Chapter II

Eight years ago, when I read Mme. Dugard’s volume, I was youthful—with all of youth’s intolerance. It seemed no mere coincidence that Emerson’s father recorded his birth in his diary between a dry note on the “Election Sermon” and a report of a session of his literary club at Mr. Adams’s. Cheerful youth, not needing reassurance concerning the excellence of this world as an abiding place, is unlikely to set a high value on what contemporary reviewers, even in the American religious press, found to praise in Emerson’s essays: “Their lofty cheer, and spirit-stirring notes of courage and hope.” I certainly had no conception of Emerson’s influence upon my father’s generation—an influence so great that Carlyle called his friend a new era in our history; so great that when some clergymen complained that he was leading young men to hell, Father Taylor remarked: “It may be that Emerson is going to hell, but I am certain he will change the climate there, and emigration will set that way.” Then again, I had no sympathy with Emerson because it seemed to me, in spite of all the long words and imported transcendentalism—or, partly, on account of them—that he didn’t “get anywhere.” (I sometimes feel so still—but the charge is less damnatory. I do not wonder that Moncure Conway wrote of Emerson setting free in his heart—in his _heart_, notice—“a winged thought that sang a new song and soared—whither?”)

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.