CHAPTER VII
EMERSON IN ENGLAND—ENGLISH TRAITS—EMERSON
AND MATTHEW ARNOLD
Emerson's last visit to England was made in 1873, after his health had failed. He had been in Egypt and on the Continent, hoping to recover the freshness of his mental powers; but that was not to be. In London he and his daughter Ellen, who gave to her father a loving devotion without limits, lived in apartments in Down Street, Piccadilly. It was only too evident that, even after ten months of rest and travel, he was an invalid in mind. He could not recollect names—a failing common in advanced age, of course, but Emerson was only in his seventieth year and was to live ten years more. He resorted to all kinds of paraphrases and circumlocutions. "One of the men who seemed to me the most sincere and clear-minded I have met was—you know whom I mean, I met him at your house, the biologist, the champion of Darwin—with what lucid energy he talked to us." When I mentioned Huxley's name, Emerson said, "Yes, how could I forget him?" But presently the name had to be given to him again. The power of association between people or things and the names of them had been lost. He was always, said the critics, a little déconsu; sentences, they insisted, succeeded each other without much obvious connection, or without the copula which would have brought them into their true relation.
The truth is, he gave his reader credit for a little imaginative power. He took him into partnership. He was mindful of Voltaire's pungent epigram: "L'art d'être ennuyeux, c'est l'art de tout, dire." He had his own theory of style and of diction. His temperament left him no choice. If his quickness of transition from one subject to another, or from one thought to another, left some of his readers toiling after him in vain, they were not the readers for whom he wrote. Why should they read him if he wrote a language to them unknown?
The interview between Huxley and himself to which Emerson referred was at breakfast; for breakfasts were then given almost as often as luncheons are now. There were a dozen or so people to meet him; men and women. I introduced each of them as they arrived. In each case they had been asked to make Emerson's acquaintance, but to some of them Emerson was an unknown name; or, if not wholly unknown, called up in their minds no clear image of the man or knowledge of his life's work. "Tell me who he is." "Tell me what he has done." "Is he English or American?" But I suppose there never has been a time when a knowledge of literature, or of great spiritual influences, has been an indispensable passport to social position. Nor was it because Emerson was an American that he was unfamiliar to these delightful and, in many ways, accomplished women.
Years afterward, in 1888, I was engaged to lunch on the day when news of Matthew Arnold's death had come. Arnold had been so good a friend to me that I did not like going on this first moment to such an entertainment, but I thought the talk would turn on Arnold, and I went. My hostess was a woman renowned in the world, or in her world, for great qualities, known to everybody, and I should have thought knowing everybody who had, as Arnold had, a place both in letters and in society. I referred to his sudden death. "Ah, yes," she answered, "an American, was he not?" That may be set off against the unacquaintance of these other ladies with Emerson.
What Emerson cared for was to meet the men and women who stood in some spiritual or intellectual relation to him; or who were his disciples. Mr. Alexander Ireland, in his biographical sketch of Emerson, quotes an illustrative story. It was in Edinburgh, this same year, and Dr. William Smith, President of the Edinburgh Philosophical Association, was driving him about that wonderful city. Dr. Smith had told him of "a worthy tradesman in Nicholas Street who is his enthusiastic admirer." When Emerson heard of it, he proposed to call on him. They stopped at the "worthy tradesman's," and Dr. Smith went into the shop and said: "Mr. ——, Mr. Emerson is at the door and will be glad to see you for a few minutes." "The five minutes were well spent," adds Dr. Smith; and the disciple was happy for the rest of his life. It was characteristic of Emerson, and of Emerson as an American. Very likely he did not quite understand how immense is the gulf which in this country separates the man who stands behind a counter from the man who stands in front of the counter. If he had understood, he would not have cared. What he cared for was the point of contact, and of discipleship. It was the master who sought his pupil, because he was his pupil.
During Emerson's too brief stay in London I called often in Down Street. Miss Ellen was anxious to protect her father against the pressure from many quarters for public addresses, and to decline as many private invitations as possible. At Oxford it was the same, but neither in Oxford nor London did Emerson lecture except briefly at Mr. Thomas Hughes's Working-men's College. Between him and Tom Hughes—he was never called anything else—there was not very much in common except sterling qualities of character. Hughes was a good and amiable Philistine, English to the tips of his fingers, who wrote one book, Tom Brown's Schooldays, which is immortal, and half a dozen others that are dead or were never really alive. But Hughes was one of our friends in the black days when we had few in England, working-men excepted; and Emerson was too good a patriot to forget that; and too much a lover of manliness in men not to like one who had that supreme trait in a high degree, as Hughes had. So he made the exception in his favour, for the Working-men's College was an institution of high usefulness, in which Hughes's heart was bound up. As for society, Emerson was an invalid, and able on that ground to decline invitations without offence. He had studied English society, as one form of English life, when here in 1848; and was content with that experience. "I do not care for classes," he said.
The nineteenth century produced two supremely good books on American and on English civilization: Tocqueville's De la Démocratic en Amérique and Emerson's English Traits, published in 1856. Tocqueville's book, published in 1835, remains the best book on the United States for the student who cares to get down to the foundation of things; who cares more for ideas, tendencies, and principles than for details. Of Emerson's the same thing may be said, yet no two treatises could be more unlike than those of the Frenchman and the American.