Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Matthew Arnold, in an address on Emerson delivered in Boston, gave
an excellent estimate of the rank we should accord to him in the great
hierarchy of letters. Some, perhaps, will think that Arnold was
unappreciative and cold, but dispassionate readers will be inclined to
agree with his judgment of our great American.
After a review of the poetical works of Emerson the English critic
draws his conclusions as follows:
"I do not then place Emerson among the great poets. But I go farther,
and say that I do not place him among the great writers, the great men
of letters. Who are the great men of letters? They are men like
Cicero, Plato, Bacon, Pascal, Swift, Voltaire--writers with, in the
first place, a genius and instinct for style.... Brilliant and
powerful passages in a man's writings do not prove his possession of
it. Emerson has passages of noble and pathetic eloquence; he has
passages of shrewd and felicitous wit; he has crisp epigram; he has
passages of exquisitely touched observation of nature. Yet he is not a
great writer.... Carlyle formulates perfectly the defects of his
friend's poetic and literary productions when he says: 'For me it is
too ethereal, speculative, theoretic; I will have all things condense
themselves, take shape and body, if they are to have my sympathy.' ...
".... Not with the Miltons and Grays, not with the Platos and Spinozas,
not with the Swifts and Voltaires, not with the Montaignes and
Addisons, can we rank Emerson. No man could see this clearer than
Emerson himself. 'Alas, my friend,' he writes in reply to Carlyle, who
had exhorted him to creative work,--'Alas, my friend, I can do no such
gay thing as you say. I do not belong to the poets, but only to a low
department of literature,--the reporters; suburban men.' He deprecated
his friend's praise; praise 'generous to a fault' he calls it; praise
'generous to the shaming of me,--cold, fastidious, ebbing person that
I am.'"
After all this unfavorable criticism Arnold begins to praise. Quoting
passages from the Essays, he adds:
"This is tonic indeed! And let no one object that it is too general;
that more practical, positive direction is what we want.... Yes,
truly, his insight is admirable; his truth is precious. Yet the secret
of his effect is not even in these; it is in his temper. It is in the
hopeful, serene, beautiful temper wherewith these, in Emerson, are
indissolubly united; in which they work and have their being.... One
can scarcely overrate the importance of holding fast to happiness and
hope. It gives to Emerson's work an invaluable virtue. As Wordsworth's
poetry is, in my judgment, the most important done in verse, in our
language, during the present century, so Emerson's Essays are, I
think, the most important work done in prose.... But by his conviction
that in the life of the spirit is happiness, and by his hope that this
life of the spirit will come more and more to be sanely understood,
and to prevail, and to work for happiness,--by this conviction and
hope Emerson was great, and he will surely prove in the end to have
been right in them.... You cannot prize him too much, nor heed him too
diligently."
Herman Grimm, a German critic of great influence in his own country,
did much to obtain a hearing for Emerson's works in Germany. At first
the Germans could not understand the unusual English, the unaccustomed
turns of phrase which are so characteristic of Emerson's style.
"Macaulay gives them no difficulty; even Carlyle is comprehended. But
in Emerson's writings the broad turnpike is suddenly changed into a
hazardous sandy foot-path. His thoughts and his style are American. He
is not writing for Berlin, but for the people of Massachusetts.... It
is an art to rise above what we have been taught.... All great men are
seen to possess this freedom. They derive their standard from their
own natures, and their observations on life are so natural and
spontaneous that it would seem as if the most illiterate person with a
scrap of common-sense would have made the same.... We become wiser
with them, and know not how the difficult appears easy and the
involved plain.
"Emerson possesses this noble manner of communicating himself. He
inspires me with courage and confidence. He has read and seen but
conceals the labor. I meet in his works plenty of familiar facts, but
he does not employ them to figure up anew the old worn-out problems:
each stands on a new spot and serves for new combinations. From
everything he sees the direct line issuing which connects it with the
focus of life....
".... Emerson's theory is that of the 'sovereignty of the individual.'
To discover what a young man is good for, and to equip him for the
path he is to strike out in life, regardless of any other
consideration, is the great duty to which he calls attention. He makes
men self-reliant. He reveals to the eyes of the idealist the
magnificent results of practical activity, and unfolds before the
realist the grandeur of the ideal world of thought. No man is to allow
himself, through prejudice, to make a mistake in choosing the task to
which he will devote his life. Emerson's essays are, as it were,
printed sermons--all having this same text.... The wealth and harmony
of his language overpowered and entranced me anew. But even now I
cannot say wherein the secret of his influence lies. What he has
written is like life itself--the unbroken thread ever lengthened
through the addition of the small events which make up each day's
experience."
