Chapter XVIII: Emerson’s Historic Sense

“_I feel time passing away as an ebbing sea. I feel the eternity of man, the identity of his thought. The Greek had, it seems, the same fellow beings as I. The sun and moon, water and fire, met his heart precisely as they meet mine. Then the vaunted distinction between Greek and English, between Classic and Romantic schools become superficial and pedantic. When a thought of Plato becomes a thought to me, when a truth that fired the soul of Pindar fires me, time is no more._”

A critic has declared that Emerson was lacking in the “historic sense.” By this he means that Emerson had no aptitude for historical investigation as it has been developed by modern scholars. He could never have been an historian like Lord Acton, seeking to get at the exact truth in regard to all the events of past periods of time. He was incapable of the fierce industry with which Thomas Carlyle investigated the records of long dead Hohenzollerns. One Hohenzollern would have been enough for Emerson. He had no taste for antiquarian research.

But to say that a man is without the historic sense is like accusing him of a lack of the sense of humor. This latter accusation usually means little more than there is a difference in the taste for jokes.

Instead of saying that Emerson lacked the historic sense, it would be better to inquire as to that which was characteristic in his attitude to history. Only when we sympathize with that can we obtain any benefit from him.

There are two ways of looking at human history. One may fix his mind on the differences between one period and another, or he may be more profoundly interested in the identities which he recognizes.

In the former case, what is seen is a succession of events and personages each having its little day and passing away forever. Each is different from the other, and it is the business of the historian to note those differences. He is the stage manager careful about the entrances and the exits of the actors, and about the way the lights are arranged for each scene. There are distinctly marked periods of time, each with its beginning, middle and end. This is one way of looking at history.

Another way is that of the philosopher who is interested primarily not in persons or events, but in the forces of which they are the temporary manifestations. He perceives not so much the differences as the identities. This was Emerson’s habitual point of view. He did not care for the dead past. So much of it as was really dead he would decently bury. But that part of it which was alive he would incorporate into the living present and treat as of contemporary interest. It was here that Emerson’s historic sense manifested itself.

In the volume called “Representative Men” Emerson illustrates his conception of History. “The search after the great men,” he says, “is the dream of youth, and the most serious occupation of manhood.” And yet when we have found the great man, we find a person very much like ourselves. We agree with him, which means that he expresses thoughts that are very like our own. We are conscious of the fact that he reveals what is in us as well as in him. Plato, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Napoleon, were representative men. There were millions of persons who had the same qualities, but in less degree. The fact that they have been appreciated proves their kinship to the multitude.

“The genius of humanity is the right point of view in history. The qualities abide; the men who exhibit them have no more nor less, and pass away; the qualities remain in another brow. No experience is more familiar. Once you saw phœnixes, now they are gone; the world is not therefore disenchanted. The vessels on which you read sacred emblems turn out to be common pottery; but the sense of the picture is sacred, and you may still read them, transferred to the walls of the world. For a time our teachers serve us personally, as meters or milestones of progress. Once they were angels of knowledge and their figures touched the sky. Then we drew near, saw their means, culture and limits and they yielded their place to other geniuses. Happy if a few names remain so high that we have not been able to read them nearer, and age and comparison have not robbed them of a ray. But at last we shall cease to look in men for completeness and shall content ourselves with their social and delegated quality. All that respects the individual is temporary and prospective like the individual himself, who is ascending out of his limits into a catholic existence. We have never come at the true and best benefit of any genius so long as we believe him an original force.”

Here Emerson differed radically from his friend Carlyle. To Carlyle the hero was an original force; Luther was more than the Reformation of the sixteenth century. Cromwell and Frederick the Great were treated as if they were creatures who were unlike the Englishmen and the Prussians whom they governed. To Emerson they were men who best represented the ideals of their countrymen.

To my mind Emerson’s most brilliant bit of historical criticism is contained in his Essay on Napoleon. Many have been the descriptions of the life and character of the great Corsican adventurer. Emerson makes us see the kind of man Napoleon was. “Bonaparte was the idol of common men because he had in transcendent degree the qualities and powers of common men.”

He was “a man of stone and iron, capable of sitting on horseback sixteen or seventeen hours, of going many days together without rest or food, except by snatches, and with the speed and spring of a tiger in action; a man not embarrassed by any scruples; compact, instant, selfish, prudent, and of a perception which did not suffer itself to be balked or misled by any pretences of others, or any superstition or any heat or haste of his own.

