EMERSON

A Mystic Who Lives Again in His Journals[2]

Warren Barton Blake

Emerson has been “discovered” again—this time in the France that he tried hard and vainly to understand. It all began with the publication of a critical biography by Madame Dugard in 1907. I was in Paris then, and read it, and was most of all struck by the comically dressy effect, in translation, of the simple lines beginning:

Good-bye, proud world, I’m going home.

In French, they correspond to an Emerson dressed in eighteenth century style, with wig and sword:

Adieu, monde orgueilleux, je retourne au foyer;

Tu n’es pas mon ami, je ne suis pas le tien…

Yet the book is a good introduction to Emerson, and, since 1907, Madame Dugard and others have translated several volumes of essays for the French public. I wonder if they have won a reading—outside the university and professionally literary groups; I wonder if Frenchmen see far beyond what Robert G. Ingersoll called the “baked-bean side of his genius”? As the late Perpetual Secretary of the Immortals said, when the French Academy “crowned” the Dugard book:

“Emerson’s influence in America, like Ruskin’s in England, is a curious illustration of the need for an ideal which, at certain moments, the man of action, the Anglo-Saxon, feels. Such was the empire of contemplative monks over barbarian chiefs and of mystics over feudal armies. It was Emerson’s fortune to launch his ideas at a time when America was largely without them…. Emerson, knowing that the great danger of democracy is atrophy of the individual conscience, set himself

to preaching individualism—the necessity of a high culture, the search for an ideal.”

Eight years ago, when I read Mme. Dugard’s volume, I was youthful—with all of youth’s intolerance. It seemed no mere coincidence that Emerson’s father recorded his birth in his diary between a dry note on the “Election Sermon” and a report of a session of his literary club at Mr. Adams’s. Cheerful youth, not needing reassurance concerning the excellence of this world as an abiding place, is unlikely to set a high value on what contemporary reviewers, even in the American religious press, found to praise in Emerson’s essays: “Their lofty cheer, and spirit-stirring notes of courage and hope.” I certainly had no conception of Emerson’s influence upon my father’s generation—an influence so great that Carlyle called his friend a new era in our history; so great that when some clergymen complained that he was leading young men to hell, Father Taylor remarked: “It may be that Emerson is going to hell, but I am certain he will change the climate there, and emigration will set that way.” Then again, I had no sympathy with Emerson because it seemed to me, in spite of all the long words and imported transcendentalism—or, partly, on account of them—that he didn’t “get anywhere.” (I sometimes feel so still—but the charge is less damnatory. I do not wonder that Moncure Conway wrote of Emerson setting free in his heart—in his heart, notice—“a winged thought that sang a new song and soared—whither?”)

Emerson’s dependence upon intuitions and praises of them as the springs of action and organ of inspiration conferring wisdom upon man seemed the less respectable because I hadn’t read Bergson—who has made intuitions more than ever fashionable. Emerson lived in the spirit-world—a quite different place from any trodden by the student in Paris who is at home in the world of the Sorbonne and the Bibliothèque Nationale, and in the world of flesh-and-blood. To healthy youth, nothing is much more repugnant than the Wordsworthian ideal of wise passivity, while the notion of a Buddhistic Nirvana seems murderous of

“Nature”—however you define her. Moreover, I know not how to direct my inexorable thoughts, Emerson avows, and scarcely appears to think any direction of them needful. His best thoughts steal upon him in silence, and Truth flies out of the window when Will enters in by the door. “There is never a fine aspiration but is on its way to its body or institution,” he confidently asserts. Too confidently, it seemed to me. Emerson, aged thirty, wrote that a system-grinder hates the truth; he loved the truth, and therefore—therefore?—side-stepped system. It was not till much later that he uttered the heartfelt cry: “If Minerva offered me a gift and an option, I would say, give me continuity. I am tired of scraps….

“‘The Asmodæan feat be mine

To spin my sand-bags into twine.’”

Perhaps the scrappiness of Emerson is less distressing to the youthful mind, eternally and quite needlessly refreshed by the comedy of life on every side of it, than the Emersonian “trick of solitariness,” that he played as a Harvard undergraduate not less but perhaps rather more than as the Concord sage. When Madame Dugard’s book on Emerson was published in Paris, I sat down and wrote a critique—stored with Roussellian analogies, à la Irving Babbitt. I was full of Rousseau then, and I piled on sentences that I meant to be cruel and crushing—not of Professor Babbitt, or Jean-Jacques, or Madame Dugard, but of poor Emerson. I showed my article, unfinished, to a dear friend—wiser than I; and then tore it up. Here is a part of the letter I had from my friend commenting on the little essay:

