Chapter XIII: Emerson’s Elusive Smile

“_Uprose the merry Sphinx
And crouched no more in stone._”

It was only the accident of local contiguity that made Doctor Holmes attempt a biography of Emerson. The men were altogether unlike, and their minds seldom met. Emerson’s mysticism was to Holmes an intellectual frailty to be covered over by a friendly apology. But the doctor, though averse to transcendentalism, was a good judge of wit and humor. He tells us that no one can fully appreciate Emerson who has not seen the quick smile with which he read passages which his sober-minded disciples took as oracles to be pondered, while to him they were flashes of wit.

Emerson certainly had wit, but he was not witty in the ordinary sense, nor did he really enjoy the broader kinds of humor. He tells us how he went with little Waldo to the circus and they enjoyed themselves hugely till the clown came out to perform his antics. Waldo whispered, “The funny man makes me want to go home.” His father adds that he was of his opinion. It was a sore trial to him, therefore, when in his lectures he was sometimes expected to play the funny man. In preparing them for the press he, to the disappointment of some of his friends, cut out the enlivening anecdotes which his more austere taste disapproved.

Play of wit there was, but it was a game of solitaire. The great wits like Sidney Smith need antagonists and spectators for their play. Theirs is the quick give and take, or the unexpected word that sets the table in a roar. Emerson, as we have seen, was strangely deficient in conversational aptitude, and had no power of repartee. He complains of the way in which he was put down by clever talkers. “A snipper snapper eats me whole.”

Many of those who had been attracted by his writings were disappointed when they came to him to talk over the subjects which he had suggested. They found it hard to get at him. Henry James, the elder, declares that he knew of no one “whose conversation was less remunerative.”

Emerson’s wit was, to use William Penn’s phrase, “the fruit of solitude.” It was produced by collisions of thought that took place in his own mind, these happenings having no particular relation to time or place. They are “the smile of reason” over the incongruities developed in the course of human reasoning.

It was a part of Emerson’s philosophy. To him the man thinking was like a schoolboy with lexicon and grammar trying to read a Latin classic. It is hard work, and the schoolboy frowns as he bends to the task. The frown indicates his grim determination, which is a good sign. He is making hard work of it, will learn the lesson in time. But his serious demeanor indicates also that he does not yet know the meaning of the words he is painfully puzzling over. For they were written in lighter vein and contain a merry jest. When the meaning flashes forth, the words are forgotten, and the boy smiles understandingly.

Emerson’s quick but illusive smile came when he perceived the meaning of something which had seemed to be meaningless. The riddle of existence seems to most men the cause of futile effort to understand. The sphinx is a very solemn character indeed. To Emerson the mystery was not a cause of complaint. He suspected the sphinx of practical jokes. She was concealing something from us.

“I heard a poet answer
Aloud and cheerfully,
‘Say on, sweet Sphinx! thy dirges
Are pleasant songs to me.
Deep love lieth under
These pictures of time;
That fade in the light of
Their meaning sublime.’”

When thus challenged

“The old Sphinx bit her thick lip,--
Said, ‘Who taught thee me to name?
I am thy spirit, yoke-fellow,
Of thine eye I am eyebeam.’”

Then the frowning face gave way to a smile, and “up rose the merry sphinx and crouched no more in stone.”

The conception of a “merry sphinx” is deliciously Emersonian. The tables are turned upon the bitter satirist. The satirist smiles when he sees the incongruity between what men expect and what they actually receive, between what they profess to be and what they are. In all this it is assumed that the reality is worse than the expectation. Things are not what they seem.

Quite so, says Emerson, but they are not always worse than they seem. They are often infinitely better than they seem. We are all the time entertaining angels unawares. We are dull creatures, and are slow to recognize our betters. If it is amusing to unmask a hypocrite, is it not still more amusing to discover that the commonplace individual whom we have been patronizing is really a king in disguise?

“Seek not beyond thy cottage wall
Redeemers that can yield thee all,
While thou sittest at the door
On the desert’s yellow floor,
Listening to the grey-haired crones,
Saadi, see! they rise in stature
To the height of mighty Nature,
And the secret stands revealed.
Fraudulent Time in vain concealed,--
The blessed gods in servile masks
Plied for thee thy household tasks.”

And when the performance does not come up to the expectation, the sudden discovery is not always unpleasant.

“The essence of all jokes, of all comedy seems to be an honest and well-intentioned half-ness, a non-performance of what is intended to be performed. The balking of the intellect, the frustrated expectation, the break of the continuity in the intellect is comedy.”

Emerson was very seldom known to laugh outright, and indeed rather disliked that explosion. But he was exceedingly sensitive to “breaks in the continuity of the intellect.” His mind was naturally logical. If this be so, that will follow, he argued. But he was quick-witted to see that sometimes the thing which he expected did _not_ follow. He could not help but smile at the contradiction to his logic.

“This is the radical joke of life and then of literature. The presence of the ideal of right and truth in all action makes the yawning delinquencies of practice remorseful to the conscience, tragic to the interest, but droll to the intellect.”

This intellectual perception is necessary for our sanity.

“We have no deeper interest than our integrity, and that we should be aware by joke and by stroke of any lie we entertain. Besides, a perception of the comic seems a balance wheel in our metaphysical structure. It appears to be an essential element in a fine character. Wherever the intellect is constructive it will be found. We feel the absence of it as a defect in the noblest and most oracular soul. The perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with other men, and a protection from those perverse tendencies and gloomy insanities in which fine intellects sometimes lose themselves. A rogue alive to the ludicrous is still convertible. If that sense is lost, his fellow men can do little for him.”

The rogue who can laugh at himself may be converted. But the sentimentalist who takes himself too seriously is in an unsalvable condition.

“Society is infested by persons who, seeing that the sentiments please, counterfeit the expression of them. These we call sentimentalists--talkers who mistake the description for the thing, saying for having. They have, they tell us, an intense love of nature; poetry; O they adore poetry and roses and the moon, and the cavalry regiment, and the governor; they “dear liberty;” they worship virtue--“dear virtue.” Yes, they adopt whatever merit is in good repute, and almost make it hateful with their praise. The warmer their expressions, the colder we feel; we shiver with cold. A little experience acquaints us with the inconvertibility of the sentimentalist, the soul that is lost by mimicking soul. Cure the drunkard, heal the insane, mollify the homicide, civilize the Pawnee, but what lessons can be devised for the debauchee of sentiment? Was ever one converted?”

It happened that Emerson attracted many of these sentimentalists and he was not unconscious of the humor of the situation.