knowledge of the various phases of practical life, and an exuberant power of applying to them the doctrines of common sense and of the higher ethics. The style of these chapters is in unison with his theme. In the three first chapters, Fate, Power, Wealth, see the impetuous vigor of his thoughts, leaping into pithy, nervous, full-armed sentences; the acceptance of the rough, tyrannical powers of fate and circumstance; the almost extravagant generalizations in extolling the value of human power of whatever sort; the belief in the great compensations and balancing of all things and events; and the assurance of the satisfactions of wisdom and of high moral and spiritual standards. Illustrations from the latest discoveries in science abound, as well as from daily life. So that I am almost inclined to qualify what I have before said as to the essayist's probable lack of interest to the scientist. This is a book the most practical minds may enjoy. But it is the prose of life irradiated by the highest ideas and principles. Between the time when he wrote "Nature" and "The Conduct of Life," he had read and observed extensively; and these pages abound with the most pertinent and varied illustrations. As he grows older, his horizon of facts enlarges, and makes him appear as if dealing more in detail with them, but always the same serene sky of idealistic thought bends over and harmonizes all. It is noteworthy that Carlyle (in the Carlyle and Emerson Correspondence) praises this book with special emphasis for its practical character. "I read it," he says, "with a satisfaction given me by the books of no other living mortal, . . . the best of all your books." "You have grown older, more pungent, piercing. I never read from you before such lightning gleams of meaning as are to be found here." We must regard Emerson as not only the great ethical teacher of the age, but one of our profoundest and most earnest religious teachers. I am at a loss to understand how there should be any doubt on this point to any thorough reader of his books. It seems to have been the province of some sectarians to put in queries about Emerson's religion, because they cannot make it coincide with theirs; because they have not been able to classify and label him as belonging to any Christian sect, if even in any way Christian. Mr. Joseph Cook seems to have experienced this difficulty, and was obliged to call in Mr. Emerson's old friend and neighbor, Mr. Alcott, to help him to a classification and a name. Whereupon, Mr. Alcott calls him a Christian Theist. But it is found that even this convenient label will not stick. Mr. Emerson could not and did not wish to classify himself, or furnish the least hint toward a denominational name. For he was of the broadest church of God and Humanity; and his spiritual sympathies reached back to the oldest seers of divine truth of all races, and took in Hindu, Chinese, Persian, Greek, and Judean scriptures, as all, when at their best, proclaiming one central essential idea of the relations of man to God. Shall we say he is pagan or Christian, Pantheist or Theist? He has intuitions which include them all. It is sufficient that he emphatically declares as well as currently implies his profound belief that all that is flows from a supreme and infinite Source; that religion is not confined to one time or people; that it is a life, and not a creed,-the highest, divinest life of which man is capable. It is only the sectarians who are puzzled to find a label for his religion. His creed escapes from their fingering like impalpable air, takes as many forms as Proteus, swims, dives, soars, hides in secular crowds or lonely solitudes, as suits its convenience, never dogmatizes, never attaches itself to one exclusive symbol, yet to the sympathetic reader brings an ever-present conviction of its uncompromising reality. It has too much mystery and grandeur for verbal self-definition. It finds an echo in the scriptures of Persia and Hindustan, as well as in those of the Hebrews and Christians. Its fullest expression is found in his essay on the Over-Soul, his chapter on Worship, and his celebrated Divinity School Address. But, in whatever class of relig ious thinkers he may be placed, we can never forget that Emerson was the great pioneer of liberal Christianity in this country; we can never compute our debt to him for having broken through the jungle and malarial swamps which for so many centuries obstructed the growth of a free, generous, and humane religion. But there is one predominating characteristic of Emerson's thought, and therefore of his style, which it is time to consider, though I have unavoidably alluded to it; and that is that, though a prose essayist, he is essentially a poet. His pages are tinged through with his symbolizing imagination. Underneath the prose, you feel the poet, both in the structure of his sentences and his modes of thought, in which the facts must lead out from an imprisoning foreground of literal truth into the large aerial horizon of the ideal. What Aristotle said of the style of Plato might be said of Emerson's, that "it was a medium between poetry