it awakes in us. It is real.
poetry if it makes us admire and rejoice in its
beauty. On the objective and formal side, we may
admit that the conventional idea of poetry is too
closely involved with that of rhythm for divorce
to be possible, and we may assent to the conventional
ruling, provisionally, while denying its essentiality.
It is useful to have some sort of criterion for the
distinguishing of poetry from prose, and rhythm-
a regularly recurring system of beats-is the only
non-metaphysical distinguishing feature.


Emerson undoubtedly felt himself to be a poet.
All his writings are inspirational-given to him by
the Voice to which he listened in the woods-
but apparently his poems came with an even more
authentic sense of inspiration than the sentences
66
""
80
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
of his prose. He said, "I like my poems best.
because it is not I who write them."1 But, however
inspirational they were, his own critical faculty
undoubtedly was dissatisfied, in spite of the remark
just quoted. In his letters to John Sterling and
others, he often deplores his lack of power to shape
his thought in rhythmic verse; and his journals
show how he laboured at the task, even from early
boyhood. This incapacity is curious, for he had
a most delicate ear for cadence in prose. It may
be granted that a few of the shorter poems have
a beautiful gem-like character, but he could not
sustain the quality in the longer ones. He himself
seemed to perceive this, for he thought Days his
best poem, and it is certainly one of the shortest,
consisting of eleven lines only. It has a quality
and beauty of its own, though it is rather depressing
and somewhat puzzling. We can hardly suppose
that Emerson regarded himself as a failure, for no
writer ever followed more faithfully his highest
leadings, and he believed those leadings to be
veritably divine; yet in this poem there is wistful
regret, as of one who sees that he has wasted his
life by timidity,-by being contented with small
things when great ones could have been grasped.
Did Emerson feel that his scholarship, his gift of
phrasing, and his fine voice, would have lifted him
to the level of Daniel Webster if his ambitions had
led him to the law-as in his brother William's
case—or was he only expressing an imagined mood?
The poem is a puzzle, but a beautiful one :-
1 i., xxxviii. (Biographical sketch.)
EMERSON THE POET
81
Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days,
Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes,
And marching single in an endless file,
Bring diadems and fagots in their hands.
To each they offer gifts after his will,
Bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that holds them all.
I, in my pleachéd garden, watched the pomp,
Forgot my morning wishes, hastily
Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day
Turned and departed silent. I, too late,
Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn.
It is interesting to note how Emerson expresses
this thought in the more sober medium of prose.
In Works and Days he says:-
•
The days are ever divine as to the first Aryans.
They come and go like muffled and veiled figures, sent
from a distant friendly party; but they say nothing,
and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry
them as silently away.¹
1 vii., p. 168.
It is good but not distinguished prose: while the
poem is magnificent poetry, unsurpassable in its
sombre yet jewelled beauty. The old Elizabethan
word pleached (intertwined, as of branches of trees
or hedge, and perhaps here used with the sense of
folded in, secluded, hermit-like) gives a curiously
pleasing flavour to the sonnet, perhaps partly
because it is such a perfect fit as regards euphony.
It may be, however, that Emerson was only
voicing the wistful regret which all of us feel when
G
82
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
we look closely at the way we have used our time.
So much of it seems to have been spent over
trivialities or worse :-
If I work in my garden and prune an apple-tree,
I am well enough entertained, and could continue
indefinitely in the like occupation. But it comes to
mind that a day is gone, and I have got this precious
nothing done. I go to Boston or New York and run
up and down on my affairs: they are sped, but so is
the day. I am vexed by the recollection of this price
I have paid for a trifling advantage.¹
Another poem which would be very puzzling if
we did not possess the key, is Uriel. Indeed, it
would seem that even O. W. Holmes, who was on
the spot and knew Emerson, failed to see its
meaning, for he says that it is a poem which "finds
itself perilously near to the gulf of unsounded
obscurity."2 To the uninitiated reader who uses
an edition without notes, this is true enough. The
poem seems to be about the fall from grace of
Uriel, though we are not told what his particular
failing was. A mysterious Seyd, walking among
the Pleiades—an astonishingly remote sauntering
spot or daidling bit, as Mr. Andrew Lang would have
said—overheard the young gods talking, and they
were evidently talking treason, like the fallen
angels in Paradise Lost; whereupon the "stern old
war-gods shook their heads," which seems a curiously
ineffective and feeble thing for stern old war-gods
1 iv., p. 21. (Uses of Great Men.)
2 Ralph Waldo Emerson, p. 398.
EMERSON THE POET
83
to do. Then Uriel's voice of cherub scorn was
heard, and "the gods shook, they knew not why,"
as the last line kindly informs us.¹
Uriel of course is the Archangel of the sun, and
Emerson would be familiar with that bright spirit,
for he had known Milton's epic from his boyhood.
But Seyd seems inexplicable, and if he is Saadi the
Persian poet, one does not quite see what he is
doing among the Pleiades. The whole thing is as
mysterious as John Keats' porridge in Browning's
poem Popularity, until we get the key. As a matter
of fact, it is an allegorical interpretation of what
happened after Emerson's Address to the Divinity
students, already mentioned in chap. iv. Uriel, the
sun-spirit, is Emerson himself; the young deities
are the divinity students; the stern old war-gods
are the old theologians-professors and preachers—
who were horrified by Emerson's heresies. It is all
clear enough, and very humorous; but it must have
been a riddle to the majority of readers. And
indeed it is condemned by Emerson's own canons,
for he says in a letter that "poetry that needs a
date is no poetry " (ix, 403).