Froude in his famous "Life of Carlyle" gives an interesting description
of Emerson's visit to the Carlyles in Scotland:
"The Carlyles were sitting alone at dinner on a Sunday afternoon at
the end of August when a Dumfries carriage drove to the door, and
there stepped out of it a young American then unknown to fame, but
whose influence in his own country equals that of Carlyle in ours, and
whose name stands connected with his wherever the English language is
spoken. Emerson, the younger of the two, had just broken his Unitarian
fetters, and was looking out around him like a young eagle longing for
light. He had read Carlyle's articles and had discerned with the
instinct of genius that here was a voice speaking real and fiery
convictions, and no longer echoes and conventionalisms. He had come to
Europe to study its social and spiritual phenomena; and to the young
Emerson as to the old Goethe, the most important of them appeared to
be Carlyle.... The acquaintance then begun to their mutual pleasure
ripened into a deep friendship, which has remained unclouded in spite
of wide divergences of opinion throughout their working lives."
Carlyle wrote to his mother after Emerson had left:
"Our third happiness was the arrival of a certain young unknown friend
named Emerson, from Boston, in the United States, who turned aside so
far from his British, French, and Italian travels to see me here! He
had an introduction from Mill and a Frenchman (Baron d'Eichthal's
nephew) whom John knew at Rome. Of course, we could do no other than
welcome him; the rather as he seemed to be one of the most lovable
creatures in himself we had ever looked on. He stayed till next day
with us, and talked and heard to his heart's content, and left us all
really sad to part with him."
In 1841 Carlyle wrote to John Sterling a few words apropos of the
recent publication of Emerson's essays in England:
"I love Emerson's book, not for its detached opinions, not even for
the scheme of the general world he has framed for himself, or any
eminence of talent he has expressed that with, but simply because it
is his own book; because there is a tone of veracity, an unmistakable
air of its being _his_, and a real utterance of a human soul, not a
mere echo of such. I consider it, in that sense, highly remarkable,
rare, very rare, in these days of ours. Ach Gott! It is frightful to
live among echoes. The few that read the book, I imagine, will get
benefit of it. To America, I sometimes say that Emerson, such as he
is, seems to me like a kind of New Era."
John Morley, the acute English critic, has made an analytic study of
Emerson's style, which may reconcile the reader to some of its
exasperating peculiarities.
"One of the traits that every critic notes in Emerson's writing is
that it is so abrupt, so sudden in its transitions, so discontinuous,
so inconsecutive. Dislike of a sentence that drags made him
unconscious of the quality that French critics name _coulant_.
Everything is thrown in just as it comes, and sometimes the pell-mell
is enough to persuade us that Pope did not exaggerate when he said
that no one qualification is so likely to make a good writer as the
power of rejecting his own thoughts.... Apart from his difficult
staccato, Emerson is not free from secondary faults. He uses words
that are not only odd, but vicious in construction; he is sometimes
oblique and he is often clumsy; and there is a visible feeling after
epigrams that do not always come. When people say that Emerson's style
must be good and admirable because it fits his thought, they forget
that though it is well that a robe should fit, there is still
something to be said about its cut and fashion.... Yet, as happens to
all fine minds, there came to Emerson ways of expression deeply marked
with character. On every page there is set the strong stamp of
sincerity, and the attraction of a certain artlessness; the most
awkward sentence rings true; and there is often a pure and simple note
that touches us more than if it were the perfection of elaborated
melody. The uncouth procession of the periods discloses the travail of
the thought, and that, too, is a kind of eloquence. An honest reader
easily forgives the rude jolt or unexpected start when it shows a
thinker faithfully working his way along arduous and unworn tracks.
Even at the roughest, Emerson often interjects a delightful cadence.
As he says of Landor, his sentences are cubes which will stand firm,
place them how or where you will. He criticised Swedenborg for being
superfluously explanatory, and having an exaggerated feeling of the
ignorance of men. 'Men take truths of this nature,' said Emerson,
'very fast;' and his own style does no doubt very boldly take this
capacity for granted in us. In 'choice and pith of diction,' again, of
which Mr. Lowell speaks, he hits the mark with a felicity that is
almost his own in this generation. He is terse, concentrated, and free
from the important blunder of mistaking intellectual dawdling for
meditation. Nor in fine does his abruptness ever impede a true
urbanity. The accent is homely and the apparel plain, but his bearing
has a friendliness, a courtesy, a hospitable humanity, which goes
nearer to our hearts than either literary decoration or rhetorical
unction. That modest and lenient fellow-feeling which gave such charm
to his companionship breathes in his gravest writing, and prevents us
from finding any page of it cold or hard or dry."
E.P. Whipple, the well-known American critic, wrote soon after Emerson's
death:
"But 'sweetness and light' are precious and inspiring only so far as
they express the essential sweetness of the disposition of the
thinker, and the essential illuminating power of his intelligence.
Emerson's greatness came from his character. Sweetness and light
streamed from him because they were _in_ him. In everything he
thought, wrote, and did, we feel the presence of a personality as
vigorous and brave as it was sweet, and the particular radical thought
he at any time expressed derived its power to animate and illuminate
other minds from the might of the manhood, which was felt to be within
and behind it. To 'sweetness and light' he therefore added the prime
quality of fearless manliness.