English Traits
In 1847 Emerson (see Vol. XIII, p. 339) made his second visit to England, this time on a lecturing tour. An outcome of the visit was "English Traits," which was first published in 1856. "I leave England," he wrote on his return home, "with an increased respect for the Englishman. His stuff or substance seems to be the best in the world." "English Traits" deals with a series of definite subjects which do not admit of much philosophic digression, and there is, therefore, an absence of the flashes of spiritual and poetic insight which gave Emerson his charm.
I.—The Anchorage of Britain
I did not go very willingly to England. I am not a good traveller, nor have I found that long journeys yield a fair share of reasonable hours. I find a sea-life an acquired taste, like that for tomatoes and olives. The sea is masculine, the type of active strength. Look what egg-shells are drifting all over it, each one filled with men in ecstasies of terror alternating with cockney conceit, as it is rough or smooth. But to the geologist the sea is the only firmament; it is the land that is in perpetual flux and change. It has been said that the King of England would consult his dignity by giving audience to foreign ambassadors in the cabin of a man-of-war; and I think the white path of an Atlantic ship is the right avenue to the palace-front of this seafaring people.
England is a garden. Under an ash-coloured sky, the fields have been combed and rolled till they appear to have been finished with a pencil instead of a plough. Rivers, hills, valleys, the sea itself, feel the hand of a master. The problem of the traveller landing in Liverpool is, Why England is England? What are the elements of that power which the English hold over other nations? If there be one test of national genius universally accepted, it is success; and if there be one successful country in the universe that country is England.
The culture of the day, the thoughts and aims of men, are English thoughts and aims. A nation considerable for a thousand years has in the last centuries obtained the ascendant, and stamped the knowledge, activity, and power of mankind with its impress.
The territory has a singular perfection. Neither hot nor cold, there is no hour in the whole year when one cannot work. The only drawback to industrial conveniency is the darkness of the sky. The night and day are too nearly of a colour.
England resembles a ship in shape, and, if it were one, its best admiral could not have anchored it in a more judicious or effective position. The shop-keeping nation, to use a shop word, has a good stand. It is anchored at the side of Europe, and right in the heart of the modern world.
In variety of surface Britain is a miniature of Europe, as if Nature had given it an artificial completeness. It is as if Nature had held counsel with herself and said: "My Romans are gone. To build my new empire I will choose a rude race, all masculine, with brutish strength. Sharp and temperate northern breezes shall blow to keep them alive and alert. The sea shall disjoin the people from others and knit them by a fierce nationality. Long time will I keep them on their feet, by poverty, border-wars, seafaring, sea-risks, and stimulus of gain." A singular coincidence to this geographic centrality is the spiritual centrality which Emanuel Swedenborg ascribes to the people: "The English nation are in the centre of all Christians, because they have an interior intellectual light. This light they derive from the liberty of speaking and writing, and thereby of thinking."
II.—Racial Characteristics
The British Empire is reckoned to contain a fifth of the population of the globe; but what makes the British census proper important is the quality of the units that compose it. They are free, forcible men in a country where life has reached the greatest value. They have sound bodies and supreme endurance in war and in labour. They have assimilating force, since they are imitated by their foreign subjects; and they are still aggressive and propagandist, enlarging the dominion of their arts and liberty.
The English composite character betrays a mixed origin. Everything English is a fusion of distant and antagonistic elements. The language is mixed; the currents of thought are counter; contemplation and practical skill; active intellect and dead conservatism; world-wide enterprise and devoted use and wont; a country of extremes—nothing in it can be praised without damning exceptions, and nothing denounced without salvos of cordial praise.
The sources from which tradition derives its stock are mainly three: First, the Celtic—a people of hidden and precarious genius; second, the Germans, a people about whom, in the old empire, the rumour ran there was never any that meddled with them that repented it not; and, third, the Norsemen and the children out of France. Twenty thousand thieves landed at Hastings. These founders of the House of Lords were greedy and ferocious dragoons, sons of greedy and ferocious pirates. Such, however, is the illusion of antiquity and wealth that decent and dignified men now existing actually boast their descent from these filthy thieves.
