'The south wind is strengthened
With the wild, sweet vigor of pine.'
We breathe a new air, gaze at new landscapes; a new climate is around us. Take this book into the sultry midsummer, and its words summon the ripe autumn with its fruits up from the west; read it by the light of the blazing Yule log, and it will still recall the wild breezes and warm suns of October. And it is this growing maturity of thought, this evident tendency to a grand realization, that prove the honesty and greatness of the man. He has worked perseveringly at his problems, disdaining to be aided by criticism or crushed by opposition. His power has silently gathered its energies in the mines of Thought, dark but rich, striking shaft after shaft of vast promise. He is a gymnast struggling now with the realities and possibilities of Life, and no longer grappling with ignis-fatui in the marshes by the road. Now his humor gleams genially in keen, swift comparisons: he sports with truths, like a king tossing up his crown-jewels or Vishnu worlds in the 'Cosmogony of Menu,' and he dares do this because they are no longer his masters, because he has made them subservient to an end—the great end of the amelioration of his race.
It is this great element of sport that in its broadest development elevates man to the far heights of his nature. There all is serene.
'Sub pedibusque videt nubes et sidera Daphnis.'
Even the Hindoos, those earliest literati of the young earth, whose eyes peered first into the intricate machinery of Being, and brought therefrom strange and glowing and miraculous impressions of its mechanical appliances,—strong levers that men use now for criticism,—recognized this element. Afar from the scene of their sorrow, in the lotos a-bloom on Vishnu's head, they beheld the primitive Humor, the laughter of infinite Strength springing from bar to bar in the great gymnasium of life. Thus we read in the Cosmogony of Menu,—
'Numerous world-developments there are, creation and extermination;
Sportively he produces either, the highest Creator for ever and ever.'
And says the more orthodox Schlegel, 'Nature was in its origin naught else than a beautiful image, a pure emanation, a wonderful creation, a sport of omnipotent love.' And Schiller, whom an impregnable aristocracy of soul shut out from the ranks of humorists, who rode in his coupée, three feet above the level of the common stream of humanity, and never drifted with its tide, yet, with clear-eyed insight into the passions he did not share, acknowledged the Spieltrieb as the highest possibility of man's nature. 'The last perfection of our faculties,' he says, 'is, that their activity, without ceasing to be sure and earnest, becomes sport.
Emerson's humor is peculiar to himself. It is not the massive, exuberant play of Jean Paul. He does not challenge the slow-riding moon to a cricket match, nor hurl the stars from their orbits in his mad game in the skies. Neither has he the brusque but more solid geniality of Lessing. Imagination fails him for the one, and a strong power of logic for the other. But he tears the clouds of ignorance and prejudice that are beneath his feet into ribbons and sends them streaming through space, filmy banners of blue and white, heavily charged with the electricity of his enfranchised thought, and illumines the world with the lightnings of their chance collision. His humor is rather latent than striking. It does not gleam through showy words, the paraphernalia of a harlequinade, but peeps out from the homeliest phrases, and convulses some simple law of our nature with laughter at its own grotesqueness. Formerly, imprisoned as it was within unyielding limits, it was as imposing as a miniature Gothic cathedral in a dark cave, but now the queen-rose of the architrave blows fresh and sweet in the sunny air. Step by step Emerson has traveled the great road worn by so many of old, passing from the 'ideal' to the real, from reverie to a cheerful awaking,—and the prophecy of genius is at last fulfilled.
For at last he has come out from the misty twilight of Transcendentalism into the clear daylight of common sense. And surely it is not for us to decry the bridge, or, if you please, the tunnel through which he has crossed. He agitates the necessity and practicability of social reform, but it must be through individual effort. Years ago he decided that society was in a low state, now he calls on all men to put their shoulders to the wheel and lift it out of the Slough of Despond, where it has been floundering to no purpose for so long. His investigations are aided by a keen shrewdness, that bespeaks the practical man, who knows where to find the vulnerable heel of circumstance, and aims at it his swiftest arrows. In his essay on Wealth this sharp practical insight hardens every sentence. The sentimentalist, who believes, with Henri Blaze, that romance must be the issue of this marriage of Nature with Religion, betakes himself in consternation to his dainty, poetical dreams of a Utopia that shall arise, ready made, from the promising East. The capitalist, who sneers at Philosophy, and would ignorantly couple Faust with the Mysteries of Udolpho, or Andromeda with Jack the Giant-killer, rubs his hands gleefully over our author's nice appreciation of capital and the mysteries of its sudden fluctuations. 'Every step of civil advancement makes a dollar worth more.' 'Political Economy is as good a book wherein to read the life of man, and the ascendency of laws over all private and hostile influences, as any Bible which has come down to us.' 'The right merchant is one who has the just average of faculties we call common sense; a man of a strong affinity for facts, who makes up his decision on what he has seen. He is thoroughly persuaded of the truths of arithmetic.... He knows that all goes on the old road, pound for pound, cent for cent, for every effect a perfect cause, and that good luck is another name for tenacity of purpose.' 'The basis of political economy is non-interference.' The merchant looks narrowly at his theory of compensation, and finds it tallies well with the result of his own after-dinner meditations, expressed of mornings to doubting confreres. The philanthropist rejoices at the crushing of the shell of foppish indolence, the heralded downfall of the petty vanities, sprung, Heaven knows with what reason, from the loins of Norman robbers, of Huguenot refugees, of Puritans beggared and ignorant, and centered in some wide-spreading genealogical tree, that a whole family unite to cultivate into a banyan that may embrace the whole little world of their satellites with inflexible ligatures. Thus 'the doctrine of the snake' is to go out, and good men see that the sinews of society are to be strengthened.
It is worth while to observe, in that first chapter on Fate, how admirably Emerson provides for the exercise of a free activity in every man. 'Every spirit makes its house, but afterward the house confines the spirit.' This leaves no room for the coward, who declines to work out his salvation, even with fear and trembling. It summons all men to clear away the brush and dry leaves of a perverted fatalism,