and prose." Herein, he is alone and original among modern thinkers, and recalls the Platonists and some of the Elizabethan writers. What we call logic does not appear in him. He has a vision of a truth, and utters it in a quaintly compact or fluently lyric sentence. He is not over-anxious about its sequence, if it is in the main line of his theme. This lack of apparent continuity baffles ordinary readers. And the prosaic minds find him wide of their mark. I have known even some persons of fine intellect and not without imagination who could never arrive at any lively interest in him. Perhaps the fault is sometimes the writer's as well as the reader's. For his sentences are often like stepping-stones over a broad stream, and puzzle the demand for continuity and connection, though they all lead in one direction. A certain vigorous and determined foothold is required, and a steadiness of vision toward the main idea, to carry us along over the deep, wide waters of his subject. His illustrations and metaphors often have the same disjointed look, and you may be at a loss to see their precise application, until you compare one with another, as the naturalist constructs an See Thomas Taylor's Introduction to his translation of Plato. animal out of scattered vertebræ. It is quite natural that most readers should prefer a continuous bridge through a book than to leap from one stone to another. This peculiarity of style arises, I suppose, partly from his habit of writing his thoughts day by day as they occur, without any idea at the time of stringing his pearls on a connecting thread. It is hardly strange that, when afterward brought into an essay, they should sometimes have a mosaic-work appearance. Thoughtful readers have now grown accustomed to this peculiarity, but forty years ago he puzzled some very wise heads. When as a lecturer in Boston he charmed so many young persons of both sexes, there were, of course, many who could not share their enthusiasm; for they were not in his magnetic current, and failed to make the connections of his thought. The Rev. Dr. Channing could not see much profoundly valuable thought in him. "What was it all about?" I once heard him ask. "What definite thought or principle have you brought away from hearing him?" Jonathan Mason, the distinguished Boston lawyer, when asked if he understood Emerson, replied, "No, but I have a daughter who does," -a saying which used to raise a laugh at the young lady's expense, but why the laughers never condescended to explain. These hearers and the lecturer failed to meet on a common ground. His symbolism submerged the facts they were so eager for. As Emerson himself says, "A man is like a bit of Labrador spar, which has no lustre as you turn it in your hand until you come to a particular angle, then it shows deep and beautiful colors." Those who most appreciated Emerson's early lectures in Boston were not always of the highest education and culture. I know a simple-minded man, a tailor, who always attended and always took notes, and who really enjoyed and understood him. And it is well known how the simple farmers of Lexington claimed to understand him better than they did any one else among their preachers and lecturers. In his metrical poetry, Emerson is fresh, sparkling, tonic; and his verses are like jets of cold mineral water. His lines are packed with original thought, and glow with images drawn at first hand from nature. There is nothing in them that has been trailed through the conventional avenues of books. In his best poems, he is terse, apt, noble. And, though his style is evidently founded on the old Elizabethan, he is always original. None of our poets have described winter and snow-storm with such a free, swift, and realistic. brush; or the hazy horizon of a New England May day; or the green silences and the perfumes of the pine woods. No American verse has so immortalized a flower as his lines on the Rhodora; none has so spiritualized the beauty of gems. as have his three stanzas entitled "Rubies"; none has treated so graphically the sunshine on the seashore and the roar of the surf as his "Each and All." And, in his purely subjective themes, he has the charm of a subtile and mystic attraction. In many of his poems occur lines and passages as rare as some of the golden lines of Shakspeare. But, with all these high qualities, there is in most of his verse a general lack of rhythmic and artistic form. Emerson's ideal of poetry was so high that it o'erleaped itself. In exalting the substance and spirit of Poetry, he underrated the form. Though in theory he was logically bound to appreciate form, in practice he slighted it. Sometimes, his theory would slight it, as in this passage from "Merlin": "Great is the art, Great be the manners, of the bard. He shall aye climb For his rhyme. Pass in, pass in,' the angels say, 'In to the upper doors, Nor count compartments of the floors, But mount to Paradise By the stairway of surprise.'" And this Mr. Emerson certainly does, whatever else he fails than "surprise" is necessary, in. But something more than "surprise whether it be to enter Paradise or Parnassus. |