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Thou, like a flame when the stormy winds fan So late, so late! How fast the hours are fly

CABOT'S LIFE OF EMERSON..

From The Quarterly Review. like Irving, swept away by the tide of imitation, or, like Dana, crippled by dissatisfaction with their surroundings.

To some Englishmen the name of Emerson suggests little more than a curious Fashions, philosophy, literary tone, were chapter in the history of modern mysti- borrowed from the Old World. Miss Edgecism. To a large section of cultivated worth and Mrs. Trimmer fed the rising Americans, on the other hand, the philos- generation upon English conventionalities. opher of Concord appears the most repre- Literature displayed the mediocrity of sentative figure in their republic of letters, imitation rather than the natural charm of their most imaginative poet, their greatest invention; Americans wrote from their teacher, their most vigorous and daring memories; they rebuilt the sepulchres of thinker, their most original writer. And their fathers, not tenements for living their verdict is substantially correct. The men. They had no native standards. estimate may appear excessive, but the Washington Irving caught the graces of exaggeration, if such there be, is prompted Addison, and national vanity satisfied by true instincts of national gratitude. A itself with comparing Cooper to Walter glance at the movement which revolution- Scott, or claiming for Bryant a rivalry ized the intellectual and literary condition with Wordsworth. An Alston might atof America in 1830-40, and the unrivalled tempt the highest range of pictorial art; influence which Emerson exercised in but both in painting and poetry American

promoting and directing that movement, will explain, if it does not justify, the verdict of his fellow-countrymen.

In 1830 the United States were a crowded mart, a busy workshop, a bus tling 'change. The general standard of life was low. Several years later, thoughtful, spiritual-minded men, like Judd, still protested against the political, social, and religious vices which had corrupted the New England spirit, and seemed inex.

talent was attracted towards inanimate nature, and in neither field attained the most perfect form of expression. Neither painters nor poets penetrated from the form to the substance. A Bryant or an Innes might render into verse or upon canvas something of the rare fascination which is exercised by the stillness and solitude of forest life. But, as a rule, both landscape painting and descriptive verse displayed little more than accurate membeauty, selection of striking effects. In neither the one nor the other was there revealed that imaginative faculty which expresses ideal truth through the forms of nature, that high poetic vein which submits the shows of things to the desires of the mind.

tricably interwoven with public institu- ory, patient observation, sensitiveness to

tions. The brains of the country were attracted into channels of activity which were hostile to literature, philosophy, and art. Practical men, absorbed in business pursuits, hemmed in by objects of sense, regarding only immediate and obvious utility, had lost faith, if not consciousness, in the higher faculties of their moral and mental natures. They were more eager to get a living than to live. Those who had leisure or capacity for thought were,

• 1. Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson. By James Elliot Cabot. 2 vols. London and New York, 1887. 2. Works of R. W. Emerson. 6 vols. London, 1884.

Industrialism and imitation were not more uncompromising in their hostility to independent culture than was Puritanism. In former generations religion had raised and elevated New England settlers, given strength to character, and fibre to morality. But the grim austerity of Calvinism had never smiled on art; it was iron in its discipline, stern and implacable in its doctrine; it favored neither freedom nor variety of thought. Puritans, who were unclogged by formalism and unfettered by logic, might still soar upwards into the 7. Transcendentalism in New England. By O. B. celestial regions of ecstatic faith; but as Frothingham. New York, 1876. the lives of the emigrants had settled

3 Correspondence of T. Carlyle and R. W. Emerson. London, 1883.

4. The Dial. 4 vols. Boston, 1840-4.

5. Life of R. W. Emerson. By Oliver Wendell

everywhere discussed; they provoked numerous replies, created a species of panic among professors like Andrews Norton, and became the occasion of a heated controversy. Emerson alone took no part in this "storm in a wash-bowl."

In these early productions Emerson sketched the teaching which he afterwards expanded, developed, and illustrated in all his subsequent lectures and essays. He is moved by the spirit of a new people. He is determined to see in the individual man of to-day the elements of all the greatness, the germ of all the strength, that the noblest historical figures have displayed. Each individual is the lord of circumstance, the maker of his character,

