To Emerson, at this moment, numbers looked with the deepest admiration or with fiercest hate. He was the type of his age, what Carlyle might perhaps call its 'Priest Vates.' In his Essays he stood aloft and proclaimed, 'In me is the kernel of truth: eat and live!' But the shell that enclosed the kernel was hard to crack, and was, moreover, like the 'Sileni' of the old French apothecaries, as described by Rabelais, so decorated with wondrous figures, harpies, satyrs, horned geese and bridled hares, that men were incredulous, and doubted that precious ambergris, musk and gems were to be found within. In his first crudities, fyttes and tilts with thought, both knight and field are covered with a cloth of gold so dazzling that the crystalline lenses of our common vision are in danger of dissolution, and we vainly hope for page or dame who will whisper to us the magic word that shall dispel this scene of enchantment. Meanwhile, his sentences, like arrows, darken that sun, himself, and we hasten with bits of smoked glass to view the eclipse. Happily, we have chosen the right medium: the luminousness is destroyed, but the opaqueness remains visible. Entrenched behind a mannerism so adroitly constructed as at once to invite and repel invasion, Emerson hurls out axioms and establishes precedents that prove upon examination to be either admirably varnished editions of old truths or statements of new ones of questionable legitimacy. Turn over leaf by leaf these early essays, and doubts arise as to the validity of the author's claim to originality. Carlyle has led before these pompous parades of moral truths that your child recognizes in the nursery when he makes war upon Johnny, who has knocked down his ten-pins. The law of compensation and the existence of evil and consequent suffering are actual entities to him. And yet these men do not belong to the same school. The resemblance is on the surface. Emerson dabbles delicately, yet, let it be conceded, energetically, with theories: his hands are not the nervy, sinewy hands of the Viking of English literature; he lacks his keen discernment of life, his quick comprehension of the mutual relations of men and their times; he often wants his fine analytical power. Carlyle sees in the life of a man his actions, associations, aspirations, disappointments, successes, what deep principles swayed him, what noble or ignoble nature provided his impulses, and wrought his manhood: Emerson tests him by the great problems of the universe, as he understands them, and educes from their application to certain circumstances the character of the man. The one is sagacious, argus-eyed; the other oracular, sibylline. And yet Emerson, perhaps unconsciously, through admiration of the liberal views and unquestioned bravery of his contemporary, adopted something like his peculiarities of style and domesticated foreign idioms, that yet, like tamed tigers, are not to be relied on in general society. As Carlyle was the rhinoceros of English, Emerson aspired to be its hippopotamus,—both pachyderms, and impenetrable to the bullets of criticism.
We have called Cousin an eclecticist. His Philosophy is a positive one compared with that of Emerson. Here are scraps of Plato and Hegel, of Porphyry and Swedenborg, of Æschylus and De Stael. Like the Lehrer zu Sais, 'he looks on the stars, and imitates their courses and positions in the sand.' In the obscurity that proves him great, for 'To be great is to be misunderstood,' (is this the true 'misery of greatness' of Milton?) it is hard to grasp his individuality. His haughty assertions meet us at every turn. We no more dare to question them than so many 'centaurs or sphinxes or pallid gorgons' in a nightmare. But he relieves our perplexity and gives us the key to that enigma himself. 'I unsettle all things. No facts to me are sacred, none are profane. I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no past at my back.' What is this but another version of Brahma? 'Far or forgot to me is near.' It is a reflection of the Veda. 'I myself never was not, nor thou, nor all the princes of the earth, nor shall we ever hereafter cease to be.' Spinoza, the God-intoxicated man, never ventured on a declaration so bold. 'The eternal wisdom of God, Dei œterna Sapientia,' says he, more modestly, 'is manifested in all things, but mostly in the human mind, and most of all in Jesus Christ.' Here then we find the individuality of Emerson, in his pure Pantheism, and, like the sword of Martin Antolinez, it illumines all the field. Now we understand the constant warfare, the 'inevitable polarity,' in these pages. We forgive the occasional inconsistencies of a man who is at once, by his own confession, 'God in Nature and a weed by the wall.' His weakness strives after infinite power. Conscious of a divinity within, he struggles to express it worthily; but ah! says Hermes Trismegistus,—'It is hard to conceive God, but impossible to express him.' Freedom within chafes at the iron necessity without, 'a necessity deep as the world,' all-controlling, imperial, which he acknowledges in the very depths of his being. But the necessity of Emerson is a Hegelian element, such as every Aristophanic comedy reveals. It is not the necessity of Fichte. 'I, with all that relates to me, am imprisoned within the bonds of Necessity. I am one link of her inflexible chain. A time was when I was not, so those have assured me who were before me, and, as I have no consciousness of this time, I am constrained to believe their testimony.' This is the necessity of mere existence, which bears no relation to the will of the man, not that inflexible destiny to which Emerson refers, that underlies his continued being. The first does not oppose the 'instinct of an activity free, independent,' which Emerson afterwards acknowledges. But 'I am God in Nature,' he repeats. 'The simplest person who in his integrity proclaims God, becomes God.' 'This thorough integrity of purpose,' writes Fichte, 'is itself the divine idea in its most common form, and no really honest mind is without communion with God.' In Emerson the last height is reached. Brahm as Arjoon could do no more, no less. His eye roams over the universe and sees only manifestations of himself: the rose of morning, the shining splendor of the sea, the purple of the distant mountains, are his dawn and noon and eve.
