Chapter V: The Essays, Representative Men, English Traits, Conduct of Life

When the _Essays_ appeared, Emerson found a larger audience. He now spoke through the medium of a recognized literary form. If all readers do not read essays, they at least know what they are and stand in no fear of them. Some buyers may have been tempted by the table of contents. Titles such as ‘Self-Reliance,’ ‘Compensation,’ ‘Friendship,’ ‘Heroism,’ had an encouraging sound and promised useful advice.

In the essay on ‘History,’ Emerson reaffirms the doctrine of the unity of human nature. There is ‘one mind,’ history is its record. What we possess in common with the men of the past enables us to comprehend and interpret the actions of the men of the past. The facts must square with our own experience.

The theme is continued in ‘Self-Reliance.’ As there is one mind common to all men, and as what belongs to greatness of the Past belongs also to us, it is suicide to descend to imitation. ‘Speak your latent conviction and it shall become the universal sense.’ The whole essay is a glowing exhortation to men to live largely and stand on their own feet, facing the world with the nonchalance begotten of health, good humor, and the sense of possession.

In ‘Compensation’ the essayist notes those inexorable forces by which a balance is kept in the world, the laws by virtue of which ‘things refuse to be mismanaged long.’ In ‘Spiritual Laws’ he shows the importance of living the life of nature. Let no man import into his mind ‘difficulties which are none of his.’ The essay on ‘Love’ is a prose poem in honor of that passion which ‘makes the clown gentle, and gives the coward heart.’ Following it is the essay on ‘Friendship’ with its austere definitions. ‘I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with roughest courage.’ ‘Friendship implies sincerity, and sincerity is the luxury allowed, like diadems and authority, only to the highest rank.’

Emerson writes on ‘Prudence’ in order to balance those fine lyric words of Love and Friendship with words of coarser sound. Prudence considered in itself is naught; but recognized as one of the conditions of existence, it deserves our utmost attention. It keeps a man from standing in false and bitter relations to other men. Emerson had no patience with people who, because they have genius or beauty, expect an exception of the laws of Nature to be made in their case. Notwithstanding their gifts, they must toe the mark.

‘Heroism,’ the eighth essay in this volume, contains a definition of the hero which does not coincide with the popular conception. We are so accustomed to seeing our heroes crowned with wreaths and overwhelmed with lecture engagements the day following the act of valor that we are surprised to read: ‘Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of mankind.’ Emerson gives a new turn to the old phrase ‘the heroic in everyday life.’ Life, he says, has its ‘ragged and dangerous front.’ It is full of evils against which the man must be armed. ‘Let him hear in season that he is born into a state of war.’ To this ‘militant attitude of the soul’ Emerson gave the name of heroism. In its rudest form it is ‘contempt for safety and ease.’

To some readers the essay on ‘The Over-Soul’ is at once the clearest and the most darkened, the plainest and the most enigmatic of the essays in this book. But there is no misapprehending the value of this effort to put, not in rigid scientific terms, but in glowing and lofty imagery, the dependence of man on the Infinite, the marvel of that Immensity which is the background of our being. ‘From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all.’ It is the universal mind by which all being is enveloped and interpenetrated.

The essay on ‘Circles’ contains this thought: Outside every circle another may be drawn. Opinion seeks to crystallize at a certain limit, to insist that there is nothing beyond. The soul bursts these barriers to set new limits, which in turn are good only for a time. Man must therefore keep himself always open to the conception of a larger circle. Let him ‘prefer truth to his past apprehension of truth.’

How to seek truth is the subject of the next essay, ‘Intellect,’ a tribute to the spontaneous action of the mind. We do not control our thoughts but are controlled by them. All we can do is to clear away obstructions and ‘suffer the intellect to see.’ Pursue truth and it avoids you. Relax the energy of your pursuit and it comes to you; yet the pursuit was as necessary as the subsequent relaxation.

In the final essay, on ‘Art,’ the large, simple, and homely elements are praised, the qualities which appeal to universal human nature. In the paintings of the Old World one thinks to be astonished by something new and strange, and he is struck by the familiar look. He is reminded of what he had always known.

