Books of the Day
100 per Cent. Americans
The Living Thoughts of Thomas Jefferson. Presented by John Dewey; The Living Thoughts of Emerson. Presented by Edgar Lee Masters. (Living Thoughts Library. Cassells 3s. 6d. each.) THERE is nationality in drinks and there is nationality in thought. Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson had not very much in common apart frnin being Americans, but how much that was! The big, loose-limbed Virginia planter and horseman, great actor on the stage of the world, famous in his twenties as the author of the greatest political manifesto of the Enlightenment, actor and observer at the last days of Versailles and the first days of the Revolution, minister to Louis XVI, counsellor to the National Assembly, governor, president, founder of a great university, semi-divine figure in his own life-time and for generations after his death, Jefferson was one of the most successful and versatile of the great men of his age, worthy contemporary of Napoleon and of Goethe. Emerson we see through the eyes of the elder Holmes, a true Brahmin; stooped,..s.bookish, gauche, barely on the edge of great events, barely on the 'edge of• the great world. Descendant of so many ministers, he took the lecture platform for his pulpit, and at an age at which Jefferson was dealing with Napoleon or Canning, was making painful and not very profitable journeys through the raw frontier towns and settlements that Martin Chuzzlewit knew.
But both Jefferson and Emerson were Americans, both con- vinced that the day of the old world was over, that "Time's noblest offspring is the last." Jefferson might correspond with his French physiocratic friends like Dupont de Nemours and make respectful pilgrimage to the Maison Carre, but he was as convinced that the last best hope of earth was not in France, as he was convinced that his Monticello and his University of Virginia were the living representatives of what Nimes had once been.
Emerson was a little more bookish. He went on pilgrimage to Europe with more humility than Jefferson displayed. One of the most lively and amusing extracts in the Emerson volume is the famous account of the visit of the unknown and enquiring American to the almost unknown but dogmatic Scot at Craigen- puttock. Emerson is a much better reporter than Jefferson, but f Jefferson had visited Carlyle and Emerson had been there to eport their conversation, the comedy would have been even better. All the-- noise, vehemence and dogmatism of Carlyle wouli have startled or shocked Jefferson, but how good for Carlyle to have his vague projects of using the land cross- xammed by that eminent (and ruined) scientific farmer. The dmiration which Carlyle expressed for the pig which go, out t the pen would not have impressed the great American pioneer I gadgets, who would have been fulL of ideas on how to keep gs at home.
But at bottom, Jefferson and Emerson agreed. In the new orld lay the future; slavish imitation of the customs or doctrines f the old world was the sin against the light for the fortunate pie who had been born free (or nearly free) of the damnosa editas of kingcraft and priestcraft. Both Emerson and Jeffer- n expressed this view with a confidence that sometimes egenerated into complacency. Not often, but often enough, voices of these great men take on something of the tone of ann. tbal Chollop or Jefferson Brick. But neither was an un- Imo. 1 admirer of the present of his country or possessed of an critical optimism about its future. Jefferson and Emerson ere both aware of the dangers of America becoming a nation ed entirely by the standards of an acquisitive society. Under e dollar sign there were many intellectual and moral virtues at would not flourish, many possibilities df development that mild die young. g. The Hamiltonians, with their banks and ligarchical plans, the Cotton Whigs, whose greatest man, ebster, was emasculated by his role as their spokesman, these ere enemies of that good and varied life that Nature and ature's God had made possible to his favoured children. But both were optimists. For Emerson the time would come when erica would find its full expression in art and in life. "We awe yet had no genius in America, with tyrannous eye, which ew the value of our incomparable materials, and saw in the arbansm and materialism of the times another carnival of the c gods whose picture it so much admires in Homer ; then the middle age ; then in Calvinism." That form which we have substituted restores the free right the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opiruon. eyes are opened, or are opening, to the rights of man. The eral.spread of the light of science has already laid open to try view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not en born with saddles on their backs, nor a favoured few booted
and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others." So thought Jefferson, with what may seem to us irritating optimism. But Jefferson had seen (without regret or surprise) the rise and fall of a more formidable liquidator of an old order than Herr Hitler. His optimism is not that of a mere preacher. but of an actor on the world-stage.
Both Jefferson and Emerson are authors who can stand the ordeal of selection. Neither wrote systematic treatises : Jefferson because he was busy and because his ideas were simple and easily set out : Emerson because his light came in flashes ; his depths are occasional pools in a clear shallow river. Each volume has a readable and enlightening introduction. Professor Dewey sticks closer to his task than does Mr Masters. He writes like a professor, but with more character than most professors let stray into their writings. He does not underestimate the import- ance of the theistic element in Jefferson's political philosophy, but he does rather underestimate the degree to which, as a fight- ing creed, his own instrumentalism is inferior to the dogmatic faith in "the laws of Nature and of Nature's God" that sup- ported the whole Jeffersonian edifice. Mr. Masters writes like a poet. His intrcduction is less an essay on Emerson than a
chapter from own Dichtung und Wahreit. It will be en;oyed most by those who know that Mr. Masters detests Lincoln, the Republican Party, the war-mongers of 1898 and all the devices of "the good, the wise and the rich." But although he transports Emerson from Concord to Spoon River, the resulting distortions are not serious, and Emerson would have been the last to mind.
D. W. BROGAN.
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