IV
The same temperamental quality is seen in the American idealist. His attitude toward his spiritual leaders is seldom that of meek discipleship. It is rather that of frank, outspoken comradeship. No mysterious barrier separates the great man from the common man. One has more, the other has less, that is all.
The men who have cherished the finest ideals have insisted that these should be shared by the multitude. In a newspaper of sixty years ago there is this contemporary character sketch: "Ralph Waldo Emerson is the most erratic and capricious man in America. He is emphatically a democrat of the world, and believes that what Plato thought, another man may think. What Shakespeare sang, another man may know as well. As for emperors, kings, queens, princes, or presidents, he looks upon them as children in masquerade. He has no patience with the chicken-hearted who refer to mouldy records or old almanacs to ascertain if they may say that their souls are their own. Mr. Emerson is a strange compound of contradictions. Always right in practice, and sometimes in theory. He is a sociable, accessible, republican sort of man, and a great admirer of nature."
Could any better description be given of the kind of man whom Americans delight to honor? This "sociable, accessible, republican sort of man" happened to be endowed with gifts denied in such full measure to his countrymen. But they were gifts which they understood and appreciated. He was one of them, and expressed and interpreted their habitual thought. Luther used to declare that no one who had never had trials and temptations could understand the Holy Scriptures. And one might say that no one who had never taken part in a town meeting, or listened to the talk of neighbors at the country store, or traveled in an "accommodation train" in the Middle West, can fully understand Emerson.
Critics have often written of the optimism of Emerson as if he were one of those who did not perceive the darker side of things. Nothing could be more untrue to his temper of mind. Emerson was cheerful, but he never pretended that the world was an altogether cheerful place to live in. Indeed, it distinctly needed cheering up, and that, according to him, is what we are here for.
It might be possible to make out a list of matters of fact treated by Emerson and his friend Carlyle. They would be essentially the same. When it came to hard facts, one was as unflinching in his recognition as the other. There was nothing smug in Emerson's philosophy. He never took an apologetic attitude nor attempted to minimize difficulties. There was no attempt to justify the ways of God to man. But while agreeing in regard to the facts the friends differed as to their conclusions. In reading Carlyle one seems to stand at the end of a world struggle that has proved unavailing. Everything has been tried, and everything has failed. Alas! Alas!
Emerson sees the same facts, but he seems to be standing at the beginning. The moral world is still without form and void, but the creative spirit is brooding upon it. "Sweet is the genesis of things." Emerson is pleased with the world, not because he thinks its present condition is very good, but because he sees so much room for it to become better. It is a most promising experiment. It furnishes an abundance of the raw materials of righteousness.
Nor does he flatter himself that the task of betterment is an easy one, or that the end is in sight. It is not a world where wishes, even good wishes, are fulfilled without effort. There are inexorable laws not of our making. The whims of good people are not respected.
"For Destiny never swerves
Nor yields to man the helm."
The struggle is stem and unrelenting. It taxes all our energies. And yet it is exhilarating. There is a moral quick-wittedness which sees the smile behind the threatening mask of Fate. Destiny is after all a good comrade for the brave and the self-reliant.
"He forbids to despair,
His cheeks mantle with mirth,
And the unimagined good of man
Is yeaning at the birth."
The riddle of existence is seen not from the Old World point of view, but from that of the new. It is of the nature of a surprise. The Sphinx of Emerson is not carved in stone. It is not silent and motionless, waiting for answers that do not come.
It is the American Sphinx leading in a game of hide-and-seek. The mystery of existence baffles us, not because there is no answer, but because there are so many. They are infinite in number, and all of them are true. They wait for the mind large enough to harbor them in all their variety, and serene enough not to be annoyed because their contradictions are not at once reconciled.
The catalogue of ills may be never so long, but it fails to depress one who sees everything in the making.
"I heard a poet answer
Aloud and cheerfully,
'Say on, sweet Sphinx! thy dirges
Are pleasant songs to me.'
"Uprose the merry Sphinx,
And crouched no more in stone;
She melted into purple cloud.
She silvered in the moon."
This conception of the merry Sphinx may seem strange to the dyspeptic philosopher pondering on the inscrutableness of the universe. But the prospectors in the mining camps of the Far West, and the builders of new cities understand what Emerson meant. Their experience of the ups and downs of fortune has taught them how to find pleasure in uncertainty. You never can tell how anything will turn out till you try. That's the fun of it. They are quite ready to believe that the same thing holds good in the higher life.
Or take the lines on "Worship." How can Worship be personified? Emerson's picture is not that of a patriarch on bended knee; it is that of a vigorous youth picking himself up after he has been knocked down by his antagonist.
"This is he, who, felled by foes,
Sprung harmless up, refreshed by blows."
Religion is a kind of spiritual resilience. It is that which makes a man come back with new vigor to his work after his first failure. It is the ability to make a new beginning.
In Emerson the American hurry is transformed into something of spiritual significance. A new commandment is given to the good man—Be quick! Keep moving!
"Trenchant Time behoves to hurry,
O wise man, hearest thou the least part,
Seest them the rushing metamorphosis,
Dissolving all that fixture is,
Melts things that be to things that seem."
Morality and religion must be speeded up if they are to do any useful work in this swift world.
If the ideals of the saints and reformers were criticized, so were those of the scholars. Matthew Arnold's definition of culture was that of a man of books. It was the knowledge of the best that had been said and known in the past. Emerson's lines entitled "Culture" begin with a characteristic question and end with an equally characteristic affirmation. The question is—
"Can rules or tutors educate
The semigod whom we await?"
The affirmation is that the man of culture is one who
"to his native centre fast,
Shall into Future fuse the Past,
And the world's flowing fates in his own mould recast."
According to this definition Abraham Lincoln, with his slight knowledge of the best things of the past, but with the power to fuse such knowledge as he had and to recast it in his own mould, was a man of culture. And all true Americans would agree with him.
Emerson, like the "sociable, accessible, republican sort of man" that he was, was the foe of special privilege. The best things were, in his judgment, the property of all. He would take religion from the custody of the priests, and culture from the hands of schoolmasters, and restore them to their proper place, among the inalienable rights of man. They were simply forms of the pursuit of happiness of which the Declaration of Independence speaks. It is a right of which no potentates can justly deprive the citizen.
Above all, he would protest against everything which tends to deprive anyone of the happiness of the forward look. There was a cheerful confidence that the great forces are on our side. Now and then the clouds gather and obscure the vision, but:
"There are open hours
When God's will sallies free
And the dull idiot may see
The flowing fortunes of a thousand years."
This is the American doctrine of "Manifest Destiny" spiritually discerned.