raised! And not a hearer seemed aware that there was any inconsistency between the speakers! God provides for his own. He has given the soul a principle that cannot die. He has given the heart a trust that will not be mocked. Christ has come. "If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death." E. B. H. ART. X.-REPRESENTATIVE MEN.* MR. EMERSON's writing has a bold beauty that wins or arrests attention. He is one of the most notable and brilliant of American authors. In a sublime discontent with what exists, he aspires beyond all mediocrity of achievement. He takes the most adventurous positions, maintaining them by force, not of logic, or any method of philosophy, but by a defying statement and a soaring imagination. It is hard to pass critical sentence on him, for the subtilty of his mind abjures all system, and gives no bond of consistency. He is not so much a seer steadily beholding the globe of truth with the clear intuition of a capacious mind, as a watcher, catching occasional bright glimpses of spiritual realities, and opening upon us lightning-flashes of startling conjecture, rather than the calm noonday of wisdom. There is no waxing power or widening stream in his progress through a subject, no vast gain from the combination of arguments, no Greek phalanx from closely ordered thoughts, but he is throughout aphoristic and oracular. His intellectual life seems interrupted in its circulation, his pulse of feeling intermits, and when we try to survey his whole drift, we are stopped, as in gazing at those crystals in which the shining laminæ run in cross and faulty directions. In the midst of his discussions, masterly and original in their single points, we look back, at a loss, like a man with a vague clew in the centre of a labyrinth. He is not self-forgetful and inspired, but intensely conscious in his mood, and, though a celestial current sets into his soul, the tide never rises so as to carry away him and his reader By R. W. EMERSON. Boston: * Representative Men: Seven Lectures. Phillips, Sampson, & Co. 1850. 12mo. pp. 285. 1850.] Mr. Emerson's Mind and Method. 315 on a common swell of excitement. He gathers no heat to kindle or speed to quicken us, but, with cold finish, jots down each separate perception, thus making a book, which is no organization, like a living body or a plant, but a cabinet of gems. He constrains our admiration, stings us with suggestions, shocks us with audacious assertions, fills our mouth with quotations, and confuses us among the multiplied threads of his tangled skein, but stirs not our hearts, moves us to no self-surrender of sympathy, never brings us upon the knees of prayer, nor draws from us a single tear. It is a delight to peruse him, but no gain to our own creative power. He sings a siren melody, which debilitates more than it strengthens our capacity for individual meditation. The soul is not strong and nimble for effort after a large draught of his nectar, but often stupefied or overwrought as with a narcotic. He furnishes a marvellous entertainment to our faculties, to be jealously and sparingly used. He has not the characteristic of the greatest genius, that he emancipates us from himself, and tempts forth our original ability. Yet it is not easy by any analysis to detect and tell the essence of his bewitching singularity. His composition is a riddle, which contradictory solutions equally fit. He defends no distinct ground, abides by no definable opinion, nor, like the great creators in the metaphysical sphere, courts any comparison, or holds himself amenable to any jurisdiction of human judgment. He swears by nothing but his right to say and gainsay any thing. He will be free of the universe, and from his bravest sally runs with Cossack-retreat into the wilderness, to appear from his abyss, perhaps, in an opposite direction. One of his most marked traits is generalization, to such excess as to call evil good, and bitter sweet. He breathes at altitudes where others cannot live, cultivating and subsisting on mountain shrubs and flowers, but rarely seen among the corn and wheat of the plain and valley. There is more loss than gain in this ascension above human life. Love grows cold and the moral sense dies in the insatiable generality of a speculation ambitious to take God's place at the centre, and look knowingly abroad through the universe of being. Individual objects and persons disappear in the haze of distance and doubt, and the greatest human achievements, the splendors of worth and faculty, vanish before this sublimated vision. Yet, from these ex - cursions he so loves, Mr. Emerson is drawn back by the topic of the present work. There is in biography a disinterestedness counteractive of the egotism of knowledge and the conceit of discovery. We have wonderful force and felicity mixed with dubious dicta in some of these delineations, in which the pencil is courageously tried upon such men as Plato, Socrates, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Shakspeare, Napoleon, Goethe. Nothing, for instance, could be finer than the portrait, in the lecture on Plato, of Socrates, but that we are tormented with the query, whether it is not partly mistaken and imaginary, and desirous to call in the sober narrator, with his desire for plain truth, to correct the idealism of the artist. The simplifying, generalizing, shaping faculty appears too much, to allow quite the look of accuracy, or leave place for the variety of nature. We miss the internal evidence of artless records, and the peculiar charm of a speaking likeness. Probably no lover of any one of these great men would be satisfied with the picture given, and those thoroughly acquainted with the persons might say, that the characters had been rather uncertainly touched and imperfectly sketched, than judicially weighed and fairly comprehended. There is no feebleness in the drawing: the limner has a decided hand: