‘Character’ and ‘Manners’ are related studies. There is a moral order in the world. Nothing can withstand it. ‘Character is this moral order seen through the medium of an individual nature.’ Society has raised certain artificial distinctions. But they must be recognized. Society is real, and grows out of a genuine need. ‘The painted phantasm Fashion casts a species of derision on what we say. But I will neither be driven from some allowance to Fashion as a symbolic institution, nor from the belief that love is the basis of courtesy.’
‘Gifts’ is a fine bit of paradox. ‘The gift, to be true, must be the flowing of the giver unto me, correspondent to my flowing unto him. When the waters are at level, then my goods pass to him, and his to me.’ To give useful things denies the relation. Hence the fitness of beautiful things.
There is bold imagery in the essay on ‘Nature.’ ‘Plants are the young of the world, but they grope ever upward toward consciousness; the trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted to the ground. The animal is the novice and probationer of a more advanced order. The men though young, having tasted the first drop from the cup of thought, are already dissipated: the maples and ferns are still uncorrupt; yet no doubt when they come to consciousness they too will curse and swear.’ Thus does Emerson describe that glimpse he had of a ‘system in transition.’
A healthy optimism pervades the essay on ‘Politics.’ In spite of meddling and selfishness the foundations of the State are very secure. ‘Things have their laws, as well as men; and things refuse to be trifled with.’ By a higher law property will be protected. The same necessity secures to each nation the form of governing best suited to it. Yet all forms are defective. Good men ‘must not obey the laws too well.’ Perfect government rests on character at last. There are dreamers who do not despair of seeing the State renovated ‘on the principle of right and love.’
Representative Men consists of lectures on Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Napoleon, and Goethe, together with an introduction on the ‘Uses of Great Men.’
Plato is the man who makes havoc with originalities, the philosopher whose writings have been for twenty-two hundred years the Bible of the learned, but who has his defects. Intellectual in aim, and therefore literary, he attempts a system of the universe and fails to complete it or make it intelligible.
Swedenborg is the representative of mysticism, great with its power, weak with its defects.
Out of the eternal conflict between abstractionist and materialist arises another type of mind, one that laughs at both philosophies for being out of their depth and pushing too far. He is the sceptic, Montaigne, for example. The type was peculiarly grateful to Emerson, admiring as he did a man who talked with shrewdness, was not literary, who knew the world, used the positive degree, never shrieked, and had no wish to annihilate time and space.
Shakespeare meets our conception of the Poet, ‘a heart in unison with his time and country,’ whose production comes ‘freighted with the weightiest convictions and pointed with the most determined aims which any man or class knows of in his times.’ He demonstrated the possibility of translating things into song. The ear is ravished by the beauty of his lines, ‘yet the sentence is so loaded with meaning and so linked with its foregoers and followers, that the logician is satisfied.’ And he had the royal trait of cheerfulness.
In Napoleon we have ‘the strong and ready actor’ who in the ‘universal imbecility, indecision, and indolence of men’ knows how to take occasion by the beard. His life is an answer to cowardly doubts. Emerson calls Napoleon ‘the agent or attorney of the middle class of modern society.’ It was he who showed what could be done by the use of common virtues. His experiment failed because he had a selfish and sensual aim. In the last analysis Napoleon was not a gentleman.