that beautiful yet enigmatical Nature which enfolds us? Emerson always writes as in the presence of Nature, or as with a window of his study open to admit her quickening air. Her beauty and health are to him a perpetual provocation, and an emblem of the beneficence of the Spirit which animates all things. The odorous breath of the pine, the streaming sunlight, and the sights and sounds of out-door life are woven into the texture of his thought and speech. Who can forget that exquisite opening to the Divinity Address ?" In this refulgent summer it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life. The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with fire and gold in the tint of the flowers."... But one need not go on with a passage which lovers of Emerson have by heart. And with what unique power are we made to feel Nature's sweet persuasiveness or her nerving incitement! Her rude gust of vigour, her cleansing rains and winds, her intervals of calm,—these are all made ministers to our energy, clearness, and serenity. How simply, too, is this all conveyed! "Man is timid and apologetic, . he is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. "When a man lives with God, his voice shall be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and the rustle of the corn." Ever does natural beauty steal in like air, and envelope great actions. ... In private places, among sordid objects, an act of truth or heroism seems at once to draw to itself the sky as its temple, the sun as its cradle. Nature stretches out her arms to embrace man, only let his thoughts be of equal scope. Willingly does she follow his steps with the rose and the violet, and bend her lines of grandeur and grace to the decoration of her darling child." And so one might go on quoting, recalling passage after passage that has lingered in the mind; passages in which the sentiment of solitude, the delights of lonely communing with Nature, in the woods, or under the tense star-lit sky, are expressed with inimitable power; passages, too, of still higher strain, telling of those moments in which the walls of self dissolve, and the dilated soul is caught up and merged in the Soul of the World. Reading Emerson, we feel that Nature has been made a new means of grace and help to salvation. There are many interesting features of a general character which in a longer study of Emerson might be profitably noticed. There is his mysticism, with its Oriental traits and affinities—affinities also shown, in a striking manner, by many other American writers, very notably by that most exuberant of souls, Walt Whitman, and also by Thoreau. These have all responded to the fascination of Eastern thought. No early Aryan, no bowed worshipper of the dawn, or of sun and stars, was ever struck into deeper wonder and more rapturous adoration in presence of the great spectacle of the universe than these men of to-day in the Western World, with all its gross materialism and feverish, restless life. But if nature is divinely infinite, so to them is man also, and thus they are not overwhelmed by the sense of man's littleness as the Easterns are. Emerson's alliance with the "brooding East" is (always remembering his strain of Western energy and practicality) more than emotional; he is, in certain higher reaches of his thought, almost a Brahman; so that a cultured Hindoo may write, seems to some of us to have been a geographical mistake. He ought to have been born in India.' "He Avoiding criticism, we have confined ourselves to the exposition of Emerson's leading ideas and traits. His defects the reader may well be left to discover for himself. The most obvious and most important is want of passion -or, at least, all passion except the etherealised passion of the seer. Emerson has not much animal heat; the troubles of the flesh, the conflict of sense and soul, are as if almost unknown to him. This is the explanation, perhaps, his innocent under-estimate of the weight of evil and suffering in the world; his lack of response to the pathos and tragedy of life. It is the key also to the absence of that profound human sympathy and "ecstasy of humanity," which have characterised the great lovers of man in all times. For this quality in modern literature we must go to his great countryman, that passionate comrade of men and women, Walt Whitman. By way of realising Emerson's lack, let us look for a moment at an expression of the shadow side of life:"In order that a man may preserve a lofty frame of mind, . . . to keep a higher consciousness alive in him, pain, suffering, and failure are as needful as ballast to a ship, without which it does not draw water enough, becomes a plaything for the winds and waves, travels no certain road, and easily overturns." Thus speaks Schopenhauer, and he speaks surely of a side of things which we cannot afford to ignore; while in Emerson it finds hardly any recognition. But Emerson's valiant optimism is what we want for daily refreshment and stimulus. It avails to keep us in good heart in the face of the sorrow and discouragement which confront us. In the last resort, Emerson's function is, as Whitman well says, to educate beyond himself. His books are most of all a discipline in self-knowledge, self-reliance, self-fulfilment. They are a perpetual antidote to the insidiousness of custom and tradition, and to that vain complaining which contemns the present, and either places the golden age in the past, or postpones it to a far-off future. They help us to realise that to-day is the best of all days, and "belongs to him who works in it with serenity and high aims." |