RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
spontaneously visit her. Yet the prose, both of Car- lyle and of Emerson, falls at times into that poetic rhythm which indicates the highest glow of a powerful imaginative nature, though of such passages the present writer, at least, could produce many more from Carlyle than from Emerson. We should say that a little of Emerson's verse is genuine poetry, though not of the highest order, and that none of Carlyle's is poetry at all ; but that some of Carlyle's prose is as touching as any but the noblest poetry, while Emerson never reaches the same profound pathos. Nor is this the only side on which these two contemporary thinkers resemble each other. As thinkers, both were eager transcendentalists, and at the
same time, rationalists too. Both were intended for divines, and both abandoned the profession, though Emerson filled a pulpit for a year or two, while Carlyle never even en- tered on the formal study of theology. Both, again, were in their way humourists, though Emerson's humour was a much less profound constituentof his character than Carlyle's. And finally, both would have called themselves the spokesmen of " the dim, common populations," the enemies of all selfish privilege, of all purely traditional distinctions between man and man, of all the artificial selfishness of class, of all the tyranny of caste, and the cruelty of custom.
Yet Emerson and Carlyle were in their way very remarkable contrasts. Emerson was as benignant and gentle as Carlyle was arrogant and bitter. Mr. Raskin has asked, "What can you say of Carlyle, except that he was born in the clouds, and struck by lightning ?" Of Emerson it might, perhaps, be also said that he was born in the clouds, but assuredly not that he was struck by lightning. There is nothing scathed or marred about him, nothing sublime, though something per- haps better,—a little of the calm of true majesty. He has the keen kindliness of the highest New-England culture, with a touch of majesty about him that no other New-England culture shows. He has the art of saying things with a tone of authority quite unknown to Carlyle, who casts his thunderbolt, but never forgets that he is casting it at some unhappy mortal whom he intends to slay. That is not Emerson's manner ; he is never aggressive. He has that regal suavity which settles a troublesome matter without dispute. His sentences are often like decrees. For example, take this, on the dangers of the much-vaunted life of
action :—" A certain partiality, headiness, and want of balance is the tax which all action must pay. Act if you like, but you do it at your peril ;" or this, on the dangers of speculation,—" Why should I vapour and play the philosopher, instead of ballasting the best I can this dancing balloon ;" or this, on the dangers of hero-worship,—" Every hero becomes a bore at last. We balance one man with his opponent, and the health of the State depends upon the see-saw ;" or this, on the Time-spirit,—" We see now events forced on which seem to retard or retrograde the civility of ages. But the World-spirit is a good swimmer, and storms and waves cannot drown him." There is no thinker of our day who, for sentences that have the ring of oracles, can quite compare with Emerson. Mr. Arnold, in a sonnet written near forty years ago, on Emerson's essays, said,—
" A voice oracular has pealed to day ; To-day a hero's banner is unfurled."
And the first line at least was true, whatever may be said of the second. No man has compressed more authoritative insight into his sentences than Emerson. He discerns character more truly than Carlyle, though he does not describe with half the fervent vigour. Carlyle worships Goethe blindly, but Emerson discerns the very core of the poet. " Goethe can never be dear to men. His is not even the devotion to pure truth, but to truth for the sake of culture." And again,—Goethe, he says, "has one test for all men : What can you teach me ?" Hear him of Goethe as artist,—" His affections help him, like women employed by Cicero to worm out the secrets of conspirators." Or take this, as summing up Goethe as a poet :—" These are not wild, miraculous songs, but elaborate poems, to which the poet has confided the results of eighty years of observation.
Still, he is a poet of a prouder laurel than any con- temporary, and under this plague of microscopes (for he seems to see out of every pore of his skin), strikes the harp with a hero's strength and grace." There is something far more royal and certain in Mr. Emerson's insight, than in all the humorous brilliance of Carlyle.