but a man may be as hardy at a guess as in the unquestionable veracity of his facts. A fatal certainty of justice and instinct for truth, the rare gifts of some men, do not seem always to get the better of our author's talent for hypothesis, and to overrule the prepossessions of his fancy. Still, we are glad to acknowledge, nothing of the biographic sort lately published has so stimulated, if not fully satisfied us, or is so likely to interest the public mind. People like to gaze through blue and green lenses as well as through colorless glass, and yield their minds to "the tricks of strong imagination," as they would try their nerves with magnetism or a draught of exhilarating gas. Without precisely ascertaining, as with perfect surety of conviction we cannot, how far the present biographer supposes, and how far he rigidly describes, we will gladly, if only in gratitude for our enjoyment, confess the magic of the brush he dips in these finer hues of words, and the scarcely equalled magnificence of his gallery. Historic doubts will last as long as any other skepticism, and, while even prosaic annalists dispute what is in any 1850.] The Defect of his Mind. 317 case the correct account, we will thank even him who romances or puts high tone on his canvas for all his unfolding of our higher susceptibilities and perceptions. Mr. Emerson's incidental allusions to Christianity betray the already mentioned defect of his mind, its restless struggle to reach broader classifications and reduce all things to ever lower terms, till the life of all is destroyed, and the spirit evaporated in the process. When he says that the "moral sentiment carries innumerable Christianities, humanities, divinities, in its bosom," we know not whether to admire most the cool, brief handling with which he despatches mighty problems in a breath and a moment of time, or the disrespect he casts upon the greatest minds; all of which, of the first order, without an exception, throughout the Christian era, have come to a different conclusion. He might as well declare, that the sensation of his skin carries in it the sun, moon, stars, and all the host of heaven. Or, when he says, "We too must write Bibles," we must think the promise, notwithstanding all our literature, easier than the achievement, and are tempted to answer, "Let not him that girdeth on his harness boast himself as he that putteth it off." He must speak less to the speculative faculty and to a mere poetic taste, must attain to greater transparency and breadth of views, and go down deeper into the wants of the human heart, among the sources of emotions and springs of life, before he can even chord with the old Bible, much less produce a new. The pantheism which asserts that "man, though in brothels, or jails, or on gibbets, is on his way to all that is good and true," is not likely to regenerate the world so effectually as will the New Testament. Could some of Mr. Emerson's principles get into the heads of bad and passionate men, or their passions into his own, the principles would work mischief enough. But, clad in mystic folds, and guarded with electric light, they may be safe, locking up or neutralizing their own bane. He has surely, with all we should count unsound, great qualities, genuineness, sincerity, magnanimity, a lustrous robe for every thought, a diamond-glitter on every sentence. Yet the deductions we have to make from the matter must be also suffered by the form of his productions. His single words and phrases shine and dazzle with poetic fire. But his paragraphs and pages do not fill the soul with great and ever-enlarging conceptions. There are writers, perhaps without the advantage of gorgeous imagery or the continual gleam of metaphor, whose simple and obvious terms of speech at first neither delight nor astonish, but yet, as we read passage after passage, as though they were the little measuring-rods of the celestial city, introduce vast ideas into our mind, stretching our faculties for their accommodation, swelling our hearts, moistening our lids, inspiring our tongues, and nerving our hands for duty. As rows of lamps flaming upon each other and shedding blended illumination all around, so their words proceed. We cannot, in the present case, award this highest praise of authorship. But though we may not regard Mr. Emerson as a great teacher and prophet of the race, there is a height of manhood in himself and in his works which requires us to mingle reverence and affection even with the exceptions of our blame. Meanness of thought, word, or act is far from him. Simplicity and elevation of purpose distinguish him. Generosity of aim runs through his worst deviations, and few are more sincere in their spirituality, or so innocent in their untruth. Behind all the strokes of his pen, beneath the shifting of his opinion, and glitter of his illustration, and immovable as the rock under the phantasmagoria and dream-land of his speculations about society, life, government, and all human conventions, are the solid principles of practical integrity and of a purity shrinking from every stain. His spirit is the corrective of his intellectual aberrations, and should be drunk by his disciples as the antidote to what is ill in his doctrines. He will not be widely a mover of mankind, but will powerfully affect a small circle of peculiar mental constitution and tendency, which is always in the world, and may own him as a leader for ages. He has been an influence in the community, and has wrought great good by many of his appeals. We fear not even his errors, we love his nobleness, we honor his integrity, we would emulate his candor, we respect him equally in our agreement and our opposition, and, though our notice of him now has been only critical, we think that, writing as he has in this book about Napoleon and Shakspeare, he must speak benedictions to the world spite of his mistakes. C. A. B. |