The American Transcendentalist
The Life of Emerson. By Van Wyck Brooks. (Dent. 10s. 6d.) ACCEPTING the title of this book in its most literal and limited sense, Mr. Brooks has done his work very finely indeed. The only adverse criticism one feels called upon to make of his biography is that had his subject been Margaret Fuller, or the impractical Alcott, father of Little Women, the visionary teacher who made his refractory pupils punish him, or Miss Mary Emerson who lived in her shroud and longed for the worms, or any other of those score of earnest and interesting men and women of that golden age of New England, Richard Henry Dana, or Webster, or Bryant, or Father Taylor, his book would have achieved all that it has achieved with a poet and a personality infinitely superior to any of these. One closes the book with a good knowledge of the externals of Emerson's life, and a vivid picture of the life of Concord and New England in the eighteen-thirties and after. But one feels that one has travelled with a presence rather than a man, for, while the presence of Emerson has cast a gentle glow over the journey, the journey has cast no-light on-Emerson. Per- haps Mr. Brooks meant this to be the effect. Did not the elder James say that locking 'yourself up with Emerson was like locking yourself up with a handful of diamonds. You saw their beauty but they. .retained their ,secret.- • Taking the biography as a history of events, however, it could hardly have been better done—unless a more restrained and less ejaculatory style might have made the way less like a series of sunbursts. Nobody who reads this biography but will have a fine sense and a knowledge of the beginnings of American literature, as well as a feeling for the genuine in modern Ame-rican criticism.
Nowhere- else, one imagines, could a book be written in this enthusiastic strain about one of the.half-gods of the nineteenth century ; which is, perhaps, very natural, seeing that in .Sinerica even half-gods are few. But there is more in it than that.. I observe that Mr. Desmond McCarthy has elsewhere spoken of Emerson as a name capable of making any modern quickly turn the page: That is doubtless true of these islands, but it is 'certainly not true of young America. There the Emerson who roused America with his famous Phi Beta Kappa oration; The Amerietin- Scholar, can still send young men on pilgrimages to Concord and fill classrooms when some out- standing lecturer speaks on him. How many young men in England, one wonders, have the slightest desire to lay a wreath in Ecelefechan ? And in that connexion it is interesting to compare with the almost lyrical tone of this biography the disillusionment of Mr. Norwood Young's Carlyle : his rise and :fall, published here a couple of years ago.
Emerson was and is a writer, for the young. He evokes both the first and the second kind of wonder of which Cole- ridge spoke when he said : " In wonder all philosophy began, in wonder it ends. The first wonder is the offspring of ignorance ; and the last is the ,parent of admiration." He brings innocence to earth and fosters wisdom. That he does any more is doubtful, for he was (like Carlyle in that) a stimulant rather than a food, and his power lay in suggestion rather than instruction. He was one of the finest of conver- fiationalists with his pen, and his effect is like the effect of good talk or good wine, in both of which there is usually about the same degree of verilas. Like Pascal, he loved not so much " to search for things " as " the search after things." And ;so all his emphasis was on the personality and the power and mystery and the sacredness of the personality. He left to :such as Thackeray and Carlyle the gospel of effecting and ;achieving. He thereby evaded the battle, but he kept his banner clean. He was no general and he was a poor guide, and he consistently brought foolish men to their folly more quickly than they would have otherwise been brought.
But because it was always the folly of a generous impulse and disgraced nobody,.which is more than can be said for the bellowing Carlyle, even a hard-bitten critic like Mr. Van Wyck :Brooks can still melt at his glow, youth be prepared to light their torches at the same lamp, and everybody halt to pay honour even where they cannot long delay.
SEAN 0' FAOLAIN.
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