As soon as this land, thus geographically posted, got a hardy people into it, they could not help becoming the sailors and factors of the world. The English, at the present day, have great vigour of body. They are round, ruddy, and handsome, with a tendency to stout and powerful frames. It is the fault of their forms that they grow stocky, but in all ages they are a handsome race, and please by an expression blending good nature, valour, refinement, and an uncorrupt youth in the face of manhood.
The English are rather manly than warlike. They delight in the antagonism which combines in one person the extremes of courage and tenderness. Nelson, dying at Trafalgar, says, "Kiss me, Hardy," and turns to sleep. Even for their highwaymen this virtue is claimed, and Robin Hood is the gentlest thief. But they know where their war-dogs lie, and Cromwell, Blake, Marlborough, Nelson, and Wellington are not to be trifled with.
They have vigorous health and last well into middle and old age. They have more constitutional energy than any other people. They box, run, shoot, ride, row, and sail from Pole to Pole. They are the most voracious people of prey that have ever existed, and they have written the game-books of all countries.
These Saxons are the hands of mankind—the world's wealth-makers. They have that temperament which resists every means employed to make its possessor subservient to others. The English game is main force to main force, the planting of foot to foot, fair play and an open field—a rough tug without trick or dodging till one or both comes to pieces. They hate craft and subtlety; and when they have pounded each other to a poultice they will shake hands and be friends for the remainder of their lives.
Their realistic logic of coupling means to ends has given them the leadership of the modern world. Montesquieu said: "No people have true commonsense but those who are born in England." This commonsense is a perception of laws that cannot be stated, or that are learned only by practice, with allowance for friction. The bias of the nation is a passion for utility. They are heavy at the fine arts, but adroit at the coarse. The Frenchman invented the ruffle, the Englishman added the shirt. They think him the best-dressed man whose dress is so fit for his use that you cannot notice or remember to describe it.
In war the Englishman looks to his means; but, conscious that no better race of men exists, they rely most on the simplest means. They fundamentally believe that the best stratagem in naval war is to bring your ship alongside of the enemy's ship, and bring all your guns to bear on him until you or he go to the bottom. This is the old fashion which never goes out of fashion.
Tacitus said of the Germans: "Powerful only in sudden efforts, they are impatient of toil and labour." This highly destined race, if it had not somewhere added the chamber of patience to its brain, would not have built London. I know not from which of the tribes and temperaments that went to the composition of the people this tenacity was supplied, but they clinch every nail they drive. "To show capacity," a Frenchman described as the end of speech in a debate. "No," said an Englishman, "but to advance the business."
The nation sits in the immense city they have builded—a London extended into every man's mind. The modern world is theirs. They have made and make it day by day. In every path of practical ability they have gone even with the best. There is no department of literature, of science, or of useful art in which they have not produced a first-rate book. It is England whose opinion is waited for. English trade exists to make well everything which is ill-made elsewhere. Steam is almost an Englishman.
One secret of the power of this people is their mutual good understanding. Not only good minds are born among them, but all the people have good minds. An electric touch by any of their national ideas melts them into one family. The chancellor carries England on his mace, the midshipman at the point of his dirk, the smith on his hammer, the cook in the bowl of his spoon, and the sailor times his oars to "God save the King!"
I find the Englishman to be him of all men who stands firmest in his shoes. The one thing the English value is pluck. The word is not beautiful, but on the quality they signify by it the nation is unanimous. The cabmen have it, the merchants have it, the bishops have it, the women have it, the journals have it. They require you to dare to be of your own opinion, and they hate the practical cowards who cannot answer directly Yes or No.
Their vigour appears in the incuriosity and stony neglect each of the other. Each man walks, eats, drinks, shaves, dresses, gesticulates, and in every manner acts and suffers, without reference to the bystanders—he is really occupied with his own affairs, and does not think of them. In short, every one of these islanders is an island himself, safe, tranquil, incommunicable.
