knew of the quiet and blameless life that came to its appointed end on the 27th April, 1882. On the completion of his college education, Emerson became a student of theology, and after a turn at teaching, was ordained, in March, 1829, minister of the ‘Second Church’ in Boston. In September of the same year he married; and the death of his young wife, in February, 1832, perhaps quickened the doubts and disinclinations which severed his connection with his ‘Church’ on the 9th September, 1832. The following year he visited Europe for the first time, and made his celebrated call upon Carlyle at Craigenputtock, and laid the keel of a famous friendship. In the summer of 1834 he settled at Concord. He married again, visited England again, wrote essays, delivered lectures, made orations, published poems, carried on a long and most remarkable correspondence with Carlyle, enjoyed after the most temperate and serene of fashions many things and much happiness. And then he died.
‘Can you emit sparks?’ said the cat to the ugly duckling in the fairy tale, and the poor abashed creature had to admit that it could not. Emerson could emit sparks with the most electrical of cats. He is all sparks and shocks.
If one were required to name the most non-sequacious author one had ever read, I do not see how one could help nominating Emerson. But, say some of his warmest admirers, ‘What then? It does not matter!’ It appears to me to matter a great deal.
A wise author never allows his reader’s mind to be at large, but casts about from the very first how to secure it all for himself. He takes you (seemingly) into his confidence, perhaps pretends to consult you as to the best route, but at all events points out to you the road, lying far ahead, which you are to travel in his company. How carefully does a really great writer, like Dr. Newman or M. Rénan, explain to you what he is going to do and how he is going to do it! His humour, wit, and fancy, however abundant they may be, spring up like wayside flowers, and do but adorn and render more attractive the path along which it is his object to conduct you. The reader’s mind, interested from the beginning, and desirous of ascertaining whether the author keeps his word and adheres to his plan, feels the glow of healthy exercise, and pays a real though unconscious attention. But Emerson makes no terms with his readers—he gives them neither
thread nor clue, and thus robs them of one of the keenest pleasures of reading—the being beforehand with your author, and going shares with him in his own thoughts.
If it be said that it is manifestly unfair to compare a mystical writer like Emerson with a polemical or historical one, I am not concerned to answer the objection, for let the comparison be made with whom you will, the unparalleled non-sequaciousness of Emerson is as certain as the Correggiosity of Correggio. You never know what he will be at. His sentences fall over you in glittering cascades, beautiful and bright, and for the moment refreshing, but after a very brief while the mind, having nothing to do on its own account but to remain wide open, and see what Emerson sends it, grows first restive and then torpid. Admiration gives way to astonishment, astonishment to bewilderment, and bewilderment to stupefaction.
‘Napoleon is not a man, but a system,’ once said, in her most impressive tones, Madame de Staël to Sir James Mackintosh, across a dinner-table. ‘Magnificent!’ murmured Sir James. ‘But what does she mean?’ whispered one of those helplessly commonplace creatures who, like the present writer, go about spoiling everything.
‘Mass! I cannot tell!’ was the frank acknowledgment and apt Shakspearian quotation of Mackintosh. Emerson’s meaning, owing to his non-sequacious style, is often very difficult to apprehend. Hear him for a moment on ‘Experience’:
‘I gossip for my hour concerning the eternal politic. I have seen many fair pictures, not in vain. A wonderful time I have lived in. I am not the novice I was fourteen, nor yet seven years ago. Let who will ask, Where is the fruit? I find a private fruit sufficient. This is a fruit, that I should not ask for a rash effect from meditations, counsels, and the hiving of truths.’
This surely is an odd way of hiving truths. It follows from it that Emerson is more striking than suggestive. He likes things on a large scale—he is fond of ethnical remarks and typical persons. Notwithstanding his habit of introducing the names of common things into his discourses and poetry (‘Hay, corn, roots, hemp, flax, apples, wool, and wood,’ is a line from one of his poems), his familiarity therewith is evidently not great. ‘Take care, papa,’ cried his little son, seeing him at work with his spade, ‘you will dig your leg.’