A few of the other poems also “need a date,”
being more or less autobiographical. Good-bye was
not a farewell to civilisation on taking to the woods
(retiring to the country) in 1835, but is the expression
of Emerson's feelings when released from school
duties,―for, to a shy youth of nineteen, a class of
young ladies was a rather alarming affair. This
little poem is a remarkable production for a boy of
1 ix., pp. 13-15.
G 2
84
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
that age, and it is curiously and exceptionally
perfect in its rhythm. Its author seems to have
thought little of it, for he apologised for sending
juvenilia when he sent it to The Western Messenger
in 1839, and he omitted it from the Selected Poems
of 1876. But it has won its way, and is among
the most quoted of Emerson's poems; particularly
the last stanza :
O, when I am safe in my sylvan home,
I tread on the pride of Greece and Rome;
And when I am stretched beneath the pines,
Where the evening star so holy shines,
I laugh at the lore and the pride of man,
At the sophist schools and the learned clan ;
For what are they all, in their high conceit,
When man in the bush with God may meet?
Date and notes are needed also for the "Ode
inscribed to W. H. Channing," which is a reply to
those who wished Emerson to be more vigorous in
his anti-slavery activities. He was on the right
side, but was not very ardent about it. He had
other slaves of his own to free, he said,—viz.,
imprisoned thoughts. But he was vigorous enough
and outspoken enough when the Fugitive Slave Act
was passed, making it felonious to harbour a run-
away or to give him succour of any sort. Emerson
said, in public, that this Act was "a law which
every one of you will break on the earliest occasion;
a law which no man can abet or obey without
forfeiting the name of a gentleman." But this
1 ix., p. 428.
EMERSON The Poet
85
Ode to Channing is unintelligible without know-
ledge of contemporary history:
Though loath to grieve
The evil time's sole patriot,
I cannot leave
My honied thought
For the priest's cant,
Of statesman's rant.
If I refuse
My study for their politique,
Which at the best is trick,
The angry Muse
Puts confusion in my brain.
The most striking bit in this poem is that in which
he deplores the modern materialism which makes
man a slave to outward success and possessions :-
'Tis the day of the chattel,
Web to weave, and corn to grind ;
Things are in the saddle,
And ride mankind.
Indeed it is mostly in scattered bits throughout
Emerson's poetry that he appeals to us. The level
of excellence is not maintained. There is much
originally-worded but vague and difficult matter, and
now and then a flash of pithy expression which
impresses the reader's mind permanently, as in the
triplet asserting compensation for all losses :-
Heartily know,
When half-gods go,
The gods arrive.1
1 ix., p. 92. (“ Give all to Love.")
86
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
The last two lines are used, as the reader will
remember, in Kipling's allegory, The Children of
the Zodiac, which the poem probably suggested.
Emerson's treatment of love-the stock theme
of the poets of all time-is somewhat disappointing,
no doubt, to many an ardent youth and maiden.
It is much too Platonic, in the true sense of that
much-abused word. For Emerson the love of the
sexes is initial, and "symbolizes at a distance the
passion of the soul for that immense lake of beauty
it exists to seek. . . Body cannot teach wisdom
God only." In human love there is "smoke in
the flame "; in the higher love, for which human
love is a training, selfish preferences vanish, love of
humanity and of God swallows up individual
littleness.2 No doubt it is good religious philosophy,
but, for the present, we are only men and women,
not angels, and the Emersonian atmosphere is too
tenuous for most human lovers to breathe in. It
makes us long for a descent to the good brown
earth and warm human flesh, even at the risk of
Whitmanic cataloguing of an unnecessarily long
list of our visceral and other arrangements.
1 ix., p. 437.
2 ibid., p. 103. (Initial, Dæmonic and Celestial Love.)
-:
CHAPTER IX.
PERSONAL CHaracter.
EMERSON himself deprecates any dwelling on the
individual except in so far as he
he illustrates
principles; and he would certainly protest as
vigorously as did Paul and Barnabas at Lystra
against any attribution of divine or heroic qualities.
But the fact remains, and cannot fail to be observed,
that Emerson's personal character was of so high an
order that we inevitably feel almost as the Lystrans
did. Contemplating such exceptional beings, we
feel that the gods have descended in the likeness
of men. About Emerson there was something
un-humanly good and great. It was not merely
his perfect citizenship, sonship, fatherhood, though
in these common relationships his exceptionality
already shows. As boy and young man, he had
never given a moment's uneasiness to those who
loved him, save in the matter of his delicate
health; while, later on, as father, his children
could find no words wherewith adequately to describe
him. Their recollections depict him as the ideal of
wisdom, thoughtfulness, and gentleness.2 There
1
1 Garnett's Life of Emerson, p. 44.
2 ibid., p. III.
}
88
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
1
If
seems to be no record of any unworthy action or
speech in his larger social duties as a citizen.
he was ever angry, it was in a righteous cause, as
when he smashed the scurrilous notice-board which
defamed a worthy fellow-townsman; and we are
reminded of One who made a whip of fine cords,
and used it on those who similarly dishonoured
what should have been respected. Throughout,
Emerson's life has a superhuman air about it: the
more one studies it, resolutely visualising the man,
the more vividly this is perceived. He seems like
a strayed spirit, descended here by mistake on his
way to a nobler planet. Or perhaps not by mistake
but of set purpose, seeing man's need of such a
teacher. Wise, good, full of perception of beauty—
not one of the tribe of saints who exhibit a morbid
onesidedness, but a rounded complete man, whole-
some and sound, through and through-serene,
unshakable, not "tourmenté des choses divines " but
living habitually with them, as one contentedly at
home;-seeing the man thus, it is not wonderful
that he should appear superhuman. The wonder
is that he has not been deified and made the centre
of a cultus, long ago, particularly as his personal
appearance aided the effect of his life and writings.
