His essay on Friendship will not be found satisfactory. Here is a subject on which surely we are entitled to ‘body.’ The Over Soul was different; there it was easy to agree with Carlyle, who, writing to Emerson, says: ‘Those voices of yours which I likened to unembodied souls and censure sometimes for having no body—how can they have a body? They are light rays darting upwards in the east!’ But friendship is a word the very sight of which in print makes the heart warm. One remembers Elia: ‘Oh! it is pleasant as it is rare to find the same arm linked in yours at forty which at thirteen helped it to turn over the Cicero De Amicitiâ, or some other tale of antique friendship which the young heart even then was burning to anticipate.’ With this in your ear it is rather chilling to read, ‘I do, then, with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them. We must have society on our own terms, and admit or exclude it on the slightest cause. I cannot afford to speak much with my friend.’ These are not genial terms.
For authors and books his affection, real as it was, was singularly impersonal. In his treatment of literary subjects, we miss the purely
human touch, the grip of affection, the accent of scorn, that so pleasantly characterize the writings of Mr. Lowell. Emerson, it is to be feared, regarded a company of books but as a congeries of ideas. For one idea he is indebted to Plato, for another to Dr. Channing. Sartor Resartus, so Emerson writes, is a noble philosophical poem, but ‘have you read Sampson Read’s Growth of the Mind?’ We read somewhere of ‘Pindar, Raphael, Angelo, Dryden, and De Staël.’ Emerson’s notions of literary perspective are certainly ‘very early.’ Dr. Holmes himself is every bit as bad. In this very book of his, speaking about the dangerous liberty some poets—Emerson amongst the number—take of crowding a redundant syllable into a line, he reminds us ‘that Shakspeare and Milton knew how to use it effectively; Shelley employed it freely: Bryant indulged in it; Willis was fond of it.’ One has heard of the Republic of Letters, but this surely does not mean that one author is as good as another. ‘Willis was fond of it.’ I dare say he was, but we are not fond of Willis, and cannot help regarding the citation of his poetical example as an outrage.
None the less, if we will have but a little
patience, and bid our occasional wonderment be still, and read Emerson at the right times and in small quantities, we shall not remain strangers to his charm. He bathes the universe in his thoughts. Nothing less than the Whole ever contented Emerson. His was no parochial spirit. He cries out:
‘From air and ocean bring me foods,
From all zones and altitudes.’
How beautiful, too, are some of his sentences! Here is a bit from his essay on Shakspeare in Representative Men:
‘It is the essence of poetry to spring like the rainbow daughter of Wonder from the invisible, to abolish the past, and refuse all history. Malone, Warburton, Dyce, and Collier have wasted their life. The famed theatres have vainly assisted. Betterton, Garrick, Kemble, Kean, and Macready dedicate their lives to his genius—him they crown, elucidate, obey, and express—the genius knows them not. The recitation begins, one golden word leaps out immortal from all this painful pedantry, and sweetly torments us with invitations to his own inaccessible homes.’
The words we have ventured to italicize seem
to us to be of surpassing beauty, and to express what many a play-goer of late years must often have dimly felt.