And pass the gulf that yawns between?”
RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
Tall, gaunt, with clear-cut and unmistakably New England features, and feet that would not admit of Cinderella slippers, is the tout ensemble which Emerson photographed upon our retina when we heard him lecture recently. We liked his calm and self-poised manner. There was no heated concern when the Sibylline leaves on which his lecture was written became inextricably mixed. Paradoxically enough, his theme was “Orators and Oratory.” His high, shrill voice, his ungainly manners, and his utter absence of gesture make him the most unattractive of speakers. But there was a certain “fury in his words” which fastened the attention. The next thing to being an orator is to love oratory; and his reverence and admiration for the eloquent in speech pass his own eloquent expression.
Emerson’s sentences are so pointed that frequently the point is so fine as to be lost. His eloquence is anything but Asiatic, and, indeed, its terseness very much resembles affectation. He is called the American Carlyle, but his proper title is the American Montaigne. There is not an idea in Emerson that cannot be traced to the garrulous old Frenchman. The first reading of Emerson is an era in a young man’s life. The short, apothegmic sentences strike him with the force of proverbs. The happy quotation and illustration seem inspirations of genius. The misty transcendentalism has a roseate hue, in delightful contrast with the bald practicality of Watts’ hymns and orthodox sermons. The stimulating style, resultant from exquisite taste and the manly resolve to carry out Pope’s advice about the “art to blot,” is high perfection when compared with the weak and weary prosing of moral essayists. Yet there is nothing original in Emerson. He has contributed little or nothing to the body of ideas. Not even his poetry, which is supposed to be productive of ideas, presents anything new or striking. The passion for nature-worship, which Wordsworth carried to its highest expression, becomes tiresome and unnatural in Emerson’s short metre and careless versification.
What is the source of his power? Why do New England critics rave over him? Even J. Russell Lowell, who, with all the limitations of a narrowed culture, ranks respectably as a literary critic, cannot find words in which to laud the New England philosopher. He finds the secret of his influence to consist in his “wide-reaching sympathy” and his being able to understand the use of a linchpin equally with the stellar influences. Lowell himself is under the witchery of mere words. His cultivated mind is drawn to the beautiful by acquired æsthetic taste. His estimate of Dante, as published in the New American Cyclopædia and afterward in Among my Books, fills the thoughtful Italian student with amazement. He is a critic of words, and is childishly led by a bright figure or exquisite metaphor. Emerson, whilst seeming to disregard words, pays profound attention to their collocation and effectiveness. This school is not a school of thoughts but of words; and it is under this aspect that we intend examining it. It is the thorough embodiment of poor Hamlet’s objection to the book which he is reading: “Words, words, words.” We read and read, and are charmed with Thucydidean terseness and Solomonic wisdom; but when we begin to reflect “all the riches have escaped out of our hands.” It is about time to expose this wily old philosopher, who has been throwing rhetorical dust into the eyes of several generations. He may have a noble manhood; he may be sincere; but there can be no question that it is the ignotum pro magnifico which has been the cheap cause of his popularity.
Thomas à Kempis tells us that “words fly through the air and hurt not a stone.” There is certainly no objection to a writer’s careful elaboration of his style. The study of words is a part of rhetoric. But there is a subtle and elusive application of words, outside of their obvious and generally-used meaning, which is at once a rhetorical and a logical vice. And as ideas fail, so words are sedulously cultivated. The style is the man, as Buffon did not say; but what of an affected style? If there is any truth in the saying, it convicts Emerson of being stilted, unnatural, and affected. No man thinks by jerks and starts, and no man writes so. The fanciful and abrupt indicate either affectation or an unbalanced intellect. All the great philosophers write calmly and equably. The sustained strength of Plato, on whom Emerson professes to model himself, is in direct contrast with the abruptness of Seneca, who was a mass of conceit and hypocrisy. We have no quarrel with Mr. Emerson on account of his studied style; only, with Sydney Smith, we object to a discourse in which are hung out preconcerted signals for tears or excitement. It is quite easy to form a quaint style. The success of Charles Lamb’s imitation of Sir Thomas Browne, or of Bret Harte’s or Thackeray’s burlesques of popular novels, shows how quickly a ready writer can fall into a philosophical diction. Emerson attempts the epigrammatic. Like Pythagoras, he disdains reasons. The ipse dixit, he supposes, will suffice for his disciples. He contradicts himself on his very self-satisfactory theory of “not being in any mood long.” He admires opposite characters; but, to the credit of American good sense be it said—good sense even in a philosophe—he does not “boil over,” like Carlyle, in all sorts of oddities of hero-worship. The Yankee hard head which he has cannot be softened by all the philosophy and poetry in the world; and, notwithstanding his ethereal views, he drives a hard bargain.