Tall, slightly stooping, spare, clean-shaven, strong-
featured, yet with a kindly smile (“a sunbeam in
his face," says Hawthorne) to offset his rather
stern mouth, his aspect was that of a prophet.
His eyes, in particular, had something unusual
about them, quite apart from their intense blue;
for it is observable in some of his portraits. One
writer says that they gave the impression of seeing
something that was invisible to others. An old
***
PERSONAL CHARACTER
89
""
•
lady told the present writer, in 1899, that when
she heard Emerson lecture in Manchester in 1847,
she had the curious feeling that his eyes saw
through the walls, and out into infinite space,'
and this was still the most vivid part of her
recollection of the event, after half-a-century.
But his whole personality was unusual. That
indefinable quality known as personal magnetism
or charm, was his in remarkable measure. Even
Harriet Martineau, positivist and anti-mystic, said
there was a nobleness and sweetness about him
which moved people to their very depths, without
their being able to explain why.1 Froude remarked
on his facial likeness to Newman,2 which indeed is
very marked; but the American's expression has
a sweetness which the Cardinal's lacked. In spite
of reserve and aloofness, Emerson's benevolent soul
shone through his face for all to see. In his
presence, an inexplicable serenity diffused itself,-
a quiet joy, and an exaltation of spirit. People felt
that it was good to be there. Even if he said
nothing, his benign personality spread its influence
around. Perhaps it was the completeness of his
love for fellow-mortals. "Let our affection flow
out to our fellows; it would operate in a day the
greatest of all revolutions." And no man ever
practised his own precept more than Emerson.
Perhaps his beautiful soul was the cause of his
3
1 Garnett's Life of Emerson, p. 144.
2 ibid., p. 145.
His
8 "No one meeting Emerson was ever the same again.
natural force was so resistless and so imperceptible that it
commanded men before they were aware.'
Woodbury's Talks
with Emerson, p. 75.
"
1
90
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
attractive physical presence; for Spenser teaches
the doctrine, in a verse which was a favourite with
Emerson himself :-
So every spirit, as it is more pure,
And hath in it the more of heavenly light,
So it the fairer body doth procure
To habit in, and it more fairly dight,
With cheerful grace and amiable sight.
For, of the soul, the body form doth take,
For soul is form, and doth the body make.¹
On the merely moral side, goodness seemed a
predictable probability, if there is anything in
heredity: his father was a minister, like most of
his more remote male ancestors, and we remember
how, after the father's death, the widow took in
boarders and did most of the household work
herself, to provide a good education for the boys.
But Emerson's character was somehow almost more
than good certainly more than good in the
conventional use of that word. There was no trace
of conscious virtue about him. "Each man sees
over his own experience a certain stain of error,
whilst that of other men looks fair and ideal."
(Love.) Again we are reminded of One who said:
Why callest thou Me good?" Emerson had
indeed a warm corner in his heart for publicans
and sinners: the Universe has produced them, so
why should he be finicky about accepting them :-
t
¹ An Hymne in Honour of Beautie, xix. Quoted in Emerson's
essay The Poet, iii., p. 14.
PERSONAL CHARACTER
91
Nature, as we know her, is no saint. The lights of
the church, the ascetics, Gentoos and corn-eaters, she
does not distinguish by any favour. She comes eating
and drinking and sinning. Her darlings, the great, the
strong, the beautiful, are not children of our law; do
not come out of the Sunday School, nor weigh their
food, nor punctually keep the commandments.¹
He had love for all. He would have suffered
even fools gladly, if at the same time he could have
done his own work. He had no academic snobbish-
ness, and often spoke slightingly of merely intel-
lectual qualities, regarding them indeed-as Goethe
does in Faust-as the Devil. Affection blends,
intellect disjoins.2 Character outshines intellect.
In Goethe's correspondence with the Duke of
Weimar, the latter shows to most advantage.³
Nor was his virtue of anæmic type. Prophets,
philosophers, and saints are usually deficient in a
sense of humour, and Emerson was here perhaps at
his weakest, as is shown by his dislike of
Aristophanes, Cervantes, and Dickens; but he was
nevertheless not quite without the saving grace.
Though he had a delicate taste for fun, and preferred
Lord Chesterfield-who claimed that he had never
disgraced himself by laughter since his arrival at
maturity-to Carlyle the Teufelsdröckian laugher,
he could joke occasionally, even if with some
difficulty. And sometimes he got very near
4
¹ iii., p. 64. (Experience.)
2 ix., p. 407. (Notes.)
3 viii., p. 317. (Greatness.)
• Woodbury says he never heard him laugh. Talks with
Emerson, p. 126.
92
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
*
A
executing a stroke of real humour, such as would
have delighted Carlyle himself. Once, when he had
delivered his lecture on "The Method of Nature,"
the chairman-a Baptist minister-prayed that the
audience “might be preserved from ever again
hearing such transcendental nonsense." Emerson
asked the man's name, and remarked: "He seems
a very conscientious, plain-spoken man."1 On
another occasion he did a rather un-Emersonian
thing in introducing deliberate bathos, for the
sheer fun of it: "If we could only make up our
minds always to tell the truth, the whole truth, and
nothing but the truth . . . (the audience waited
eagerly for the culminating phrase) to what
embarrassing situations it would give rise!"2 The
audience responded with Homeric laughter.
