BOOKS.
E AIERSON.*
THE various excellent editions of Emerson's works which are now appearing in this country,—of which Messrs. Macmillan's is probably the most taking, if only for Mr. Morley's thoughtful and charming preliminary essay, though Messrs. Routledge's "Riverside Edition" is very good,—will be valued very differ- ently by different men, even though these be all among the beet
judges of their time. None, we think, will deny to Emerson a singular power of sententious speech, and a singular purity and keenness of critical insight. To our mind, Emerson was rather an uncertain oracle, some of whose sayings ring for ever in the mind, while others only jingle there, than either a poet or a philosopher. There was too much strain in him for either. He rose too much on tiptoe for the poet, and was too broken in his insights for a philosopher's steady continuity of thought. We have read Mr. Joel Benton's little book on Emerson as a poet without any result, except 'perfect concurrence with his remark,—aimed at "a critical English journal," which is very possibly our own,—that "argument is as futile with this state of mental inaptitude as it is with the colour-blind. There is no delinquency of perception so nnhelpable as that which dis- cerns but one literary fashion." Only we deny that to reject Emerson's poetry as inadequate to the higher re- quirements of verse, implies limitation to one literary fashion. We find poetry of the truest kind at once in Isaiah and in lEschylus, in Shakespeare and in Shelley, in Tennyson and in Matthew Arnold, and surely these are not of one literary fashion. But Emerson's verse is laborious. It gives one that sense of uphill straining, as distinguished from flight, which is far removed from what seems to us of the essence of poetry, and though there are fine sayings 'in Emerson's verse which are near akin to poetry, there seems to us very little indeed of genuine poetic passion. This, perhaps, of all that Mr. Joel Benton quotes, comes nearest to it, but you could hardly rest the repute of a poet on this :—
" The trivial harp will never please,
Or fill my craving ear ; Its chords should ring, as blows the breeze, Free, peremptory, clear ; No jingling serenader's art, Nor tinkle of piano-strings, Can make the wild blood start In its mystic springs.
The kingly bard Must smite the chords rudely and har:I, As with hammer or with mace, That they may render back Artful thunder which conveys Secrets of the solar track, Sparks of the super-solar blaze."
We wholly agree with Mr. John Morley that Emerson's poems "are the outcome of a discontent with prose, not of that high- strung sensibility which compels the true poet into verse." His verse often attains the mystic dignity of gnomic runes, but seldom indeed embodies the passion of a poet's heart.
Emerson is a most stimulating writer,—one, however, who, like most stimulating writers, is apt sometimes to make you think that you have got hold of a real truth, only because he has put an old error into a novel and fascinating dress. If you would be stimulated by him to the best advantage, you must be stimulated to challenge his gnomic sayings, and to sift them through and through before you accept them. He has a gannine dignity in him which often gives a false air of authority to his announcements, and so takes in the unwary. It was he, we fancy, who introduced the unfortunate !ilia- take, which has been followed by so many, of using imposing scientific terms, like 'polarity' or 'plarised,'
• 1. The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. With an Introduction by John Morley. 6 vols. London ?dannillan. 2. The Works of Ralph Waldo EntEraon. Riverside Edition. 8 vols. To be coin. plated in 11 vols. London: Routledge. 3. Emerson or a Poet, By Joel Benton. New York: M. L. Holbr)ok nal GU for instance, in a hybrid popular sense, which makes them at once pretentious and misleading. "Let me see every trifle," says Emerson, "bristling with the polarity that ranges it constantly on an eternal law, and, the shop, the plough, and the ledger referred to the like cause by which light undu- lates and poets sing." How the ledger is to be made to bristle with a polarity that ranges it constantly on an eternal law, Emerson, of course, never even suggested ; but that grandiose mode of speaking of things takes hold of all his dis- ciples. Mr. Joel Benton, in defending his poems, says, for in- stance,—" They are hints rather than finished statements. The words alone startle by their deep suggestion. Their polarised vitality, rich symbolism, and strong percussion, shock the mind, and celestial vistas or unfathomed deeps are opened." There, we venture to say that the metaphorical polarity of Emerson,—a very vague kind of polarity even in him, for it meant only the indication given by some detail of common life that that detail had its explanation in grander life beyond itself,—has fallen to a yet lower level of metaphorical emptiness. The "polarised vitality" of his poems can hardly be so explained as to give it any very distinct meaning. Polarised light is, we believe, light deprived of one set of its vibrations; and polarised life ought, we suppose by analogy, to mean life that does not show itself equally in all spheres,—life thinned off into what is spiritual only. If Mr. Benton means this by the "polarised " of Emerson's poems, he certainly is using terms at once pedantic and ineffectual to convey a very simple meaning; and this is just the fault into which Emerson not 'infrequently fell himself, and almost always led his followers. There is a cant of scientific symbolism about their language which makes it at once.obscare and affected.
What Emerson will always be remembered by is his noble and resonant depth of conviction, his pithy metaphor, and his keen, placid criticism. No one could give more perfect resonance to the convictions of the heart than he. One who was a boy forty years ago never forgot the impression made upon him by the last sentence of his address on the subject of our West India emancipation :—" The Intellect with blazing eye, looking through history from the beginning onwards, gazes on this blot and it disappears. The sentiment of right, once very low and indistinct, but ever more articulate, because it is the voice of the Universe, pronounces Free- dom. The power that built this fabric of things affirms it in the heart, and in the history of the let of August has made a sign to the ages of his wilL" But even there, how strange is the assertion that "the sentiment of right" is "the voice of the Universe!" It is the voice of God, no doubt, but most certainly not the voice of the Universe, but a voice that over-rules the many discordant voices of the Universe, some of which pronounce "slavery," and some "freedom." Emerson's thin and curiously optimistic Pantheism seems to have needed hardly any verifica- tion from his intellect. He assumed it as if it were the only intellectual assumption on which life to him was intelligible at all.
Emerson's pithy metaphor has a curious charm and some- times a curious grandeur of its own :—" Man," he says, "is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is Feat, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier.
But, unfortunately, this original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed to multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops and cannot be gathered. The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man." "The priest becomes a form ; the attorney a statute book; the mechanic a machine ; the sailor a rope of the ship." Or, again, how can you have a finer metaphor for the tendency of men to follow clearer minds than their own, than the following F—" The un- stable estimates of men crowd to him whose mind is filled with a truth, as the heaped waves of the Atlantic follow the moon." But we confess that we value Emerson most as a critic. Bepreeentatiz)e Men, and the critical passages which abound in his book on the Conduct of Life and English Traits, seem to us his best literary achievements.
As Mr. Morley justly remarks, Emerson has a marked dis- like of disame in any form, and is helpless in dealing with "that horrid burden and impediment on the soul, which the Churches call sin, and which, by whatever name we call it, is a very real catastrophe in the moral nature of man." That is perfectly
true, and by the way, we defy any one who wishes to cal this phenomenon truly, to find a better name for it than the Churches have given. Sin would not be "a very real' catastrophe," if it could be explained away into anything but sin,—that is, a conscious and voluntary revolt against a moral- authority to which we owe obedience. Emerson lived in pale, moonlit world of ideality, in which there was little that was adapted to tame the fierce passions and appease the agonis- ing remorse of ordinary human nature. He was a voice to the pure intellect and the more fastidious conscience of men, not a power of salvation for their wretchedness. But his gnomia wisdom will live long, and startle many generations with ita clear, high, thrilling note.
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