Can we review this philosopher to the satisfaction of our readers, or must they peruse him themselves in order to form a vague idea of his system?
It may be Emerson’s boast that he has no system. This restlessness under any, even nominal, régime is a characteristic of contemporaneous philosophy outside the church. There is liberty enough in the church; and, in fact, beyond it we see nothing but imprisonment, for nothing so practically chains the intellect of man as irresponsible freedom. It is like the liberty of the ocean enjoyed (?) by a mariner without sails or compass. A Catholic philosopher can speculate as much as he pleases. The security of the faith gives him a delightful sense of safe freedom. Like O’Connell’s driving a coach and four through an act of Parliament, he may go to the outermost verge of speculation. St. Thomas moves the most outrageous fallacies, speculations, and objections, and discusses them, too, with all the boldness of intellectual freedom. It is Dr. Marshall, we think, who shows that all intellectual activity and freedom are enjoyed within the spacious bounds of Catholic truth. Even in theology there are wide differences. The Catholic intellect is supposed to be completely bridled. We once read a powerful arraignment of our Scriptural proofs for purgatory, written by an eminent Protestant theologian. He must have been surprised to learn that Catholic theologians do not attach all importance to the Scriptural argument for purgatory. The different schools of Catholic theology argue pro and con. as keenly as old Dr. Johnson himself would have desired, but without the slightest detriment to the unity of the faith. Nothing can be falser than the received Protestant notion that we are helplessly bound by a network of petty definitions and regulations. There are, however, great and immovable principles which are understood to guide and vivify the Catholic intellect. And such systemization is necessary to all knowledge. Without it a man’s mind, like Emerson’s, wanders comet-like, attracting attention by its vagaries, but is of no intelligible use to the universe, and gives no light, except of a nebulous and perplexing nature.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, who, of all American writers, had the true transcendental mind, ridicules it unsparingly. His doleful experience upon Brook Farm, when he attempted to milk a cow, may have had a practical awakening effect upon his dreams. In a little sketch entitled The Celestial Railroad, in which he whimsically carries out Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, he introduces Giant Transcendentalism, who has taken the place of Giant Pope, and Giant Despair, that interrupted Christian’s progress to the Delectable Mountains. Giant Transcendentalism is a huge, amorphous monster, utterly indescribable, and speaking an unintelligible language. This language, which Emerson strives to make articulate, we read with mingled amusement and astonishment in the German writers. Emerson is not a member of the Kulturkampf, like Carlyle. His mind does not take in their wild rhapsodies. His essay on Goethe (in Representative Men) is cold and unappreciative when compared with the Scotchman’s eulogies. We firmly believe that no healthy intellect can feed upon Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, or even Kant, who was the most luminous intellect of the group. Emerson has not the stolid pertinacity of Herr Teufelsdröckh. His genius is French. He delights in paradox and verbal gymnastics. Carlyle works with a sort of furious patience at such a prosaic career as Frederick the Great’s. He gets up a factitious enthusiasm about German Herzhogs and Erstfursts. Emerson would look with dainty disdain upon his Cyclopean work among big, dusty, musty folios and the hammering out of shining sentences from such pig-iron.
Whence his transcendentalism? We believe that it has two elements, nature-worship and Swedenborgianism. Of nature-worship we have very little. Like Thomson, the author of the Seasons, who wrote the finest descriptions of scenery in bed at ten o’clock in the morning, we are frightfully indifferent to the glories of earth, sea, and sky, whilst theoretically capable of intense rapture. This tendency to adore nature, and this intense modern cultivation of the natural sciences, we take as indicative of the husks of religion given by Protestantism. Man’s intellect seeks the certain, and where he cannot find it in the supernatural he will have recourse to the natural. The profound attention paid to all the mechanical and natural sciences, to the exclusion, if not denial, of supernatural religion, is the logical result of the absurdity of Protestantism. Perhaps Emerson’s poetic feeling has much to do with his profound veneration for fate, nature, and necessity, which are his true god, with a very little Swedenborgianism to modify them.