This comparison, be it understood, is not to be taken as an attempt to settle a question of comparative rank. A contrast is not of itself an appraisal, nor a figure of speech an end of the argument. And after all, if figures of speech are to be regarded, a floor of tiles may be as beautiful, and even as “artistic,” as the finest of woven carpets. Let comparisons go. We may study differences without exalting one or depreciating another. Of the four writers now named, we are not to say that any one was greater than all the rest. Each had his superiorities and his inferiorities, the second necessary concomitants of the first; for every virtue casts its shadow.
Emerson, for his part, seems to have been keenly aware of the disconnectedness of his work,—his “formidable tendency to the lapidary style,” he terms it,—and even to have accepted it as a defect. “I dot evermore in my endless journal, a line on every knowable in nature,” he writes to Carlyle; “but the arrangement loiters long, and I get a brick-kiln instead of a house.” That was one face of the medal; but his “bricks” are now of more value than many another man’s streetful of buildings.
Thoreau, though he too had his humble moods, was in general more self-reliant—or at least more self-assertive—than his older friend and master. He believed in the “lapidary style,” or in some wholesome approach to it; and what he believed in he would stand up for. “We hear it complained of some works of genius,” he says, “that they have fine thoughts, but are irregular and have no flow. But even the mountain peaks on the horizon are, to the eye of science, parts of one range.” He is defending Emerson,—though he does not name him,—and, indirectly, himself; and with the same end in view he goes on to praise Sir Walter Raleigh, whose style, he says, has a natural emphasis, like a man’s tread, “and a breathing space between the sentences.” And he declares, correctly enough, that what the ignorant applaud as a “flow” of style is much of it nothing but a “rapid trot.”
One thing is certain: a man must work according to his own method. For him that is the best method, and indeed the only one. Carlyle entreated Emerson to “become concrete, and write in prose the straightest way.” “I wish you would take an American Hero, one whom you really love; and give us a History of him,—make an artistic bronze statue (in good words) of his Life and him. I do indeed.” Thoreau’s appeal to Emerson is for exactly the opposite: less art, if need be, and less concreteness, but more “far-off heats,” more “star-dust and undissolvable nebulæ.” To that end he turns Emerson’s own verse against him. “From his
‘lips of cunning fell
The thrilling Delphic oracle.’
And yet sometimes,—
We should not mind if on our ear there fell
Some less of cunning, more of oracle.”
Clever critics, both of them, the Scotchman and the Yankee; but meanwhile, between the two fires, Emerson kept on polishing pearls and cutting cameos, with hardly so much as an attempt at an “artistic bronze statue.” The author of the essay on “Self-Reliance” knew that a man must work with his own mind, as he must wear his own face; that no method is so good or so bad but that it may be damaged by an attempt to make it as good as another’s.