“I find your point that Emerson, the preacher of individualism, was himself thin-blooded and barren of true personality, interesting: whether or not it is true. I never happened to find it put just so before, and should certainly never have thought of it. But I suppose, after all, a certain kind of individuality might be expressed by impersonality as well as by any other instrument. I’ve only glanced through the Dugard book, but the point of view seems to be the conventional one that Emerson

was too far removed from the stress and pain of life to touch very closely vibrant, struggling souls. As you translate, ‘he fills only the full, reassures only the optimists.’ I suppose that is true enough. And yet—and yet, is any life so full that it does not need refilling; or any optimism so complete and so unshaken that it does not need reassurance, expression, from an articulate, a stronger spirit? Isn’t optimism with many people a religious yearning rather than any truly temperamental attribute; a thing to be struggled for, and cherished, and reinforced from without? Whatever forces from within may have urged Emerson toward idealism and optimism, wasn’t he at least equally an idealist, and optimist, from conviction, or faith, or whatever else you call the semi-religious element? The Emersonian idealism is more, I am sure, than the natural overflow of a serenely poetic disposition—to which you try to reduce it. You must not forget that essay of his on Destiny—Destiny, man’s heroic, large-spirited friend, man’s bolster against Fate (discouraging and enervating personage!).

“I suppose that it is fair enough to complain that Emerson gives light without heat, but how many writers throw off much heat and little light—to say nothing of ‘darkness visible’…. Not many philosophers and poets and friends of ours yield us both forms of power. Perhaps the combination of the two—light and, well, at least warmth—is the most remarkable thing about Christ and his system.”

I feel less ashamed of my calfish distrust and dislike of Emerson now that I have read in President Eliot’s centenary essay on the great New Englander his confession that he too, “as a young man,” found the writings of Emerson “unattractive, and not seldom unintelligible, … speculative, and visionary.” It is only after one has suffered from living that one fully values Emerson—only as one is gradually educated himself, in experience’s school, that one appreciates his worth as a prophet of modern education; of the latter day social organization, its maladies and quacks and salves; of what Dr. Eliot calls “natural” rather than supernatural religion.

III

For this descendant of a line of Yankee ministers, there is no dividing line between the secular and the sacred. To Emerson, life is itself sacred; and the universe no less holy than the Ark of the Tabernacle—

So nigh is grandeur to our dust

So nigh is God to man.

“Christianity is wrongly conceived by all such as take it for a system of doctrines,” he wrote in his diary as a young man—thereby fortifying in some sort what Augustine Birrell was to say half a century later: “You cannot, however dogmatically inclined, construct a theology out of Emerson.” His stress was placed—as he was persuaded Christ’s was—upon moral truth; and at thirty he wrote: “I feel myself pledged, if health and opportunity be granted me, to demonstrate that all necessary truth is its own evidence.” Demonstrate? Emerson never did succeed in “demonstrating” very much. In Dr. Eliot’s words, here was no logician or reasoner, but “a poet who wrote chiefly in prose.” But his prose is certainly no less poetic than his poetry. The inspiration is in both cases moral; and, to paraphrase—

His every line, of noble origin,

Is breathed upon by Hope’s perpetual breath.

Yet Emerson was intolerant of cant about immortality. “I notice that as soon as writers broach this subject they begin to quote. I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”[3]

Emerson demonstrates, after death, one meaning of immortality by living again in his “Journal”—the tenth volume of which has just come to my book-shelf. Some complain of prolixity, but to read this Journal is to find the measure of the man: and that is all the more cheering to the lazy reader in that Emerson is far from being immeasurable. He set down from day to day not only the record of events and personages who impressed him, but many stray thoughts and reflections. He swept into his Journal all the chips from his workshop, and stored there all the rough materials he meant to carve and fabricate and ornament. Workshop? The word is decidedly unpoetical, and perhaps inapt; for, as Madame Dugard points out, he made of his soul a lyre whose strings vibrated to all the winds of the spirit (his spirit, that is); and in his Journal he notes these passing vibrations in phrases where words like flow, flee, flux, fugitive, fugacious, current, stream, undulation, occur and recur. Undeniably he sometimes forced himself; he acknowledged that his talent, like the New England soil, is good only while he works it. “If I cease to task myself, I have no thoughts.” And adds: “This is a poor sterile Yankeeism. What I admire and love is the generous and spontaneous soil which flowers and fruits at all seasons.” Many of his memoranda he developed later in the essay form—a procedure suspected by his own contemporaries [4] —but I like the mere scraps. Very perfectly do they express the eagerly searching, earnestly austere man: reflecting all his sincerity and incompleteness just as the beautiful paragraphs they piled up as their sole monuments mirror the minds of Joubert in France and Amiel in Switzerland. There is no humbug here, though there are some few fallacies to reward those who read principally to prove, at the author’s expense, their own astuteness. Emerson fully realized—at fifty—what his deficiencies were; he called himself an intellectual chiffonier,

with a Jew’s rag-bag of brocade remnants and velvets and torn cloth-of-gold. Truth to tell, he is all this no less in his essays than in these Journals—and is a literary architect no more than his friend Montaigne. As he repeated his lectures, and they gained in polish and conciseness, the defect still sometimes remained: he built more than one excellent house without stairs. It is in momentary flashes of intuitive communication with the great spirits—lightning flashes that suddenly light up the black night in which we spend most of our time—that his genius shines. Somewhere in his Journal he writes:

“One man sees the fact or object, and another sees the power of it; one the triangle, and the other the cone which is generated by the revolution of the triangle.”

