Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803) was born at Boston of what the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table liked to call "the Brahmin caste"; that is the educated clerical class, ministers from father to son. A similar class existed in Scotland after the Reformation.[2] Preaching was in the blood of these gentlemen of Boston. Emerson, after breaking away from Unitarianism in a singular sermon at Boston (1832), continued to preach, when he could find an audience, and then betook himself to lecturing, first on scientific subjects, and next on literature and things in general. In 1837 he delivered to the F B K Society at Harvard a lecture on "The American Scholar". He said: "Mr. President and Gentlemen, This confidence in the unsearched might of man belongs, by all motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation, to the American Scholar. We have listened too long to the courtly Muses of Europe". Indeed Ticknor, Longfellow, and Lowell successively held a Chair founded for the precise purpose of listening to the courtly Muses of mediaeval and modern Europe. But the American scholar, it seems, was to listen neither to them nor to Homer, Virgil, and Horace, nor even to Isaiah, who was much about an Asiatic Court. Walt Whitman must be the typical American scholar, from the point of view of Emerson.
The position of Emerson, as poet and essayist, is matter of controversy among the learned of his own country. In a poem styled "Nature," Emerson writes:—
She is gamesome and good
But of mutable mood,—
No dreary repeater now and again,
She will be all things to all men,
She who is old but nowise feeble
Pours her power into the people.
As to his prose, Prof. Barrett Wendell of Harvard writes: "The Essays are generally composed of materials which he collected for purposes of lecturing.... He would constantly make note of any idea which occurred to him; and when he wished to give a lecture he would huddle together as many of those notes as would fill the assigned time, trusting with all the calm assurance of his unfaltering individualism that the truth inherent in the separate memoranda would give them all together the unity implied in the fact of their common sincerity.... The fact that these essays were so often delivered as lectures should remind us of what they really are.... Emerson's essays, in short, prove to be an obvious development from the endless sermons with which for generations his ancestors had regaled the New England fathers."
Professor Trent of Columbia University asks: "Shall we not follow Emerson's own lead, and call him frankly a great poet, basing the title on these and similar essays" ("Circles" and "The Oversoul") "and on the somewhat scanty but still important mass of his compositions in authentic poetic form"—of which a poor specimen has just been given. Some of Emerson's fellow-citizens, Professor Trent says, answer his question in the affirmative. Emerson, on the strength of his prose and verse, is "a great poet". "Others equally cultivated maintain that many of his poems are only versified versions of his essays, and declare that save in rare passages he is deficient in passion, in sensuousness, in simplicity ..." while Mr. Trent, speaking for himself, says that Emerson "is prone to jargon, to bathos, to lapses of taste". Mr. Matthew Arnold, and Charles Baudelaire, agreed with the second and less favourable party of American critics. Baudelaire's remarks were intemperate in style, but Mr. Trent thinks that, "it seems as if the time had come for Emerson's countrymen frankly to accept the verdict" of Matthew Arnold, that Emerson's prose "was not of sufficient merit to entitle him to be ranked as a great man of letters".
It does not become an alien to interfere in this unsettled controversy. In literary criticism of modern English poetry Emerson said that Pope "wrote poetry fit to put round frosted cake". Walter Scott "wrote a rhymed traveller's guide to Scotland," Wordsworth had the merit of being "conscientious," Byron was "passional," Tennyson "factitious".
It is, of course, impossible here to discuss Emerson as a philosopher. He is spoken of as an Idealist, but he seems to lean a little to Pragmatism. "The advantage of the ideal theory over the popular theory is this, that it presents the world in precisely that view which is most desirable to the mind." To whose mind? Emerson visited England twice; after the second tour he wrote "English Traits". Dickens had done, regrettably, the same sort of work in "American Notes," and "Martin Chuzzlewit". Authors on each side of the Atlantic took the advice of the elder Mr. Weller, and abused the countries and peoples that they visited, Emerson hitting the darker blots in our society. He had an influence, mainly over young men, in both countries, scarcely inferior to that of Carlyle; but left nothing so massive and concrete as Carlyle's "Frederick," "Cromwell," and "The French Revolution". Having quoted from Professor Barrett Wendell passages which leave rather a mournful impression, we must add that, in his opinion, Emerson's work "surely seems alive with such unconditioned freedom of temper as makes great literature so inevitably lasting". Professor Trent, while confessing "that true poetic glow and flow are almost entirely absent from Emerson's verses, and that his ever-recurring and often faulty octosyllabic couplets soon become wearisome," declines to rank him with Tennyson, Shelley, or Longfellow, and ends: "But to Americans, at least, Emerson is an important poet, whose best work seems likely to gain rather than to lose value".
James Russell Lowell.
The poetic qualities of Whittier and of James Russell Lowell (1819-1891) are pleasantly indicated in Mr. Lowell's sonnet to Whittier on his seventy-fifth birthday.[3]