“I call Napoleon the agent or attorney of the middle classes of modern society; of the throng who filled the markets, shops, counting houses, manufactories, ships of the modern world, aiming to be rich. He was the agitator, the destroyer of prescription, the internal improver, the liberal, the radical, the inventor of means, the opener of doors and markets, the subverter of monopoly and abuse.”

Napoleon’s change from the young revolutionist to the Emperor was nothing strange. “The democrat is the young conservative. The aristocrat is the democrat, ripe and gone to seed--because both parties stand on the one ground of the supreme value of property, which one endeavors to get and the other to keep. Bonaparte may be said to represent the whole history of this party, its youth and its age, yes and with poetic justice its fate in his own.”

Turn from the Essay on Napoleon to that on Power. In the description of the village tavern keeper you will recognize a poor relation of the great Napoleon. There is the same combination of force and unscrupulousness.

“I knew a burly Bonaface who for many years kept a public house in one of our rural capitals. He was a knave whom the town could ill spare. He was a social vascular creature, grasping and selfish. There is no crime which he did not or could not commit. But he made good friends of the selectmen, served them with his best chop when they supped at his house, and also with his honor the Judge he was very cordial, grasping his hand. He introduced all the fiends, male and female, into the town, and united in his person the functions of bully, incendiary, swindler, barkeeper and burglar. He girdled the trees, and cut off the horses’ tails of the temperance people in the night. He led the ‘rummies’ and radicals in the town meeting. Meanwhile, he was civil, fat and easy in his house, and precisely the most public-spirited citizen. He was active in getting the roads repaired and planted with shade trees; he subscribed for the fountains, the gas and the telegraph, he introduced the new horse rake, the new scraper, the baby-jumper and what not that Connecticut sends to the admiring citizens.”

Schoolboys dispute the question--Was the career of Napoleon Bonaparte beneficial to Europe? The same question arises in regard to the public-spirited and disreputable tavern keeper. Emerson as an historian would not attempt to give a final verdict. He would insist on having the facts on both sides presented. And then he would judge the value of the facts by their correspondence with his own experience.

“The fact narrated must correspond to something in me to be credible or intelligible. We as we read must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner, must fasten the image to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly.”

One experiences history as he experiences religion. There are a few passions that are common to all men. They are the keys to all story of the past. It is mere pedantry to explain the worship and the achievements of other ages as if they were mysteries. After all they are nothing strange. We have felt the same impulses.

“How easily these old worships of Moses, of Zoroaster, of Menu, of Socrates, domesticate themselves in the mind. I cannot find any antiquity in them. They are mine as much as theirs.

“I have seen the first monks and anchorets without crossing seas or centuries. More than once some individual has appeared to me with such negligence of labour and such commanding contemplation, a haughty beneficiary, begging in the name of God, as made good to the nineteenth century Simeon the Stylite, the Thebais, and the first Capuchins.

“The priestcraft of the East and West, of the Magian, Brahmin, Druid, and Inca, is expounded in the individual’s private life. The cramping influence of a hard formalist on a young child in repressing his spirits and courage, paralyzing the understanding, and that without producing indignation, but only fear and obedience, and even much sympathy with tyranny,--is a familiar fact explained to the child when he becomes a man, only by seeing that the oppressor of his youth is himself a child tyrannized over by those names and words and forms, of whose influence he was merely the organ to the youth. The fact teaches him how Belus was worshipped, and how the Pyramids were built, better than the discovery by Champollion of the names of all the workmen and the cost of every tile. He finds Assyria and the Mounds of Cholula at his door, and himself has laid the courses.

“Again, in that protest which each considerate person makes against the superstition of his times, he repeats step for step the part of old reformers, and in the search after truth finds like them new perils to virtue. He learns again what moral vigour is needed to supply the girdle of a superstition. A great licentiousness treads on the heels of a reformation. How many times in the history of the world has the Luther of the day had to lament the decay of piety in his own household! ‘Doctor,’ said his wife to Martin Luther, one day, ‘how is it that, whilst subject to papacy, we prayed so often and with such fervour, whilst now we pray with the utmost coldness and very seldom?’

“The advancing man discovers how deep a property he has in literature,--in all fable as well as in all history. He finds that the poet was no odd fellow who described strange and impossible situations, but that universal man wrote by his pen a confession true for one and true for all. His own secret biography he finds in lines wonderfully intelligible to him, dotted down before he was born. One after another he comes up in his private adventures with every fable of Æsop, of Homer, of Hafiz, of Ariosto, of Chaucer, of Scott, and verifies them with his own head and hands.”