Born in a harsh and wet climate, which keeps him indoors whenever he is at rest, and, being of an affectionate and loyal temper, the Englishman dearly loves his home. If he is rich he builds a hall, and brings to it trophies of the adventures and exploits of the family, till it becomes a museum of heirlooms. England produces, under favourable conditions of ease and culture, the finest women in the world. Nothing can be more delicate without being fantastical, than the courtship and mutual carriage of the sexes. Domesticity is the taproot which enables the nation to branch wide and high. In an aristocratical country like England, not the trial by jury, but the dinner is the capital institution. It is the mode of doing honour to a stranger to ask him to eat.
The practical power of the English rests on their sincerity. Alfred, whom the affection of the nation makes the type of their race, is called by a writer at the Norman Conquest, the "truth-speaker." The phrase of the lowest of the people is "honour-bright," and their praise, "his word is as good as his bond." They confide in each other—English believes in English. Madame de Staël says that the English irritated Napoleon mainly because they have found out how to unite success with honesty. The ruling passion of an Englishman is a terror of humbug.
The English race are reputed morose. They have enjoyed a reputation for taciturnity for six or seven hundred years. Cold, repressive manners prevail, and there is a wooden deadness in certain Englishmen which surpasses all other countrymen. In the power of saying rude truth no men rival them. They are proud and private, and even if disposed to recreation will avoid an open garden. They are full of coarse strength, butcher's meat, and sound sleep. They are good lovers, good haters, slow but obstinate admirers, and very much steeped in their temperament, like men hardly awaked from deep sleep which they enjoy.
The English have a mild aspect, and ringing, cheerful voice. Of absolute stoutness of spirit, no nation has more or better examples. They are good at storming redoubts, at boarding frigates, at dying in the last ditch, or any desperate service which has daylight and honour in it. They stoutly carry into every nook and corner of the earth their turbulent sense of inquiry, leaving no lie uncontradicted, no pretension unexamined.
They are very conscious of their advantageous position in history. I suppose that all men of English blood in America, Europe, or Asia, have a secret feeling of joy that they are not Frenchmen. They only are not foreigners. In short, I am afraid that the English nature is so rank and aggressive as to be a little incompatible with any other. The world is not wide enough for two. More intellectual than other races, when they live with other races they do not take their language, but bestow their own. They subsidise other nations, and are not subsidised. They proselytise and are not proselytised. They assimilate other nations to themselves and are not assimilated.
III.—Wealth, Aristocracy, and Religion
There is no country in which so absolute a homage is paid to wealth. There is a mixture of religion in it. The Englishman esteems wealth a final certificate. He believes that every man has himself to thank if he does not mend his condition. To pay their debts is their national point of honour. The British armies are solvent, and pay for what they take. The British empire is solvent. It is their maxim that the weight of taxes must be calculated not by what is taken but by what is left. They say without shame: "I cannot afford it." Such is their enterprise, that there is enough wealth in England to support the entire population in idleness one year. The proudest result of this creation of wealth is that great and refined forces are put at the disposal of the private citizen, and in the social world the Englishman to-day has the best lot. I much prefer the condition of an English gentleman of the better class to that of any potentate in Europe.
The feudal character of the English state, now that it is getting obsolete, glares a little in contrast with democratic tendencies. But the frame of society is aristocratic. Every man who becomes rich buys land, and does what he can to fortify the nobility, into which he hopes to rise. The taste of the people is conservative. They are proud of the castles, language, and symbols of chivalry. English history is aristocracy with the doors open. Who has courage and faculty, let him come in.
All nobility in its beginnings was somebody's natural superiority. The things these English have done were not done without peril of life, nor without wisdom of conduct, and the first hands, it may be presumed, were often challenged to show their right to their honours, or yield them to better men.
Comity, social talent, and fine manners no doubt have had their part also. The lawyer, the farmer, the silk mercer lies perdu under the coronet, and winks to the antiquary to say nothing. They were nobody's sons who did some piece of work at a nice moment.
The English names are excellent—they spread an atmosphere of legendary melody over the land. Older than epics and histories, which clothe a nation, this undershirt sits close to the body. What stores of primitive and savage observation it infolds! Cambridge is the bridge of the Cam; Sheffield the field of the river Sheaf; Leicester the camp of Lear; Waltham is Strong Town; Radcliffe is Red Cliff, and so on—a sincerity and use in naming very striking to an American, whose country is whitewashed all over with unmeaning names, the cast-off clothes of the country from which the emigrants came, or named at a pinch from a psalm tune.