He could poke fun at the unco' guid, too, in spite
of his clerical ancestry, and was quite capable of
suggesting that they were an unpractical, feckless
lot, totally lacking in business qualities,—but
sharp enough to employ those who had them :—
Philanthropic and religious bodies do not commonly
make their executive officers out of saints. The
communities hitherto founded by socialists-the
Jesuits, the Port-Royalists, the American communities
at New Harmony, at Brook Farm, at Zoar, are only
possible by installing Judas as steward... Of the
Shaker society it was formerly a sort of proverb in the
country that they always sent the devil to market.3
1 Garnett's Life of Emerson, p. 125.
2 xii., p. 464. (Notes to Art and Criticism.)
3 vi., p. 66. (Power.)
PERSONAL CHARACTER
93
There were Shaker settlements at Harvard and
Sterling, near Concord, and Emerson maintained
quite friendly relations with them; but he once
said that he thought he saw this utterance of his
reflected on the faces of some of the worthy elders
he met in the cars.
At one period Emerson had an uneasy feeling
that he was not treating his servants as he ought.
Recognising the universal sonship of mankind, and
moreover imbued with true American democracy
in its best meanings, he decided that his servants
should be invited to have their meals with the
family. This patriarchal system was thereupon
tried but it did not work. The cook said she was
not fit to appear at table, and the housemaid was
too shy to appear without the cook. So the old
system was reverted to, no doubt to the relief of
the master, whose conscience was thus eased with-
out damage to his fastidious taste in manners,
which the cook and housemaid might have found it
hard to satisfy.¹
One of the pleasantest features of Emerson's
life was his friendship with Carlyle and the way in
which it was conducted, They saw each other in
1833, 1847-8, and 1873, but except for these
occasions their communication was by letter. And
Emerson had plenty of opportunity to cultivate
forbearance and the returning of a soft answer, for
his stormy friend did not boil his critical peas before
shooting them :-
1 i., p. 440.
94
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
How you go on as if altogether on the Oversoul,'
the Ideal, the Perfect or Universal and Eternal in this
life of ours; and take so little heed of the frightful
quantities of friction and perverse impediments there
everywhere are. . .1
•
But Emerson acted on his own precept that
people ought always to be taken by their best
handles, and accordingly ignored Carlyle's faults
and prejudices, including even his defence of
slavery, which must have been very distasteful to
the American. He saw the essential genuineness
of his friend, saw that he spoke out his thought, and
never feared the face of man"; and this great
fact overshadowed errors of opinion. He edited
Carlyle's earlier works in America, contributing
prefaces and making himself to a large extent
financially responsible. Sartor and Chartism at first
sold slowly, and Emerson found himself out of
pocket to the extent of a thousand dollars,-
a serious amount for him, as he remarks in his
Journal. It is almost certain that Carlyle never
knew how much his friend had done for him.
Eventually the Scotsman's work obtained the
recognition it deserved-earlier indeed in America.
than at home-and all was well. But there had
been risk, which Emerson shouldered, saying
nothing.
1
""
¹ vii., p. 345. (Notes to Society and Solitude.) In another
letter, referring to the Dial, Carlyle says: You seem to me
in danger of dividing yourselves from the Fact of this present
Universe, in which alone, ugly as it is, can I find any anchorage,
and soaring away after Ideas, Beliefs, Revelations, and such
like-into perilous altitudes, as I think; beyond the curve of
perpetual frost, for one thing." Holmes's Life, p. 162.
PERSONAL CHARACTER
95
It has sometimes been suggested that Emerson
was lacking on the side of the warm human
affections, and extracts from his essays may easily
be gathered in support of the charge. There is
a passage in Experience which seems to indicate
a callousness or numbness or anæsthesia, chilling
and repellent to many readers :-
In the death of my son, now more than two years
ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate,—no more.
I cannot get it nearer to me . . . something which
I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn
away without tearing me nor enlarged without enriching
me, falls off from me and leaves no scar.¹
But he is here speaking of the immortal hunger
of the soul for more and more experience, for closer
and still closer touch with reality, and is describing
how at present everything strikes us only a glancing
blow, even our griefs: we look forward to death
with a grim satisfaction," there at least is reality
that will not dodge us." Most people know the
mood: a sense of unreality, as if we half suspected
that it is all a dream, from which we shall presently
awake. But it is clear from Emerson's Journal
and from a letter to Carlyle, that the loss of this
noble boy-the little Waldo, dead of scarlet fever
at five years of age-was as stunning a blow to him
as it would have been to any human father. The
pathetic heart-cry which it wrung from him reminds
us of the similar case of another great soul of very
different temperament,-Huxley, who lost a child
1 iii., pp. 48, 49.
96
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
of about the same age, by the same disease. Also,
Emerson's habitual reserve prevented him from
public expressions of emotion over personal matters.