The second series of _Essays_ treats of ‘The Poet,’ ‘Experience,’ ‘Character,’ ‘Manners,’ ‘Gifts,’ ‘Nature,’ ‘Politics,’ of ‘Nominalist and Realist;’ there is also a lecture on ‘New England Reformers.’ Emerson notes the shallow nature of a theory of poetry busied only with externals. Neither is that poetry which is written ‘at a safe distance from our own experience.’ The poet is representative. ‘He stands among common men for the complete man, and apprises us not of his wealth but of the commonwealth.’

‘Experience’ is in praise of a mode of life which consists in living without making a fuss about it, filling the time, taking hold where one can and exhausting the possibilities. Only fanatics say it is not worth while. ‘Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, to-day. Let us treat the men and women well; treat them as if they were real; perhaps they are.’

‘Character’ and ‘Manners’ are related studies. There is a moral order in the world. Nothing can withstand it. ‘Character is this moral order seen through the medium of an individual nature.’ Society has raised certain artificial distinctions. But they must be recognized. Society is real, and grows out of a genuine need. ‘The painted phantasm Fashion casts a species of derision on what we say. But I will neither be driven from some allowance to Fashion as a symbolic institution, nor from the belief that love is the basis of courtesy.’

‘Gifts’ is a fine bit of paradox. ‘The gift, to be true, must be the flowing of the giver unto me, correspondent to my flowing unto him. When the waters are at level, then my goods pass to him, and his to me.’ To give useful things denies the relation. Hence the fitness of beautiful things.

There is bold imagery in the essay on ‘Nature.’ ‘Plants are the young of the world, but they grope ever upward toward consciousness; the trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted to the ground. The animal is the novice and probationer of a more advanced order. The men though young, having tasted the first drop from the cup of thought, are already dissipated: the maples and ferns are still uncorrupt; yet no doubt when they come to consciousness they too will curse and swear.’ Thus does Emerson describe that glimpse he had of a ‘system in transition.’

A healthy optimism pervades the essay on ‘Politics.’ In spite of meddling and selfishness the foundations of the State are very secure. ‘Things have their laws, as well as men; and things refuse to be trifled with.’ By a higher law property will be protected. The same necessity secures to each nation the form of governing best suited to it. Yet all forms are defective. Good men ‘must not obey the laws too well.’ Perfect government rests on character at last. There are dreamers who do not despair of seeing the State renovated ‘on the principle of right and love.’

_Representative Men_ consists of lectures on Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Napoleon, and Goethe, together with an introduction on the ‘Uses of Great Men.’

Plato is the man who makes havoc with originalities, the philosopher whose writings have been for twenty-two hundred years the Bible of the learned, but who has his defects. Intellectual in aim, and therefore literary, he attempts a system of the universe and fails to complete it or make it intelligible.

Swedenborg is the representative of mysticism, great with its power, weak with its defects.

Out of the eternal conflict between abstractionist and materialist arises another type of mind, one that laughs at both philosophies for being out of their depth and pushing too far. He is the sceptic, Montaigne, for example. The type was peculiarly grateful to Emerson, admiring as he did a man who talked with shrewdness, was not literary, who knew the world, used the positive degree, never shrieked, and had no wish to annihilate time and space.

Shakespeare meets our conception of the Poet, ‘a heart in unison with his time and country,’ whose production comes ‘freighted with the weightiest convictions and pointed with the most determined aims which any man or class knows of in his times.’ He demonstrated the possibility of translating things into song. The ear is ravished by the beauty of his lines, ‘yet the sentence is so loaded with meaning and so linked with its foregoers and followers, that the logician is satisfied.’ And he had the royal trait of cheerfulness.

In Napoleon we have ‘the strong and ready actor’ who in the ‘universal imbecility, indecision, and indolence of men’ knows how to take occasion by the beard. His life is an answer to cowardly doubts. Emerson calls Napoleon ‘the agent or attorney of the middle class of modern society.’ It was he who showed what could be done by the use of common virtues. His experiment failed because he had a selfish and sensual aim. In the last analysis Napoleon was not a gentleman.