In seeing old castles and cathedrals I sometimes say: "This was built by another and a better race than any that now look on it." Their architecture still glows with faith in immortality. Good churches are not built by bad men; at least, there must be probity and enthusiasm somewhere in society.
England felt the full heat of the Christianity which fermented Europe, and, like the chemistry of fire, drew a firm line between barbarism and culture. When the Saxon instinct had secured a service in the vernacular tongue the Church was the tutor and university of the people.
Now the Anglican Church is marked by the grace and good sense of its forms; by the manly grace of its clergy. The gospel it preaches is "By taste are ye saved." The religion of England is part of good breeding. When you see on the Continent the well-dressed Englishman come into his ambassador's chapel and put his face for silent prayer into his well-brushed hat, you cannot help feeling how much national pride prays with him, and the religion of a gentleman.
At this moment the Church is much to be pitied. If a bishop meets an intelligent gentleman and reads fatal interrogation in his eyes, he has no resource but to take wine with him.
But the religion of England—is it the Established Church? No. Is it the sects? No. Where dwells the religion? Tell me first where dwells electricity, or motion, or thought? They do not dwell or stay at all. Electricity is passing, glancing, gesticular; it is a traveller, a newness, a secret. Yet, if religion be the doing of all good, and for its sake the suffering of all evil, that divine secret has existed in England from the days of Alfred to the days of Florence Nightingale, and in thousands who have no fame.
[Representative Men]
Some of the lectures delivered by Emerson during his lecturing tour in England were published in 1850 under the title of "Representative Men," and the main trend of their thought and opinion is here followed in Emerson's own words. It will be noted that the use of the term "sceptic," as applied to Montaigne, is not the ordinary use of the word, but signifies a person spontaneously given to free inquiry rather than aggressive disbelief. The estimate of Napoleon is original. In "Representative Men" Emerson is much more consecutive in his thought than is customary with him. His pearls are as plentiful here as elsewhere, but they are not scattered disconnectedly.
Plato
Among secular books, Plato only is entitled to Omar's fanatical compliment to the Koran: "Burn all books, for their value is in this book." Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated among men of thought. Plato is philosophy, and philosophy Plato. No wife, no children had he, but the thinkers of all civilised nations are his posterity, and are tinged with his mind.
Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. They lived in their writings, and so their house and street life is commonplace. Their cousins can tell you nothing about them. Plato, especially, has no external biography.
Plato stands between the truth and every man's mind, and has almost impressed language and the primary forms of thought with his name and seal.
The first period of a nation, as of an individual, is the period of unconscious strength. Children cry, scream, and stamp with fury, unable to express their desires. As soon as they can speak and tell their wants they become gentle. With nations he is as a god to them who can rightly divide and define. This defining is philosophy. Philosophy is the account which the human mind gives to itself of the constitution of the world.
Two cardinal facts lie ever at the base of thought: Unity and Variety—oneness and otherness.
To this partiality the history of nations corresponds. The country of unity, faithful to the idea of a deaf, unimplorable, immense fate, is Asia; on the other side, the genius of Europe is active and creative. If the East loves infinity, the West delights in boundaries. Plato came to join and enhance the energy of each. The excellence of Europe and Asia is in his brain. No man ever more fully acknowledged the Ineffable; but having paid his homage, as for the human race, to the illimitable, he then stood erect, and for the human race affirmed: "And yet things are knowable!" Full of the genius of Europe, he said "Culture," he said "Nature," but he failed not to add, "There is also the divine."
This leads us to the central figure which he has established in his academy. Socrates and Plato are the double-star which the most powerful instrument will not entirely separate. Socrates, in his traits and genius, is the best example of that synthesis which constitutes Plato's extraordinary power.