Still, if we were to compare the two as transcendental thinkers, we should not hesitate to declare Carlyle much the greater of the two. Emerson never seems to us so little secure of his ground as he is in uttering his transcendentalisms,— Carlyle never so secure. Emerson on " Nature," Emerson on the " Over-soul," Emerson on the law of "Polarity," Emerson on " Intuition," does not seem to us even instructive. He aims too wide, and hits only the vague. When he tells us, in his " Representative Men," that " animated chlorine knows of chlorine, and incarnate zinc of zinc," he attempts to state his peculiar pantheism in words which not only do not make it more intelligible, but rather illustrate the untruth of the general assertion that only like can perceive like. " Shall we say," he adds, "that quartz mountains will pulver- ise into innumerable Werners, Von Buchs, and Beanmonts, and that the laboratory of the atmosphere holds in solu- tion I know not what Berzeliuses and Davys P"—a question to which the present writer, at least, would reply with a most emphatic "No," if, at least, the object be, as it no doubt is, to ex- plain discoverers by their latent affinity with the thing discovered. Suppose we put it thus,—" Animated bacteria know of bacteria, incarnate lymph of vaccine :"—who would. not see the ab- surdity P Is there really more of the bacteria in Professor Pasteur or Professor Koch, than there is in the cattle inoculated by the former, or the consumptive patients who die from the presence of tubercular bacteria, according to the teaching of the latter, . that Professors Pasteur and Koch discover their presence, while the patients themselves discover nothing of the nature of their own complaints ? Of course, Emerson would have said that he did not mean his statements to be thus carnally understood. Very likely not; but have they any real meaning at all, unless thus carnally construed ? Mr. Emerson's transcendental essays are full of this kind of dark and vague symbolism, which carries weight only in proportion to the extent of our ignorance, not to the extent of our knowledge. Now, Carlyle, so far as he was a transcendentalist, stuck to the very truth and reality of nature. He showed us how small a proportion of our life we can realise in thought; how small a proportion of our thoughts we can figure forth in words; how immense is the difference between the pretensions of human speech and the real life for which it stands; how vast the forces amidst which the human spirit struggles for its little modicum of purpose; how infinite the universe, both in regard to space and time, on which we make our little appearances only
to subside again before we can hope materially to change the great stream of tendencies which contains us ; and he made us feel, as hardly any other has made us feel, how, in spite of all this array of immensities in which we are hardly a distinguish- able speck, the spirit whose command brings us into being re- quires of us the kind of life which defies necessity, and breathes into the order of our brief existence the spirit of impassioned right and indomitable freedom. This was but a narrow aim, compared with that of Mr. Emerson's philosophy, but it suc- ceeded, while Emerson's did not. The various philosophic essays in which Emerson tried to assert the absolute unity of the material and spiritual laws of the Universe, have always seemed to us, though decidedly interesting, yet unquestion- able failures. You can drive a coach and six through almost any one of the generalisations which pass for philosophy, in these vague and imaginative, but unreal speculations.
Inferior in genius,—as a man Emerson will compare favour- ably with Carlyle. He certainly possessed his soul in patience, which Carlyle never did. He had a magnanimity in which Carlyle was altogether wanting. He sympathised ardently with all the greatest practical movements of his own day, while Carlyle held contemptuously aloof. Emerson was one of the first to strike a heavy blow at the institution of slavery. He came forward to encourage his country in the good cause, when slavery raised the flag of rebellion. He had a genuine desire to see all men really free, while Carlyle only felt the desire to see all men strongly governed,—which they might be without being free at all. Emerson's spirit, moreover, was much the saner and more reverent of the two, though less rich in power and humour. His mind was heartily reli- gions, though his transcendentalism always gave a certain air of patronage to his manner in speaking of any of the greater religions. One of his youthful sermons was thus described by a lady who heard it :—" Waldo Emerson came last Sunday, and preached a sermon, with his chin in the air, in scorn of the whole human race." That is caricature, but whenever Emerson spoke on any religion which claims a special revelation, even in later life, his chin seemed to be "in the air" still. He had the democratic transcendentalist's jealousy of any one who claimed to be nearer God than the race at large. He was con- temptuous of the pretensions of special access to God, and this, to our ears at least, always spoils his tone, when he speaks of Christ and Christianity. But towards man, be is always reverent—which Carlyle seldom is—and he is always reverent, too, in relation to the Divine Mind itself. "I conceive a man as always spoken to from behind," he once wrote, " and unable to turn his head and see the speaker. In all the millions who have heard the voice, none ever saw the face. As children in their play run behind each other, and seize one by the ears, and make him walk before them, so is the Spirit our unseen pilot." Those are the words of a truly reverent mind, though of a mind as jealously devoted to a sort of false spiritual democracy, as it is reverent in its attitude and poetic in its inmost thought.
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