'Alas! what perils do environ
The man who meddles with—a siren!'
This may be Pantheism, but if it is not in accordance with the needs of the ages, it is not the Pantheism of Giordano Bruno, it has little in common with Plato. The great idea, the latter tells us, in the Republic, 'the idea of the God, is perceived with difficulty, but can not be perceived without concluding that in the visible world it produces light, and the star whence the light directly comes, and in the invisible world it directly produces Strength and Intelligence.' Strength and Intelligence; whose correlatives are Progress and Happiness. Are there among Emerson's earlier 'big-sounding sentences and words of state,' any of which these are the legitimate fruit? Does the soul of Infinite Love that beamed from Nazareth inform these pages with the active, perfect, immortal spirit of truth? No. In these essays, Emerson is a royalist, an aristocrat: he aims for the centralization of power; he does not elevate the masses; he claims for himself, for all nature, ultra-refined and cultivated, to whom the Open Secret 'has been discovered, a separate and highly superior personality. 'The height, the duty of man is to be self-sustained, to need no gift, no foreign force. Society is good when it does not violate me, but best when it is likest to solitude.' What an Apollo Belvidere the man would be, moulded by no sympathies, standing aloof from his race, and independent of it, disdainful, magnificent, a palace of ice, untenable by the summer heat of Love. The true cosmopolite is the man of his age, even if he has known no latitude but that of his birth, for he has won for himself the highest individuality, and the greatest power of association with his fellow-man, and the laws that govern man in his efforts to secure these are the laws of the only true social science. Henry Carey says with reason, in Italy the highest individuality was found when the Campagna was filled with cities. It is a narrow belief that the highest development of character demands solitude. Give to a young man, genial, impulsive, and intelligent, only the companionship of forest, sea, and mountain, and the chances are, he will become morbid, unpractical, and selfish. But place him in the same position in the decline, or even in the noon of life, when the different parts of his nature have become subordinated to each other, by friction with diverse human organizations about him, and he will carry a brave individuality among nature's gifts, being himself her noblest development. 'Men,' says Emerson, 'resemble their contemporaries even more than their progenitors. It is observed in old couples, or in persons who have been house-inmates for a course of years, that they grow alike: if they should live long enough we should not be able to know them apart. Nature abhors such complaisances, which threaten to melt the world into a lump, and hastens to break up such maudlin agglutinations.' But Darby and Joan in the chimney-corner are not types of mankind at large.
'Right ethics are central, and go from the soul outward. Gift is contrary to the law of the universe. Serving others is serving myself. I must absolve me to myself.' And what is myself? Let Fichte answer. 'I affirm that in what we call the knowledge or the contemplation of things, it is always ourselves that we know or contemplate: in every sentiment of consciousness it is only modifications of ourselves that we feel.' And again: 'The universe lives. From it arises a marvelous harmony that resounds deliciously in the very depths of my heart. I live in all that surrounds me. I recognize myself in every manifestation of Nature, in the various forms of the beings about me, as a sunbeam that sparkles in the million dew-drops that reflect it.... Within me Nature is flesh, nerves, muscles; without, turf, plant, animal.'