Socrates, a man of humble stem, and a personal homeliness so remarkable as to be a cause of wit in others, was a cool fellow, with a knowledge of his man, be he whom he might whom he talked with, which laid the companion open to certain defeat in debate; and in debate he immoderately delighted. He was what in our country people call "an old one." This hard-headed humorist, whose drollery diverted the young patricians, turns out in the sequel to have a probity as invincible as his logic, and to be, under cover of this play, enthusiastic in his religion. When accused before the judges, he affirmed the immortality of the soul and a future reward and punishment, and, refusing to recant, was condemned to die; he entered the prison and took away all ignominy from the place. The fame of this prison, the fame of the discourses there, and the drinking of the hemlock, are one of the most precious passages in the history of the world.
The rare coincidence in one ugly body of the droll and the martyr, the keen street debater with the sweetest saint known to any history at that time, had forcibly struck the mind of Plato, and the figure of Socrates placed itself in the foreground of the scene as the fittest dispenser of the intellectual treasures he had to communicate.
It remains to say that the defect of Plato is that he is literary, and never otherwise. His writings have not the vital authority which the screams of prophets and the sermons of unlettered Arabs and Jews possess.
And he had not a system. The acutest German, the lovingest disciple could never tell what Platonism was. No power of genius has ever yet had the smallest success in explaining existence. The perfect enigma remains.
Montaigne
The philosophers affirm disdainfully the superiority of ideas. To men of this world the man of ideas appears out of his reason. The abstractionist and the materialist thus mutually exasperating each other, there arises a third party to occupy the middle ground between the two, the sceptic. He labours to be the beam of the balance. There is so much to say on all sides. This is the position occupied by Montaigne.
In 1571, on the death of his father, he retired from the practice of the law, at Bordeaux, and settled himself on his estate. Downright and plain dealing, and abhorring to be deceived or to deceive, he was esteemed in the country for his sense and probity. In the civil wars of the League, which converted every house into a fort, Montaigne kept his gates open, and his house without defence. All parties freely came and went, his courage and honor being universally esteemed.
Montaigne is the frankest and honestest of all writers. The essays are an entertaining soliloquy on every random topic that comes into his head, treating everything without ceremony, yet with masculine sense. I know not anywhere the book that seems less written. It is the language of conversation transferred to a book. Montaigne talks with shrewdness, knows the world, and books, and himself; never shrieks, or protests, or prays. He keeps the plain; he rarely mounts or sinks; he likes to feel solid ground and the stones underneath.
We are natural believers. We are persuaded that a thread runs through all things, and all worlds are strung on it as beads. But though we reject a sour, dumpish unbelief, to the sceptical class, which Montaigne represents, every man at some time belongs. The ground occupied by the sceptic is the vestibule of the temple. The interrogation of custom at all points is an inevitable stage in the growth of every superior mind. It stands in the mind of the wise sceptic that our life in this world is not quite so easy of interpretation as churches and school books say. He does not wish to take ground against these benevolences, but he says: "There are doubts. Shall we, because good nature inclines us to virtue's side, say, 'There are no doubts—and lie for the right?' Is not the satisfaction of the doubts essential to all manliness?"
I may play with the miscellany of facts, and take those superficial views which we call scepticism; but I know they will presently appear to me in that order which makes scepticism impossible. For the world is saturated with deity and law. Things seem to tend downward, to justify despondency, to promote rogues, to defeat the just; but by knaves as by martyrs the just cause is carried forward, and general ends are somewhat answered. The world-spirit is a good swimmer, and storms and waves cannot drown him. Through the years and the centuries, through evil agents, through toys and atoms, a great and beneficent tendency irresistibly streams. So let a man learn to look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting; let him learn to bear the disappearance of things he was wont to reverence without losing his reverence.
Shakespeare
Shakespeare is the only biographer of Shakespeare. So far from Shakespeare being the least known, he is the one person in all modern history known to us. What point of morals, of manners, of economy, of philosophy, of taste, of conduct of life has he not settled? What district of man's work has he not remembered? What king has he not taught statecraft? What maiden has not found him finer than her delicacy? What lover has he not outloved?
Some able and appreciating critics think no criticism on Shakespeare valuable that does not rest purely on the dramatic merit; that he is falsely judged as poet and philosopher. I think as highly as these critics of his dramatic merit, but still think it secondary. He was a full man who liked to talk; a brain exhaling thoughts and images, which, seeking vent, found the drama next at hand.
