Henry Beers - The Connecticut Wits and Other Essays

All this has a familiar look to readers who remember the chapter on Plato in “Representative Men,” or passages like the following from “The Oversoul”: “In youth we are mad for persons. But the larger experience of man discovers the identical nature appearing through them all.” Now, in mundane letters it is the difference that counts, the più and not the uno . The common nature may be taken for granted. In drama and fiction, particularly, difference is life and identity is death; and this “tyrannizing unity” would cut the ground from under them both.

This philosophical attitude did not keep Emerson from having a sharp eye for personal traits. His sketch of Thoreau in “Excursions” is a masterpiece; and so is the half-humorous portrait of Socrates in “Representative Men”; and both these are matched by the keen analysis of Daniel Webster in the journals. All going to show that this transcendentalist had something of “the devouring eye and the portraying hand” with which he credits Carlyle.

As in religion and in literature, so in the common human relations, this impersonality gives a peculiar twist to Emerson’s thought. The coldness of his essays on “Love” and “Friendship” has been often pointed out. His love is the high Platonic love. He is enamored of perfection, and individual men and women are only broken images of the absolute good.

Alas! nous autres , we do not love our friends because they are more or less perfect reflections of divinity. We love them in spite of their faults: almost because of their faults: at least we love their faults because they are theirs. “You are in love with certain attributes,” said the fair blue-stocking in “Hyperion” to her suitor. “ ‘Madam,’ said I, ‘damn your attributes!’ ”

Another puzzle in Emerson, to the general reader, is the centrality of his thought. I remember a remark of Professor Thomas A. Thacher, upon hearing an address of W. T. Harris, the distinguished Hegelian and educationalist. He said that Mr. Harris went a long way back for a jump. So Emerson draws lines of relation from every least thing to the centre.

He never lets go his hold upon his theosophy. All his wagons are hitched to stars: himself from God he cannot free. But the citizen does not like to be always reminded of God, as he goes about his daily affairs. It carries a disturbing suggestion of death and the judgment and eternity and the other world. But, for the present, this comfortable phenomenal world of time and space is good enough for him. “So a’ cried out, ‘God, God, God!’ three or four times. Now I, to comfort him, bid him a’ should not think of God; I hoped there was no need to trouble himself with any such thoughts yet.”

Another block of stumbling, about which much has been written, is Emerson’s optimism, which rests upon the belief that evil is negative, merely the privation or shadow of good, without real existence. It was the heresy of “Uriel” that there was nothing inherently and permanently bad: no line of division between good and evil – “Line in nature is not found”; “Evil will bless and ice will burn.” He turned away resolutely from the contemplation of sin, crime, suffering: was impatient of complaints of sickness, of breakfast-table talk about headaches and a bad night’s sleep. Doubtless had he lived to witness the Christian Science movement, he would have taken an interest in the underlying doctrine, while repelled by the element of quackery in the practice and preaching of the sect. Hence the tragedy of life is ignored or evaded by Emerson. But ici bas , the reality of evil is not abolished, as an experience, by calling it the privation of good; nor will philosophy cure the grief of a wound. We suffer quite as acutely as we enjoy. We find that all those disagreeable appearances – “swine, spiders, snakes, pests, mad-houses, prisons, enemies,” – which he assures us will disappear, when man comes fully into possession of his kingdom, do not disappear but persist.

The dispute between optimism and pessimism rests, in the long run, on individual temperament and personal experience, and admits of no secure solution. Imposing systems of philosophy have been erected on these opposing views. Leibnitz proved that everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Schopenhauer demonstrated the futility of the will to live; and showed that he who increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. Nor does it avail to appeal from the philosophers to the poets, as more truly expressing the general sense of mankind; and to array Byron, Leopardi, Shelley, and the book of “Lamentations,” and “The City of Dreadful Night” against Goethe, Wordsworth, Browning, and others of the hopeful wise. The question cannot be decided by a majority vote: the question whether life is worth living, is turned aside by a jest about the liver. Meanwhile men give it practically an affirmative answer by continuing to live. Is life so bad? Then why not all commit suicide? Dryden explains, in a famous tirade, that we do not kill ourselves because we are the fools of hope: —

Shelley, we are reminded, calls birth an “eclipsing curse”; and Byron, in a hackneyed stanza, invites us to count over the joys our life has seen and our days free from anguish, and to recognize that whatever we have been, it were better not to be at all.

The question as between optimist and pessimist is not whether evil is a necessary foil to good, as darkness is to light – a discipline without which we could have no notion of good, – but whether or not evil predominates in the universe. Browning, who seems to have had somewhat of a contempt for Bryon, affirms: —

This may answer as a criterion of a poet’s “worth,” that is, his power to fortify, to heal, to inspire; but it can hardly be accepted, without qualification, as a test of intellectual power. Goethe, to be sure, thought lightly of Byron as a thinker. But Leopardi was a thinker and a deep and exact scholar. And what of Shakespeare? What of the speeches in his plays which convey a profound conviction of the overbalance of misery in human life? – Hamlet’s soliloquy; Macbeth’s “Out, out, brief candle”; the Duke’s remonstrance with Claudio in “Measure for Measure,” persuading him that there was nothing in life which he need regret to lose; and the sad reflections of the King in “All’s Well that Ends Well” upon the approach of age,

It is the habit of present-day criticism to regard all such speeches in Shakespeare as having a merely dramatic character, true only to the feeling of the dramatis persona who speaks them. It may be so; but often there is a weight of thought and emotion in these and the like passages which breaks through the platform of the theatre and gives us the truth as Shakespeare himself sees it.

Browning’s admirers accord him great credit for being happy. And, indeed, he seems to take credit to himself for that same. Now we may envy a man for being happy, but we can hardly praise him for it. It is not a thing that depends on his will, but is only his good fortune. Let it be admitted that those writers do us the greater service who emphasize the hopeful view, who are lucky enough to be able to maintain that view. Still, when we consider what this world is, the placid optimism of Emerson and the robustious optimism of Browning become sometimes irritating; and we feel almost like calling for a new “Candide” and exclaim impatiently, Il faut cultiver notre jardin !