Thus the semi-poetical Pantheism of the Bhagvat-Gita is reproduced, beautiful, dreamy and mythical, but without the shadow of an addition. Emerson presents to us the primeval faith in its imposing majesty and terrible unity, but omits to mention its final winding up in the sacred Maya or Illusion of the Hindoos. Though his early essays are brilliant with many noble thoughts, the principles he advocates in them are thoroughly unprogressive and unpractical. Plato is to him the 'exhaustive generalizer,' beyond whom it is folly to aspire, and by whose stature he measures the nations. Boëthius, Rabelais, Erasmus, Bruno, are only brisk young men translating into the vernacular wittily his good things. St. Augustine, Copernicus, Newton, Behmen, Swedenborg also 'say after him.' Emerson either addresses men whose ignorance he greatly exaggerates, or else the ideal men of some centuries hence. His mission is to the Past or the Future, not to the Present. His theories, fine and venerable, as they are as here expressed, will never save a soul, and men are still convinced that one sharp, decisive action is worth a thousand fine strategic points on paper. Yet he won an enviable and wide reputation by these his early works. 'There is merit without elevation,' says La Rochefoucauld, 'but there is no elevation without some merit.' Such we find him in his earlier essays, while he had as yet only grasped at the Pantheistic wing of the Egyptian globe. In England, in 1848, four thousand people crowded Exeter Hall, to hear the champion of free thought from America. In Poland, men who knew him only by some fragments in a Polish review, considered him the thinker of the age. His courage was the talisman that won him admiration, and his earnestness, visible through the veil of arrogance and petty affectations, secured respect.
In Representative Men, the old Plato-worship illumined by Schelling—Wissenschaften—is the key-note, and English Traits is the record of impressions received during the Sturm und Drang, or rather 'cloud-compelling' days of the Dial and Essay developments. A volume of Poems, published in 1856, recalls the old landmarks. If they are rich in thought, they are also luxuriant in labyrinthine sentences that puzzle even the initiated in the Ziph language. A thought once extricated from a maze of inversion and entangled particles,
'we are in pain
To think how to unthink that thought again.'
As a poet, Emerson is careless in versification. Like Friar John, of the Funnels, he does not rhyme in crimson. His imagination is too bold to be confined by the petty limits of trochee or iambus. Consequently his pictures, when he condescends to paint, present rather a mass of brilliant coloring than the well-finished detail that we demand in a work of art. We look in vain in his poems for that effort of identity between the conscious and the unconscious activities that Schelling calls the sole privilege of genius. 'The infinite (or perfect) presented as the finite, is Beauty.' Yet the single poem 'Threnody' would establish Emerson's title to a place among the guild of poets. It is classically beautiful and faultless in mechanism. Its flow is that of a river over sands of gold, its solemn monotone broken now and then by staccato plaints, and the tender gold of its shining waters dimmed by dark shadows, as rock beneath or tree above assails the gentle stillness of its onward flow. Only that which comes from the heart goes again to the heart. We find a new and delicious personality, a simple Greek naturalness, in this exquisite dirge that scarcely owns the 'blasphemy of grief,' that are wanted in his sententious instructions and metaphysical wanderings.
We open Emerson's latest work, the Conduct of Life, in a hopeful mood. Some mysterious sympathy, born from a natural faith in the progress of a mind that had already proved its power by a daring and successful onslaught upon old habits and associations, strengthened by a more practical philosophy that dawns in English Traits, and culminating in the intense passion of yearning in the Phrenody, justifies an expectation that is gloriously realized. To the vigilant thinker a decade is worth more than aeons to his sleeping brother. The Emerson of to-day is not the Emerson of twenty or even ten years ago. Here is still the true, epigrammatic style of his youth. He is as lavish of his aphorisms, which, like the coins of Donatello, hang over our heads and are free to every passer-by. Still an antiquarian, like Charles Kingsley, he peers among Etruscan vases, Greek ruins, Norse runes and ancient Dantean Infernos and Escurials for the models of a new literature, a new art, a new life. But an enlarged spirit is visible on every page.