This line of thought logically resulted also in a kind of pessimism. He seemed at times to despise human nature. Somewhere about 1860 he wrote to a friend, "There is not one man in twenty that is worth the ground he stands on"; and speaking of Napoleon he affirms that, in the well-nigh universal negligence and inefficiency of mankind, we cannot be too thankful for this prompt and ready actor. No one who realizes the hard and bitter struggle for daily bread with which three-fourths of the human race are constantly occupied, would have written such a sentence. The transition from optimism to pessimism is very much like that from democracy to imperialism. [Footnote: The peculiar type of Emerson's optimism is illustrated in his poem called "Sea Shore" where he makes a fine catalogue of the gifts and advantages which the ocean brings to mankind, but says nothing of the terrible destructive power of the sea. He forgot that his old friend the Greek represented Neptune as even more cruel than the god of war. Did this man of heroic nature lack the courage to face tragedy?]
We regret to see him deciding the discovery of etherization in favor of his brother-in-law, Dr. Jackson; a question which a Congressional committee found itself unable to determine.
He had one trait of character which his biographers have not mentioned, and which might pass by the name of incredulity. He was the most difficult of men to persuade of any strange and remarkable event. Neither did he take the least pains to conceal his disbelief; and when you were telling him the living truth this was rather difficult to bear. When we said that a woodpecker had been seen in Walden woods nearly as large as a crow and quite as black, he shook his head and looked up at the pine trees. That was not according to his idea of a woodpecker. Neither did he like to hear anything which tended to prove the depravity of human nature. Stories of fraud and corruption in commercial or political life were not pleasant to his ears; and if the perpetrators escaped punishment he was evidently much annoyed. He liked to tell the truth better than he did to hear it.
When nearly sixty years of age both Emerson and Alcott fell in love with a charming young school-teacher of the transcendental sort, and it is rather pleasant to think that there was so much human nature still left in those grave old philosophers.
He was the most famous American of his time; not so celebrated perhaps in his own country as President Lincoln, but in foreign countries he surpassed all others,—such is the deep impression which a great writer makes on the minds of men. In Europe he was looked upon as the best representative of our Western Hemisphere. Carlyle celebrated him in England, and Grimm in Germany. The latter said, "There is no other living writer to whom I feel that I owe so much."
He had no public receptions in foreign cities, but everywhere the finest people united to honor him. On his second visit to England he complained that his time was almost consumed in answering letters of invitation. An English guest at the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa dinner said that when he returned home he would be asked two questions,—if he had seen Niagara Falls, and if he had met Emerson. He was a particular favorite with the English nobility, and whenever we saw a glittering carriage rolling down Concord turn-pike we felt sure it contained some earl or viscount who was paying his compliments to the poet of the pines. Emerson liked to entertain these distinguished visitors in his modest little parlor, but he never slighted his old friends for them; for he lived the wisdom that he taught, and the final virtue of this man was the religious humility of his nature.
MATTHEW ARNOLD'S LECTURE.
During the earlier part of Emerson's career his religious philosophy met with such decided opposition that his friends were, very properly, all the more enthusiastic in his defence; and when the tide turned in his favor, and his fame rose continually higher and higher, the enthusiasm of his admirers reached a climax, and, like Webster before him, he became a veritable subject of idolization. His opponents, finding the current too strong for them, retreated into smooth water, waiting, like a defeated political party, for a favorable change of the tide. When, therefore, Matthew Arnold came to America in the autumn of 1883 expressly to lecture on Emerson, as a writer and thinker, there was great expectation on both sides, and both were equally disappointed. His friends who knew that he liked Emerson, thought he had found too much fault with him, and the other party considered he had praised him too highly.
Few men have ever done so much good in England as Matthew Arnold. Somewhere about the year 1830 Goethe remarked, that Englishmen, as such, were without reflection; party politics and the interests of trade interfered to prevent it; but they were great as practical men. This continued to be the order of the day, in spite of an occasional warning from Macaulay, for thirty years more, until finally Matthew Arnold came forward and said, "Do not be blinded any longer by the prejudices of self-interest, but endeavor to see things as they actually are." This was the continual chant of his life, repeated in a hundred different forms. He made use of the popularity he had gained by his fine, classic poetry, to teach his countrymen a lesson in culture. [Footnote: Lowell also made an excellent point when he warned Englishmen, at the Coleridge memorial, that if they were to regain the intellectual altitude of their ancestors, they must give up the adoration of common-sense, and pay more respect to imagination and ideality.]
Never did Demosthenes expose their faults to the Athenians more frankly and fearlessly, and with such manliness that at the time of his death there was no person in the British Islands more generally respected. On a trial vote that was taken by a London newspaper for membership to a proposed British Academy, Gladstone received the largest number of ballots, Tennyson the next and Matthew Arnold came third. He was considered the best literary critic in England, and if he had outlived Tennyson he would have succeeded him as laureate. He showed a dignified reserve in only publishing a very few books. Two small volumes of poetry, his "Essays in Criticism", which has become a standard work, and his American essays, are all that I know of. For all that, few writers were more celebrated in his own time, and it may be said that he fully deserved his monument in Westminster Abbey.