În the Journal whence the just-quoted passage was
taken, it stands: "the death of my sweet Boy,'
which he evidently thought too intimately revealing,
and perhaps verging on the sentimental. But in
the letter to Carlyle he drops all reserve :-
""
My son, a perfect little boy of five years and three
months, has ended his earthly life. . . A few weeks ago
I accounted myself a very rich man, and now the
poorest of all . you can never know how much of
me such a young child can take away a promise
like that Boy's I shall never see. How often I have
pleased myself that one day I should send to you this
Morning Star of mine, and stay at home so gladly
behind such a representative. I dare not fathom the
Invisible and Untold to inquire what relations to my
Departed ones I yet sustain.1
•
2
The poem Threnody is his dirge for this "wondrous
boy." Holmes says it has the dignity of Lycidas
without its cold classicism, and the tenderness of
Cowper in the lines on his mother's picture. This
is perhaps an over-estimation, but no doubt the
good doctor was too much moved by his very
human sympathy to exercise his critical faculty
impartially. The poem is
~
a deeply poignant
expression of grief, too sincere and spontaneous to
be analysed and judged in detail. As a whole it
does not reach the distinction of some of the other
1 ix., p. 453. (Notes to Threnody.)
2 Ralph Waldo Emerson, p. 333.
PERSONAL CHARACTER
97
pieces, such as Days, Brahma, and The Problem.
But it does show that Emerson had a human heart.
And his human love was not confined to the fatherly.
After his first wife's death, and until his departure
for Europe, he daily visited her grave; and in his
Journal there was found an entry indicating grief
and passion such as perhaps few have known, for
it appeared that on one occasion he had opened
her coffin in order to look once more on that beloved
face.
Dr. Holmes, in his Ralph Waldo Emerson, quotes
the remarks of several personal friends of Emerson's,
as to his character and personality. An old school-
mate, Rufus Dawes, speaks of him as "a spiritual-
looking boy in blue nankeen, who seems to be
about ten years old,-whose image more than any
other is still deeply stamped upon my mind, as
I then saw him and loved him, I knew not why,
and thought him so angelic and remarkable "
(p. 44). Judge Abbot refers to the "peculiar look
in his eyes, as if he saw something beyond what
seemed to be in the field of vision " (p. 50). James
Russell Lowell, then Ambassador to the Court of
St. James, and thus meeting the most distinguished
men then living, wrote to Holmes: "There was
a majesty about him beyond all other men I have
known, and he habitually dwelt in that ampler and
diviner air to which most of us, if ever, only rise
in spurts" (p. 361), and-says Holmes, "our good
Methodist, Father Taylor, spoke of him as more
like Christ than any man he had known" (p. 412).¹
¹ Quoted from the Life of Father Taylor: letter from Mrs.
H. Mann to Taylor's daughter.
H
98
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
Holmes says of him somewhere that he was
sane for an idealist." We may similarly say that
he was remarkably reliable in small practical
matters, for a mystic. We usually expect little
derelictions, say in the matter of punctuality in
keeping appointments, from lofty geniuses whose
thoughts are not running on mundane clocks. But
Mr. Woodbury says that he never knew Emerson
a minute late at any appointment.¹
CC
ܝܟ
The same authority settles another vexed question.
A story often turns up about Carlyle and Emerson
(sometimes it is Carlyle and Tennyson) sitting
smoking a whole evening without speaking :
Carlyle finally remarking, while knocking out the
ashes of his last pipeful, that they had had "a fine
time." Such a feat of silence would of course have
been quite impossible to Carlyle; and the smoking
would have been almost equally impossible to
Emerson; for he did not smoke at all until he was
fifty-which was after his two visits to Carlyle-
and even then he had only two cigars a day, each
after a meal.
1 Talks with Emerson, p. 129.
CHAPTER X.
EMERSON AS CRITIC:
ENGLISH TRAITS AND REPRESENTATIVE MEN.
It is usual to regard Emerson as a dreamer, or at
best as a scholar and philosopher of very unpractical
character. But he could unmistakably walk the
solid earth when necessary, and could come to close
grips with facts. On one occasion a Concord
publican or his emissaries had put up a scurrilous
sign in the middle of the village, defaming the
excellent Dr. Bartlett, the leading physician, who
had been active in the temperance cause.
The
people laughed or were angry, according to their
opinions and temperament, but did not touch it.
Emerson came along on his way to the post-office :
stopped to read the notice, and forthwith smashed
it down with his walking-stick. And he could be
equally practical in his criticism of other things.
He could observe closely and comment acutely.
In his English Traits he gives us the best criticism
ever written, of English customs, ways of thinking,
and general character. Carlyle called it the best
¹ vi., p. 357. (Notes to Power.)
i
H 2
100
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
book he had read for seven years,-worth all the
other books ever written by New England upon the
Old.
It follows from Emerson's conception of the soul
as greater than its possible expression, that persons
are always disappointing. Men descend to meet.
Language cannot convey the fulness of thought and
experience; least of all the unpondered language of
conversation. It might therefore have been
expected that Emerson, knowing this, would have
discounted his anticipations, thus saving himself
the shock of discovering that his heroes and oracles
were only human beings, after all. But apparently
he did not quite succeed in doing so, for his meetings
with distinguished men always resulted in more or
less disappointment, even in the case of Channing.
Sometimes it was his sense of humour that got the
better of him, the idol showing itself in undress, so
to speak, and appearing rather ridiculous; as when
the old man Wordsworth proceeded to chant his
own poetry to his visitor. Sometimes it was the
downright ill-manners of the great man, as in the
incident with Coleridge, already described. (Also
Coleridge "took snuff freely," and soiled his cravat
and suit.) But generally it was the inevitable fact
that a writer puts his best into his books, and
therefore appears comparatively commonplace in
his conversation. Emerson knew this was true of
himself, but did not sufficiently remember it as
regards others. Moreover his acquaintance had
been with giants of English literature, from Chaucer
and Shakespeare to Gibbon and Macaulay; and he
had a naturally exaggerated idea of the great
living Englishmen he was going to see, particularly
EMERSON AS CRITIC
ΙΟΙ
on his first visit in 1833. After the second visit,
in 1847-8, he had adjusted himself to the facts and
had touched English life not only at its summits
but also on its more average levels, by meeting
many men besides the great writers; and he was
then able to write the acute yet very favourable
criticisms which he gave in lectures on his return
to America, and afterwards in book form under
the title English Traits. He realises the impossi-
bility of a really impartial and aloof judgment, for
"England has inoculated all nations with her
civilization, intelligence, and tastes; " and a critic
becomes her relative and advocate-or rebounds to
the spiteful enmity of inter-family feud—instead of
maintaining judicial balance. However, he will do
his best.
