Patience should indeed be the motto for any Emerson reader who is not by nature ‘author’s kin.’ For example, in the essay on Character, after reading, ‘Everything in nature is bipolar, or has a positive and negative pole. There is a male and a female, a spirit and a fact, a north and a south. Spirit is the positive, the event is the negative; will is the north, action the south pole. Character may be ranked as having its natural place in the north’—how easy to lay the book down and read no more that day; but a moment’s patience is amply rewarded, for but sixteen lines farther on we may read as follows: ‘We boast our emancipation from many superstitions, but if we have broken any idols it is through a transfer of the idolatry. What have I gained that I no longer immolate a bull to Jove or to Neptune, or a mouse to Hecate; that I do not tremble before the Eumenides or the Catholic Purgatory, or the Calvinistic Judgment Day—if I quake at opinion, the public opinion as we call it, or the threat of assault or contumely, or bad neighbours, or poverty, or mutilation, or at the
rumour of revolution or of wonder! If I quake, what matters it what I quake at?’ Well and truly did Carlyle write to Emerson, ‘You are a new era, my man, in your huge country.’
Emerson’s poetry has at least one of the qualities of true poetry—it always pleases and occasionally delights. Great poetry it may not be, but it has the happy knack of slipping in between our fancies, and of clinging like ivy to the masonry of the thought-structure beneath which each one of us has his dwelling. I must be allowed room for two quotations, one from the stanzas called Give all to Love, the other from Wood Notes.
‘Cling with life to the maid;
But when the surprise,
First shadow of surmise,
Flits across her bosom young
Of a joy apart from thee,
Free be she, fancy-free,
Nor thou detain her vesture’s hem,
Nor the palest rose she flung
From her summer’s diadem.
Though thou loved her as thyself,
As a self of purer clay,
Though her parting dims the day,
Stealing grace from all alive;
Heartily know
When half-gods go,
The gods arrive.’
The lines from Wood Notes run as follows:
‘Come learn with me the fatal song
Which knits the world in music strong,
Whereto every bosom dances,
Kindled with courageous fancies;
Come lift thine eyes to lofty rhymes
Of things with things, of times with times,
Primal chimes of sun and shade,
Of sound and echo, man and maid;
The land reflected in the flood;
Body with shadow still pursued.
For nature beats in perfect tune
And rounds with rhyme her every rune;
Whether she work in land or sea
Or hide underground her alchemy.
Thou canst not wave thy staff in air,
Or dip thy paddle in the lake,
But it carves the bow of beauty there,
And the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake.
Not unrelated, unaffied,
But to each thought and thing allied,
Is perfect nature’s every part,
Rooted in the mighty heart.’
What place Emerson is to occupy in American literature is for America to determine. Some authoritative remarks on this subject are to be found in Mr. Lowell’s essay on ‘Thoreau,’ in My Study Windows; but here at home, where we are sorely pressed for room, it is certain he must be content with a small allotment, where,
however, he may for ever sit beneath his own vine and fig-tree, none daring to make him afraid. Emerson will always be the favourite author of somebody; and to be always read by somebody is better than to be read first by everybody and then by nobody. Indeed, it is hard to fancy a pleasanter destiny than to join the company of lesser authors. All their readers are sworn friends. They are spared the harsh discords of ill-judged praise and feigned rapture. Once or twice in a century some enthusiastic and expansive admirer insists upon dragging them from their shy retreats, and trumpeting their fame in the market-place, asserting, possibly with loud asseverations (after the fashion of Mr. Swinburne), that they are precisely as much above Otway and Collins and George Eliot as they are below Shakespeare and Hugo and Emily Brontë. The great world looks on good-humouredly for a moment or two, and then proceeds as before, and the disconcerted author is left free to scuttle back to his corner, where he is all the happier, sharing the raptures of the lonely student, for his brief experience of publicity.
Let us bid farewell to Emerson, who has bidden farewell to the world in the words of his own Good-bye:
‘Good-bye to flattery’s fawning face,
To grandeur with his wise grimace,
To upstart wealth’s averted eye,
To supple office low and high,
To crowded halls, to court and street,
To frozen hearts and hasting feet,
To those who go and those who come,—
Good-bye, proud world, I’m going home,
I am going to my own hearth-stone
Bosomed in yon green hills, alone,
A secret nook in a pleasant land,
Whose groves the frolic fairies planned;
Where arches green the livelong day
Echo the blackbird’s roundelay,
And vulgar feet have never trod,
A spot that is sacred to thought and God.’