down into prose, so the poetry of their first took his audience by storm. It was religion had fled. Old ideas, passionate “an event," says Lowell, "without any piety, and philosophical penetration met former parallel in our literary annals, a in conflict. Men became sceptics una- scene to be always treasured in the memory wares; they doubted the basis of the faith for its picturesqueness and its inspiration." to whose symbols they clung with des- "It has," wrote Theodore Parker, who also perate tenacity. Religion's claim to in- heard it, "made a great noise;" and he spiration was opposed to the dominant calls it "the noblest, most inspiring strain philosophy of Locke; Puritan asceticism I ever listened to." In after life he used revolted against the habits of a wealthy "to thank God for the sun, the moon, and democracy. "The Scarlet Letter" re- Ralph Waldo Emerson." Many Amerveals the possibilities, if not the actualities, icans of the present day have testified of the gloomy despotism, which frowned to the electric shock which these two down amusement, carried its espionnage addresses gave to society. They were into private life, and darkened society with the grim shadow of ministerial tyranny. The inevitable reaction came. Formal, hard, external, it fell an easy prey to Unitarianism. But its successful rival was too dry and material to satisfy the higher needs of human nature. With all its clearness of thought, mental activity, and sincerity of intention, it had, in 1830, lost its spring. In ceasing to be aggressive, it ceased to be enthusiastic. It rose or fell to a dull level of respectability, on which a sense of propriety replaced religious fervor. Thus the society of the country was industrial, utilitarian, fettered by conventionalities; its religion formal or rationalizing; its art unimaginative; its literature imitative and pusillanimous. the master of his fate. What Plato has To change these unfavorable conditions was the object of Emerson's teaching. Few men initiated a new departure with more conscious purpose. The text of his first sermon was "What is a man profited if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" The great end of every man's life is the preservation of his individual mind and character. This lesson of private freedom is the essence of all his later utterances. “Nature," his first published composition, was a challenge to the Old World. In his thoughts on modern literature (Dial, October, 1840), the same note is struck; even Goethe fails to satisfy him, not only because of his artistic indifferentism, but because, in Emerson's opinion, he never rose above the sphere of artistic conventionality. The addresses before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, and before the divinity class at Cambridge, produced a profound impression. The

thought, every one may think; what a saint has felt, every one may feel. Names of power do not overawe Emerson; he is not oppressed by the ruins of the Capitol. "My giant goes with me wherever I go." He regards the world with a new vision; he gives the living present precedence over the dead past; the vital spark within his nation outweighs the most splendid dust of antiquity. He breathes the free air of the Western prairies. He eschews all alien or artificial inspirations, and studies the material which lies to his right hand and his left. He urges his countrymen to turn from the literature of salons to their own modes and customs of life, to contemplate the nature that is before their eyes directly, and not through foreign spectacles. "Here, on this rugged soil of Massachusetts, I take my stand, baring my brow in the breeze of my own country, and invoke the genius of my own

woods." Not only is he national and the | from some of its phases, he guided and representative of a new people, he is also steadied its course. Other influences democratic in his mental attitude. The were already at work to produce what may Puritans had preached the natural deprav-be called, without fear of provoking com ity of man; Emerson asserted his inherent parisons, the Elizabethan Age of Amerworth. He taught that man was capable ican literature. It was the springtime of of self-government, that, if he were but national independence, and a stir was in true to himself, his future was serene and the air. The long frost of custom was glorious. He insisted that every individ-breaking up; society was preparing to ual human being might be, and ought to bud and blossom with promise of varied be, law, prophet, Church to himself. He fruit; men were learning to think for endeavored to build up character by indi- themselves. Bryant, Irving, Cooper, the vidual culture, to develop each man's in- profound mind of Channing, the richly ternal resources so that they should re-flowered eloquence of Everett, had not quire no external aid, social or religious. created an American literature, but they He claimed for the individual mind a had created an American audience for the sovereign freedom of thought, a direct discussion of every sort of topic from communion with the infinite mind. "The poetry to criticism. As broader fields of foregoing generations," he writes, "beheld action opened out, as novel controversies God face to face; we, through their eyes; occupied the press, as criticism analyzed why should not we enjoy also an original the bases of classical or theological literrelation to the universe? Why should ature, as science destroyed accepted ficnot we have poetry and philosophy of tions, fresh interests and theories collided insight and not of tradition, and a religion with ancient creeds and institutions. The by revelation to us and not the history of shock of new and old struck the spark of theirs?" It is this doctrine of self-reli- literary life. The revolution began with ance, illustrated by fresh examples, en- a change in metaphysics. Thinkers have forced under new aspects, presented in been for centuries divided into idealists different shapes, that forms the essence and sensationalists, transcendentalists of his philosophy, and was repeated on and materialists. The one insists upon every platform and reiterated in every thought, will, and inspiration, the other essay. His teaching emphatically pro- on facts, history, circumstances; the one tested against utilitarian ethics, against starts from consciousness, the other from material philosophy, against formal reli- experience; the one treats the external gion, against carefully cultured exotics world as the product of man's thought, the which choked plants of native growth. other regards man as the product of the Ecclesiastically and politically free, Amer- external world; the one exalts, the other ica was still intellectually dependent. decries mental abstractions; the one deEmerson enlarged and illuminated his preciates, the other exaggerates matter; countrymen's conception of national life, the one emphasizes the unity of reason, and gave to it an impulse and direction the other the variety of sense. From which it never lost. His words stirred the what has been already said of Emerson, blood of his contemporaries like a bugle- it is obvious that he would throw all the call; the movement he promoted had its weight of his genius into the scale of excesses and extravagances, but it was idealism. Stripped of its metaphysics, fresh, indigenous, national. In 1830 Transcendentalism represents the value America was intellectually a colony of of ideals in thought, morals, politics, and England. Emerson's writings and ad- reform. Emerson traced the decadence dresses from 1836 to 1840 were the "Declaration of Intellectual Independence."

It would be absurd to say, that Emerson created an intellectual revival which had commenced in 1820; but he stimulated its progress, and, although he stood aloof

of the human mind to the supremacy of the system of Locke. He deplored the loss of native force, of width of grasp, of depth of feeling, which had achieved great things in literature, art, and statesmanship. Men could not think grandly so