England's climate has a singular perfection.
Neither hot nor cold, there is no hour in the year
when one cannot work. The only drawback is the
darkness of its sky. Night and day are too nearly
of a colour. It strains the eyes to read and write.
An Englishman said to the Persian Ambassador:
"I am told that in your country you worship the
sun. "So would you, if you ever saw him,"
replied the Persian. The population is "twenty-
seven millions, but emigration is going on (1852) at
the rate of a thousand a day," and it remains to be
seen if the country can stand the drain.
""
66
The best nations are those most widely related.
The English are an example. Everything English
is a fusion of distant and antagonistic elements.”
The language is mixed-half Latin and half Gothic.
The blood is mixed, dark Kelt, fair Saxon and
Scandinavian, of temperament conservative and
102
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
progressive respectively. The animal vigour comes
from the fair stock :-
These Northmen are excellent persons in the main,
with good sense, steadiness, wise speech and prompt
action. But they have a singular turn for homicide;
their chief end of man is to murder or to be murdered;
oars, scythes, harpoons, crowbars, peat-knives and
hay-forks are tools valued by them all the more for
their charming aptitude for assassinations. A pair of
kings, after dinner, will divert themselves by thrusting
each his sword through the other's body, as did Yngve
and Alf. Another pair ride out on a morning for a
frolic, and finding no weapon near, will take the bits
out of their horses' mouths and crush each other's
heads with them, as did Alric and Eric. The sight of
a tent cord or a cloak-string puts them on hanging
somebody, a wife, or a husband, or, best of all, a king.
If a farmer has so much as a hay-fork, he sticks it into
a King Dag.¹
But these honest fellows degenerated in Normandy,
and the twenty thousand thieves who landed at
Hastings in 1066 had lost their language and
acquired all the Gallic vices instead. Such however
is the glamour of antiquity and wealth that “decent
and dignified men now existing boast their descent
from these filthy thieves." Emerson is rather too
hard on William and his crew. They brought
necessary ingredients for the mixture, after all.
The Englishman has vigour and endurance:
other countrymen look slight and undersized beside
him, and invalids. He is bigger than the American,
1 v., p. 58. (English Traits: Race.)
EMERSON AS CRITIC
103
is, in fact, a little overloaded with flesh. He is
logical, but "impatient of genius, or of minds
addicted to contemplation." He looks always to
facts, tests all by results. He has justice in his
blood is not touchy on a point of honour or easily
seduced by a title or a phrase, but will at once
fight to the last drop of blood if you attack his
property or his freedom. He uses plain language,
means what he says, says what he means and no
more, disdains embroidery and flights. "I find the
Englishman to be him of all men who stands firmest
in his shoes."1
He is cleanly, methodical, loving conventional
ways a stickler for form. Fond of his home,
which he decorates with pictures and plate if he can
afford it. “Domesticity is the taproot
taproot which
enables the nation to branch wide and high. The
motive and end of their trade and empire is to
guard the independence and privacy of their
homes." Here are the finest women in the world.
The Englishman has the Teutonic hereditary
rectitude, further cultivated by the punctuality and
precise dealing which commerce requires. His
power rests largely on his sincerity. Geoffrey of
Monmouth says of Aurelius the uncle of Arthur,
that "above all things he hated a lie." The English
of all classes pride themselves on this veracity:
the French, they say, are more polite than true.
°°
But the Englishman has a constitutional dulness
and lethargy. He is slow in the uptak'.
"A saving
stupidity masks and protects their perception, as
¹ v., p. 102. (English Traits: Manners.)
104
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
the curtain of the eagle's eye."1 Coleridge is said
to have given public thanks to God, at the close of
a lecture, that He had defended him from being
able to utter a single sentence in the French
language. An English lady on the Rhine heard
some Germans allude to her party as foreigners.
"No," she said, "we are English; it is you who
are foreigners."
در
Coupled with stupidity and arrogance is the
Englishman's hypocrisy in matters of religion.
Abhorring change, he clings to the last rag of form,
and is dreadfully given to cant. "The English
(and I wish it were confined to them, but 'tis a
taint in the Anglo-Saxon blood in both hemis-
pheres), the English and the Americans cant
beyond all other nations. The French relinquish
all that industry to them. What is so odious as
the polite bows to God, in our books and news-
papers?" When the Englishman prays, so far is
he from attaching any meaning to the words, that
he thinks he has done quite the generous thing,
and that it is rather a condescension on his part to
pray to God.
It is well that Emerson included Americans in
this condemnation, for an amusing example occurred
in his own experience. Visiting California in 1874
with friends, he read in San Francisco the lecture
now printed as "Immortality." Next day the
Alta California produced in all innocence a gem of
the first water :-
All left the church feeling that an elegant tribute
1 v., p. 138. (Character.)
EMERSON AS CRITIC
105
had been paid to the creative genius of the Great First
Cause, and that a masterly use of the English language
had contributed to that end.1
Emerson's comments on this are not on record.
