Emerson’s dependence upon intuitions and praises of them as the springs of action and organ of inspiration conferring wisdom upon man seemed the less respectable because I hadn’t read Bergson—who has made intuitions more than ever fashionable. Emerson lived in the spirit-world—a quite different place from any trodden by the student in Paris who is at home in the world of the Sorbonne and the Bibliothèque Nationale, and in the world of flesh-and-blood. To healthy youth, nothing is much more repugnant than the Wordsworthian ideal of wise passivity, while the notion of a Buddhistic Nirvana seems murderous of
“Nature”—however you define her. Moreover, I know not how to direct my inexorable thoughts, Emerson avows, and scarcely appears to think any direction of them needful. His best thoughts steal upon him in silence, and Truth flies out of the window when Will enters in by the door. “There is never a fine aspiration but is on its way to its body or institution,” he confidently asserts. Too confidently, it seemed to me. Emerson, aged thirty, wrote that a system-grinder hates the truth; he loved the truth, and therefore—therefore?—side-stepped system. It was not till much later that he uttered the heartfelt cry: “If Minerva offered me a gift and an option, I would say, give me continuity. I am tired of scraps….
“‘The Asmodæan feat be mine
To spin my sand-bags into twine.’”
Perhaps the scrappiness of Emerson is less distressing to the youthful mind, eternally and quite needlessly refreshed by the comedy of life on every side of it, than the Emersonian “trick of solitariness,” that he played as a Harvard undergraduate not less but perhaps rather more than as the Concord sage. When Madame Dugard’s book on Emerson was published in Paris, I sat down and wrote a critique—stored with Roussellian analogies, à la Irving Babbitt. I was full of Rousseau then, and I piled on sentences that I meant to be cruel and crushing—not of Professor Babbitt, or Jean-Jacques, or Madame Dugard, but of poor Emerson. I showed my article, unfinished, to a dear friend—wiser than I; and then tore it up. Here is a part of the letter I had from my friend commenting on the little essay:
“I find your point that Emerson, the preacher of individualism, was himself thin-blooded and barren of true personality, interesting: whether or not it is true. I never happened to find it put just so before, and should certainly never have thought of it. But I suppose, after all, a certain kind of individuality might be expressed by impersonality as well as by any other instrument. I’ve only glanced through the Dugard book, but the point of view seems to be the conventional one that Emerson
was too far removed from the stress and pain of life to touch very closely vibrant, struggling souls. As you translate, ‘he fills only the full, reassures only the optimists.’ I suppose that is true enough. And yet—and yet, is any life so full that it does not need refilling; or any optimism so complete and so unshaken that it does not need reassurance, expression, from an articulate, a stronger spirit? Isn’t optimism with many people a religious yearning rather than any truly temperamental attribute; a thing to be struggled for, and cherished, and reinforced from without? Whatever forces from within may have urged Emerson toward idealism and optimism, wasn’t he at least equally an idealist, and optimist, from conviction, or faith, or whatever else you call the semi-religious element? The Emersonian idealism is more, I am sure, than the natural overflow of a serenely poetic disposition—to which you try to reduce it. You must not forget that essay of his on Destiny—Destiny, man’s heroic, large-spirited friend, man’s bolster against Fate (discouraging and enervating personage!).
“I suppose that it is fair enough to complain that Emerson gives light without heat, but how many writers throw off much heat and little light—to say nothing of ‘darkness visible’…. Not many philosophers and poets and friends of ours yield us both forms of power. Perhaps the combination of the two—light and, well, at least warmth—is the most remarkable thing about Christ and his system.”
I feel less ashamed of my calfish distrust and dislike of Emerson now that I have read in President Eliot’s centenary essay on the great New Englander his confession that he too, “as a young man,” found the writings of Emerson “unattractive, and not seldom unintelligible, … speculative, and visionary.” It is only after one has suffered from living that one fully values Emerson—only as one is gradually educated himself, in experience’s school, that one appreciates his worth as a prophet of modern education; of the latter day social organization, its maladies and quacks and salves; of what Dr. Eliot calls “natural” rather than supernatural religion.
III