Let him hope infinitely with a patience as large as the sky.
Nothing is so young and untaught as time.
How wise is his saying that we do not turn to the books of the Bible—St. Paul and St. John—to start us on our task, as we do to Marcus Aurelius, or the Lives of the philosophers, or to Plato, or Plutarch, "because the Bible wears black clothes"! "It comes with a certain official claim against which the mind revolts. The Bible has its own nobilities—might well be charming if left simply on its merits, as other books are, but this, 'You must,' 'It is your duty,' in connection with it, repels. 'T is like the introduction of martial law into Concord. If you should dot our farms with picket lines, and I could not go or come across lots without a pass, I should resist, or else emigrate. If Concord were as beautiful as Paradise, it would be as detestable to me."
In his essays and letters Emerson gives one the impression of never using the first words that come to mind, nor the second, but the third or fourth; always a sense of selection, of deliberate choice. To use words in a novel way, and impart a little thrill of surprise, seemed to be his aim. This effort of selection often mars his page. He is rarely carried away by his thought, but he snares or captures it with a word. He does not feel first and think second; he thinks first, and the feeling does not always follow. He dearly loved writing; it was the joy of his life, but it was a conscious intellectual effort. It was often a kind of walking on stilts; his feet are not on the common ground. And yet—and yet—what a power he was, and how precious his contributions!
He says in his Journal, "I have observed long since that to give the thought a full and just expression I must not prematurely utter it." This hesitation, this studied selection robs him of the grace of felicity and spontaneity. The compensation is often a sense of novelty and a thrill of surprise. Moreover, he avoids the commonplace and the cheap and tedious. His product is always a choice one, and is seen to have a quality of its own. No page has more individuality than his, and none is so little like the page of the ordinary professional writer.
'Tis a false note to speak of Emerson's doctrines, as Henry James did. He had no doctrines. He had leading ideas, but he had no system, no argument. It was his attitude of mind and spirit that was significant and original. He would have nothing to do with stereotyped opinions. What he said to-day might contradict what he said yesterday, or what he might say to-morrow. No matter, the spirit was the same. Truth is a sphere that has opposite poles. Emerson more than any other writer stood for the contradictory character of spiritual truth. Truth is what we make it—what takes the imprint of one's mind; it is not a definite something like gold or silver, it is any statement that fits our mental make-up, that comes home to us. What comes home in one mood may not come home in another.
Emerson had no creed, he had no definite ideas about God. Personality and impersonality might both be affirmed of Absolute Being, and what may not be affirmed of it in our own minds?
The good of such a man as Emerson is not in his doctrines, but in his spirit, his heroic attitude, his consonance with the universal mind. His thought is a tremendous solvent; it digests and renders fluid the hard facts of life and experience.
XIV
Emerson records in his Journal: "I have been writing and speaking what were once called novelties, for twenty-five or thirty years, and have not now one disciple. Why? Not that what I said was not true; not that it has not found intelligent receivers; but because it did not go from any wish in me to bring men to me, but to themselves. I delight in driving them from me. What could I do, if they came to me?—they would interrupt and encumber me. This is my boast that I have no school follower. I should account it a measure of the impurity of insight, if it did not create independence."