What would Carlyle have said?
The Anglican Church suffered some gentle but
keenly searching raillery at the hands of this acute
visitor. It (the Church in question) is marked by
good sense and mildness: is perfectly well-bred and
can shut its eyes on all proper occasions. Its
gospel is: By taste are ye saved. If you let it
alone, it will let you alone. But its instinct is
hostile to all change. It has not been the founder
of the London University, the Mechanics' Institutes,
and whatever aims at diffusion of knowledge. The
prelates are overpaid. A bishop is only a surpliced
merchant. A wealth like that of Durham makes
almost a premium on felony. The bishop is elected
by the Dean and Prebends of the cathedral. The
Sovereign sends these gentlemen a congé d'élire, or
leave to elect, but also sends them the name of the
person they are to elect. They go into the
cathedral, chant and pray and invoke the Holy
Ghost to assist them in their choice; and invariably
find that the dictates of the Holy Ghost agree with
the recommendations of the Sovereign.
The English Church, undermined by the scholars'
criticism, has nothing left but tradition, and is led
logically back to Rome. Its infallible Book turns
out fallible, and it has no authority save that
1 Garnett's Life of Emerson, p. 180.
106
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
T
derived from historical continuity. And it is now
clear that the Reformers of the sixteenth century
sawed off the branch on which they sat. An
Anglican bishop, reading fatal interrogation in
your eye, has no resource but to ask you to take
wine with him and "when the hierarchy is afraid
of science and education, afraid of piety, afraid of
tradition and afraid of theology, there is nothing
left but to quit a church which is no longer one.
And the sects are no better; they are only "perpet-
uations of some private man's dissent."
And yet, England is religious. If religion be the
doing of all good, and for its sake the suffering of
all evil, souffrir de tout le monde, et ne faire souffrir
personne, "that divine secret has existed in England
from the days of Alfred to those of Romilly, of
Clarkson and of Florence Nightingale, and in
thousands who have no fame."
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ઃઃ
"I leave England," he wrote to Margaret Fuller,
with an increased respect for the Englishman.
His stuff or substance seems to be the best of the
world."1
The "Representative Men," on whom Emerson
gave seven lectures before the Boston Lyceum, in
1845-6, and in England in 1847-8, publishing the
series in 1850, are Plato, Shakespeare, Napoleon,
Swedenborg, Montaigne, and Goethe. These
represent respectively the philosopher, poet, man of
the world, mystic, sceptic, and writer. It may be
objected, not without reason, that Swedenborg is
not a good representative of mysticism, St. Teresa
1 v., p. 323. (Notes.)
EMERSON AS CRITIC
107
or Madame Guyon or Jacob Boehme or any of a
dozen other Catholic saints being more typical of
the high spiritual gifts involved; while Goethe
seems unnecessary after Shakespeare. But Emerson
was no doubt better acquainted with Swedenborg's
life and thought than with those of the truer
mystics; and he had toiled through fifty-five
volumes of Goethe-learning the language as he
went on to please his friend Carlyle, and no doubt
he felt that this labour ought to be made to pay
dividends by means of a lecture. Also he had
a certain personal interest in Goethe through his
elder brother William. The latter, studying
theology in Göttingen, and beset by doubts, made
pilgrimage to Weimar, eighty miles away, for
advice. Goethe advised the expedient, not the
heroic; told him to continue in his profession,
preach his best, and keep his doubts to himself.
But the Emersons were not the people to practise
insincerity. At twenty-four William Emerson
changed his plans and went in for the law. Goethe's
cynical advice must have jarred on Ralph Waldo's
moral sense, and when he came to read Wilhelm
Meister its free Continental manners would further
offend his fastidious taste.
Carlyle said, after reading Representative Men,
that he got the least good out of the Plato-part,
for he remembered nothing of it except Socrates'
clogs and big ears. This would not be pleasing to
Emerson-Carlyle rarely tempered his criticism
to the culprit-for Plato was his chief hero. Of all
secular books, he says, Plato only is entitled to
Omar's fanatical remark of the Koran: "Burn
the libraries, for their value is in this book." He
108
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
is the mountain from which all later men have
quarried their boulders. He unites the Unity of the
religious East to the detail-seeking, analytical,
scientific West, and thus balances for the first
time in one soul the tendencies which sway in
eternal conflict all down the ages, wherever lesser
men have attempted universe-explanations. Plato
could see both sides, could ride his pair with
a foot on each, could keep his two balls always in
the air. It is true that he has no self-consistent
system of philosophy, that he says one thing in
one place and the reverse in another, that "the
acutest German, the lovingest disciple, could never
tell what Platonism was;" but that very fact
proves his greatness. He will not take sides and
be partial. Like the Universe itself, he will not be
afraid of contradictions.
Of Napoleon, the man of the world, it might be
expected that Emerson would make no competent
judge. Yet the expectation would be wrong. The
philosopher estimates the man of action much better
than the latter would have estimated the former.