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. With this wisdom of life is the equal endowment of imaginative and lyric power. An omnipresent humanity co-ordinates all his faculties. He has no peculiarity, no importunate topic, but all is duly given. No mannerist is he; he has no discoverable egotism—the great he tells greatly, the small subordinately. He is wise without emphasis or assertion; he is strong as Nature is strong, who lifts the land into mountain slopes without effort, and by the same rule as she floats a bubble in the air, and likes as well to do the one as the other. This power of transferring the inmost truth of things into music and verse makes him the type of the poet.
One royal trait that belongs to Shakespeare is his cheerfulness. He delights in the world, in man, in woman, for the lovely light that sparkles from them. Beauty, the spirit of joy, he sheds over the universe. If he appeared in any company of human souls, who would not march in his troop? He touches nothing that does not borrow health and longevity from his festal style. He was master of the revels to mankind.
Napoleon
Among the eminent persons of the nineteenth century, Bonaparte owes his predominance to the fidelity with which he expresses the aim of the masses of active and cultivated men. If Napoleon was Europe, it was because the people whom he swayed were little Napoleons. He is the representative of the class of industry and skill. "God has granted," says the Koran, "to every people a prophet in its own tongue." Paris, London, and New York, the spirit of commerce, of money, of material power, were also to have their prophet—and Bonaparte was qualified and sent. He was the idol of common men because he, in transcendent degree, had the qualities and powers of common men. He came to his own and they received him.
An Italian proverb declares that if you would succeed you must not be too good. Napoleon renounced, once for all, sentiments and affections, and helped himself with his hands and his head. The art of war was the game in which he exerted his arithmetic. He had a directness of action never before combined with so much comprehension. History is full of the imbecility of kings and governors. They are a class of persons to be much pitied, for they know not what they should do. But Napoleon understood his business. He knew what to do, and he flew to his mark. He put out all his strength; he risked everything; he spared nothing; he went to the edge of his possibilities.
This vigour was guarded and tempered by the coldest prudence and punctuality. His very attack was never the inspiration of courage, but the result of calculation. The necessity of his position required a hospitality to every sort of talent, and his feeling went along with this policy. In fact, every species of merit was sought and advanced under his government. Seventeen men in his time were raised from common soldiers to the rank of king, marshal, duke, or general. I call Napoleon the agent or attorney of the middle class of modern society.
His life was an experiment, under the most favourable conditions, of the powers of intellect without conscience. All passed away, like the smoke of his artillery, and left no trace. He did all that in him lay to live and thrive without moral principle.
Goethe
I find a provision in the constitution of the world for the writer or secretary who is to report the doings of the miraculous spirit of life that everywhere throbs and works. Nature will be reported. All things are engaged in writing their history. The planet goes attended by its shadow. The air is full of sounds, the sky of tokens; the ground is all memoranda and signatures.
Society has really no graver interest than the well-being of the literary class. Still, the writer does not stand with us on any commanding ground. I think this to be his own fault. There have been times when he was a sacred person; he wrote Bibles; the first hymns; the codes; the epics; tragic songs; Sibylline verses; Chaldæan oracles. Every word was true, and woke the nations to new life. How can he be honoured when he is a sycophant ducking to the giddy opinion of a reckless public?
Goethe was the philosopher of the nineteenth century multitude, hundred-handed, Argus-eyed, able and happy to cope with the century's rolling miscellany of facts and sciences, and by his own versatility dispose of them with ease; and what he says of religion, of passion, of marriage, of manners, of property, of paper-money, of periods of belief, of omens, of luck, of whatever else, refuses to be forgotten.
What distinguishes Goethe, for French and English readers, is an habitual reference to interior truth. But I dare not say that Goethe ascended to the highest grounds from which genius has spoken. He is incapable of self-surrender to the moral sentiment. Goethe can never be dear to men. His is a devotion to truth for the sake of culture. But the idea of absolute eternal truth, without reference to my own enlargement by it is higher; and the surrender to the torrent of poetic inspiration is higher.