Goethe is the other phase of the genius of the age. There is a provision for the writer in the scheme of things. Nature insists on being reported. To Man the universe is something to be recorded. The instinct exists in different degrees. One has the power to ‘see connection where the multitude sees fragments.’ Lift this faculty to a high degree and you have the great German poet who well-nigh restored literature to its primal significance. ‘There must be a man behind the book.’ ‘The old Eternal Genius who built the world has confided himself more to this man than any other.’ Goethe is the type of culture. Here, too, is his defect. For his devotion is not to pure truth, but to truth for the sake of culture.

_Representative Men_ was succeeded by _English Traits_, a volume in which Emerson taught his countrymen more about England than they had hitherto known or fancied. Histories, statistical reports, treatises on British art and British manufactures, are useful and sometimes dreary reading; they give us facts heaped on facts. It is a relief to put them down and take up _English Traits_ in order to learn what we have been reading about.

Through Emerson’s eyes we can see this little island ‘a prize for the best race,’ its singular people, chained to their logic, willing ‘to kiss the dust before a fact,’ strong in their sense of brotherhood, yet fond each of his own way, incommunicable, ‘in short every one of these islanders an island in himself.’ They have a ‘superfluity of self-regard’--which is a secret of their power; they are assertive, crotchety, wholly forgetful of ‘a cardinal article in the bill of social rights,’ that every man ‘has a right to his own ears;’ nevertheless Emerson concludes (and an Englishman would assure him no other conclusion was possible) they are the best stock in the world. Here is the typical islander as Emerson paints him. ‘He is a churl with a soft place in his heart, whose speech is a brash of bitter waters, but who loves to help you at a pinch. He says no, and serves you, and your thanks disgust him.’

There are paragraphs and chapters on the Aristocracy, the Universities, Religion, Literature, and the Press, that is, the ‘Times.’ Every page glitters with wit. Every apothegm contains the full proportion of truth and untruth which sayings of that sort are wont to contain. Says Emerson: ‘The gospel the Anglican church preaches is, ‘“By taste are ye saved.”’ Yet the more one reflects on this monstrous statement, the more is he astonished at the amount of truth in it.

The volume entitled _Conduct of Life_ has a fine rough vigor. Here are displayed to advantage Emerson’s robust habit of mind, searching analysis, vivacity and picturesqueness of expression, epigrammatic skill, homely plain sense, and lofty idealism. The first essay, ‘Fate,’ is an energetic and striking performance. One needs the optimism of its last paragraphs to counteract the grim terror of the earlier ones. Seldom has the relentless ferocity of Circumstance, Fate, Environment, been set forth in terms equally emphatic. The companion essay, ‘Power,’ is a study of the influence of brute force (and its compensations) in life and history. Emerson shows the value of the ‘bruiser’ in politics, trade, and in society. This leads to the third subject, ‘Wealth.’ Money must be had if only to buy bread. Nature insults the man who will not work. ‘She starves, taunts, and torments him, takes away warmth, laughter, sleep, friends and daylight, until he has fought his way to his own loaf.’ But what men of sense want is power, mastery, not candy; they esteem wealth to be ‘the assimilation of nature to themselves.’

To all this there must be a corrective; it is discussed in the essay on ‘Culture.’ Nature ruins a man to gain her ends, makes him strong in things she wants done, weak otherwise, and then robs him of his sense of proportion so that he becomes an egotist. Culture restores the balance. Culture rescues a man from himself, ‘kills his exaggeration.’ The simpler means to it are books, travel, society, solitude; and there are nobler ones, not the least of which is adversity. The discussion is continued in the practical essay on ‘Behavior’ and lifted to the highest plane in the essay on ‘Worship.’ The whole state of man is a state of culture, ‘and its flowering and completion may be described as Religion or Worship.’ For all its beauty this chapter will not please many people. They may take refuge in ‘Considerations by the Way,’ which shows the ‘good of evil,’ or in the fine essay on ‘Beauty’ or the ironical little closing piece called ‘Illusions.’