No doubt the scholar always feels more or less his
parasitism, and Emerson often used to say: "I like
people who can do things." Accordingly he gives
ungrudging admiration to the power of the man
Napoleon. This man would see no impediments
to his will; would blot "impossible" out of the
dictionary. "There shall be no Alps," he said,-
and built his roads until Italy was as accessible as
Paris. Having decided what he wanted to do, he
did it with might and main. He fought sixty
battles, and had the details all calculated out
beforehand, winning his victories in his head before
EMERSON AS CRITIC
109
he won them in the field. He had enormous
powers of endurance: "there have been many
working kings, from Ulysses to William of Orange,
but none who accomplished a tithe of this man's
performance." He had the efficient man's contempt.
for the ineffective; "the hereditary asses," he called
the Bourbons. Nor was he soldier only. He
delighted in the conversation of men of science,
though slighting literature as mere phrase-making ;
and he discussed religion with the Bishop of
Montpellier, showing New Theology tendencies
concerning hell. But he was no materialist. “You
may talk as long as you please, gentlemen, but who
made all that?"-pointing to the stars. Naturally
he had the defects of his temperament, the vices
of his virtues. He had no generous sentiments.
He was neither truthful nor honest.
"He is a
boundless liar." He had a passion for stage effect,
was vulgar in manners, was an unqualified egotist.
In short, he had no virtue save power; and in the
exercise of that power he left France poorer and
feebler and smaller than he found it. So inefficient,
ultimately, is power without other virtues. The
gods are going the other way. Napoleon was fond
of talking about his star, but the one to which he
hitched his wagon was a falling one and not one
which travelled with the swinging constellations.
As soon as he fought for conquest and personal
ambition,—not for France and order and principle—
the stars in their courses were against him, as they
were against Sisera.
The lecture on Montaigne is perhaps the best of
the series. Certainly it is the homeliest and most
human. Emerson had early found a friend in
ΙΙΟ
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
Montaigne so much so that for some time he felt
he would require no other book. It seemed to him
that he must have written it himself, in a former
life, "so sincerely it spoke to my thought and
experience." The circumstances of the two were
widely different, for Montaigne was a French lord
of the sixteenth century, bred a good Catholic, and
a courtier and man of the world in his early days.
But there was nevertheless deep communion between
the two, a uniting catholicity of mind. Montaigne
was honest, through and through: a lover of truth
and hater of cant: outspoken and candid-perhaps
too much so for some tastes: a solid, shrewd man,
who has seen the foolishness of pretending to be
more than we are, or to know more than we do
know. Yet he was no materialist-he saw through
that fallacy also:-
You are both in extremes, he says. You that will
have all solid, and a world of pig-lead, deceive your-
selves grossly. You believe yourselves rooted and
grounded on adamant; and yet, if we uncover the last
facts of our knowledge, you are spinning like bubbles
in a river, you know not whither or whence, and you
are bottomed and capped and wrapped in delusions.
Neither will he be betrayed to a book, and wrapped in
a gown. The studious class are their own victims;
they are thin and pale, their feet are cold, their heads
are hot, the night is without sleep. . . If you come near
them and see what conceits they entertain,-they are
abstractionists, and spend their days and nights in
dreaming some dream. . . But I see plainly, he says,
that I cannot see. I know that human strength is not
in extremes, but in avoiding extremes. I, at least,
will shun the weakness of philosophizing beyond my
depth.
EMERSON AS CRITIC
III
So the seigneur Michel de Montaigne, having
retired from court life at thirty-eight, proceeds to
live in quiet and homely fashion on his estate,
writing down meanwhile the random thoughts that
came into his head, on every topic under the sun.
And the result is a book which the best minds have
commended. It is the only book known to have
been in Shakespeare's library. His autographed
copy is in the British Museum; and another copy
of this translation (Florio's) has the autograph of
Ben Jonson. Leigh Hunt says that Montaigne was
the only writer that Byron could read with any
pleasure. One wishes that Burton, of Anatomy of
Melancholy fame, would have read him also. It
would have cheered him up. And there is consider-
able similarity and kinship between their two
minds, in the way they jog on through their
reflections and quotations.
Emerson had a great regard for Swedenborg,
though disliking his morbid visions and his stiff
Old Testament theology. What he chiefly liked
about him was his doctrine of Correspondences,
according to which every material object has a
spiritual meaning. It was Emerson's habit-as it
was Plato's-to base his thought on perceptible
nature, and then to use the natural object as a
symbol for something in the thought-world; some-
what as we all do when we say as brave as a
lion," "firm as a rock," "wise as the serpent,"
meek as a lamb," etc. But Emerson saw the
danger of tying the thought to one symbol only.
The scientifically-trained and too systematic mind
of the Swedish seer fell inevitably into this error.
He made the horse stand for carnal understanding;
(
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II2
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
a tree is perception; the moon, faith; a cat means
this, an ostrich that, and cabbages something else,
poorly tethering each symbol to one spiritual
sense. But, says Emerson, the slippery Proteus is
not so easily caught :
In Nature, each individual symbol plays innumerable
parts. . . The central identity enables any one symbol
to express successively all the qualities and shades of
real being.
Nevertheless Swedenborg is a colossal soul, and
may be called the last Father of the Church. His
works run to about fifty stout octavos, and would
be a sufficient library for a lonely and athletic
student. He stands as a sort of companion and
parallel to Shakespeare, as Emerson points out :-
I have sometimes thought that he would render the
greatest service to modern criticism, who should draw
the line of relation that subsists between Shakespeare
and Swedenborg. The human mind stands ever in
perplexity, demanding intellect, demanding sanctity,
impatient equally of each without the other. The
reconciler has not yet appeared. If we tire of the
saints, Shakespeare is our city of refuge. Yet the
instincts presently teach that the problem of essence
must take precedence of all others;-the questions of
Whence? What? and Whither?
It is the ancient problem of the Good and the
True, on which Coleridge was so fond of expatiating.
And there is also the Beautiful. Man's soul is
many-sided, and cannot be satisfied with one kind
of food or activity.
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