He who has so often been reproached with aloofness looked at many common facts, and saw what we see there—and beyond. His first lesson of religion is that things seen are temporal, unseen things eternal; yet is the temporal much for the eternally-minded, who preserves the all-important sense of wonder. “Now that man was ready, the horse was brought,” he writes; and continues:

“The timeliness of this invention of the locomotive must be conceded. To us Americans it seems to have fallen as a political aid. We could not have held the vast North America together which now we engage to do. It was strange, too, that when it was time to build a road across to the Pacific, a railroad, a ship-road, a telegraph, and in short, a perfect communication in every manner for all nations,—’twas strange to see how it was secured. The good World-Soul understands us well.”

Nowise was Emerson a Ruskinian. To the railroad he says—“like the courageous Lord Mayor at his first hunting, when told the hare was coming: ‘Let it come in Heaven’s name, I am not afraid on’t.’” And this assurance is all the more welcome as one of the not too frequent flashes of his humor.

While an author is often the worst-qualified critic of individual books or passages in his own work, he has almost always

expressed somewhere the final criticism of his total. So it is with Emerson. On one page he defines for us the type of idealism of which he was an exponent:

“We are idealists whenever we prefer an idea to a sensation…. Character is more to us…. Religion makes us idealists.”

On another page, he writes:

“Malthus existed to say, Population outruns food: Owen existed to say, ‘Given the circumstance, the man’s given. I can educate a tiger’: Swedenborg, that inner and outer correspond: Fourier, that the destinies are proportioned to the attractions; Bentham, the greatest good of the greatest number. But what do you exist to say?”

It is no tragedy if this sower of good seed said no one thing, and only repeated many unequally wise counsels, and, by the wireless telegraph of sympathetic genius, spelled out the dots and dashes that, for the rest of us, unschooled in science, might have remained dots and dashes till the day of judgment. Emerson’s contemporaries greatly needed the man and his serene preaching—so undisturbed—while

Theist, atheist, pantheist

Define and wrangle how they list.

To paraphrase Thureau-Dangan, Emerson’s was the empire of the contemplative monks over barbarian axe-men and sword-bearers. To-day, while the prosperous shudder at every murmur of social unrest, and the not-prosperous are drunk with heady wines; while society is, as in Emerson’s day, still “devoured by a secret melancholy,” disguised in a hundred forms of madness; while the nations still glare at one another from behind their breast-works, and the classes still war or hate (with ever deepening consciousness of class): while all these things are so, democracy’s “great dangers” may well remain the vulgarizing of the arts, contempt of contemplation, “the atrophy of the individual conscience.” Emerson somehow soothes this conscience without putting it to sleep. His courageous faith in Destiny, his cheering theory of compensations, his deathless hope, his healthy,

exaggerated individualism: here are counter-irritants for more than one of Time’s diseases. “If thought makes free, so does the moral sentiment. The mixtures of spiritual chemistry refuse to be analyzed.” And Emerson did indeed “make free”; he was Emancipator, “not of black bodies, but of the minds of white men.”

[2] Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson: 1820-1872. With Annotations. Edited by Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company. Ten Volumes.

[3] “Emerson refused to dogmatize about what is necessarily obscure at present.”—John Albee, Recollections of Emerson. Emerson wrote in his essay on Experience: “In accepting the leading of the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning the immortality of the soul or the like, but the universal impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance and is the principal fact in the history of the globe.” This is not far from the point of view of James, Bergson, and, nowadays, Sir Oliver Lodge. If Emerson “refused to dogmatize” about the uncertainties of the future life, he had all the same his nobler convictions. He writes in his Journal: “I know my soul is immortal if it were only by the sublime emotion I taste in reading these lines of Swedenborg: ‘The organical body with which the soul clothes itself is here compared to a garment, because a garment invests the body, and the soul also puts off the body and casts it away as old clothes (exuviæ), when it emigrates by means of death from the natural world into its own spiritual world.’”

[4] In Harper’s New Monthly Magazine for June, 1870, we read: “Rumor attributes to Ralph Waldo Emerson a peculiar method of composition. He keeps, it is said, a commonplace book into which go every striking thought, curious metaphor, keen epigram, which his own mind incubates or his various reading discovers. When he is called on for a lecture, he goes to his commonplace book. He culls from its pages enough of its best material for an hour’s instruction or entertainment. Connection is immaterial….”