Obiter Dicta Part 9

If it be said that it is manifestly unfair to compare a mystical writer like Emerson with a polemical or historical one, I am not concerned to answer the objection, for let the comparison be made with whom you will, the unparalleled non-sequaciousness of Emerson is as certain as the Correggiosity of Correggio. You never know what he will be at. His sentences fall over you in glittering cascades, beautiful and bright, and for the moment refreshing, but after a very brief while the mind, having nothing to do on its own account but to remain wide open, and see what Emerson sends it, grows first restive and then torpid. Admiration gives way to astonishment, astonishment to bewilderment, and bewilderment to stupefaction.

'Napoleon is not a man, but a system,' once said, in her most impressive tones, Madame de Stael to Sir James Mackintosh, across a dinner-table.

'Magnificent!' murmured Sir James. 'But what does she mean?' whispered one of those helplessly commonplace creatures who, like the present writer, go about spoiling everything. 'Ma.s.s! I cannot tell!' was the frank acknowledgment and apt Shakspearian quotation of Mackintosh.

Emerson's meaning, owing to his non-sequacious style, is often very difficult to apprehend. Hear him for a moment on 'Experience':

'I gossip for my hour concerning the eternal politic. I have seen many fair pictures, not in vain. A wonderful time I have lived in. I am not the novice I was fourteen, nor yet seven years ago. Let who will ask, Where is the fruit? I find a private fruit sufficient. This is a fruit, that I should not ask for a rash effect from meditations, counsels, and the hiving of truths.'

This surely is an odd way of hiving truths. It follows from it that Emerson is more striking than suggestive. He likes things on a large scale--he is fond of ethnical remarks and typical persons.

Notwithstanding his habit of introducing the names of common things into his discourses and poetry ('Hay, corn, roots, hemp, flax, apples, wool, and wood,' is a line from one of his poems), his familiarity therewith is evidently not great. 'Take care, papa,' cried his little son, seeing him at work with his spade, 'you will dig your leg.'

His essay on _Friendship_ will not be found satisfactory. Here is a subject on which surely we are ent.i.tled to 'body.' The _Over Soul_ was different; _there_ it was easy to agree with Carlyle, who, writing to Emerson, says: 'Those voices of yours which I likened to unembodied souls and censure sometimes for having no body--how _can_ they have a body?

They are light rays darting upwards in the east!' But friendship is a word the very sight of which in print makes the heart warm. One remembers Elia: 'Oh! it is pleasant as it is rare to find the same arm linked in yours at forty which at thirteen helped it to turn over the Cicero _De Amicitia_, or some other tale of antique friendship which the young heart even then was burning to antic.i.p.ate.' With this in your ear it is rather chilling to read, 'I do, then, with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them. We must have society on our own terms, and admit or exclude it on the slightest cause. I cannot afford to speak much with my friend.'

These are not genial terms.

For authors and books his affection, real as it was, was singularly impersonal. In his treatment of literary subjects, we miss the purely human touch, the grip of affection, the accent of scorn, that so pleasantly characterize the writings of Mr. Lowell. Emerson, it is to be feared, regarded a company of books but as a congeries of ideas. For one idea he is indebted to Plato, for another to Dr. Channing. _Sartor Resartus_, so Emerson writes, is a n.o.ble philosophical poem, but 'have you read Sampson Read's _Growth of the Mind_?' We read somewhere of 'Pindar, Raphael, Angelo, Dryden, and De Stael.' Emerson's notions of literary perspective are certainly 'very early.' Dr. Holmes himself is every bit as bad. In this very book of his, speaking about the dangerous liberty some poets--Emerson amongst the number--take of crowding a redundant syllable into a line, he reminds us 'that Shakspeare and Milton knew how to use it effectively; Sh.e.l.ley employed it freely: Bryant indulged in it; Willis was fond of it.' One has heard of the _Republic of Letters_, but this surely does not mean that one author is as good as another. 'Willis was fond of it.' I dare say he was, but we are not fond of Willis, and cannot help regarding the citation of his poetical example as an outrage.

None the less, if we will have but a little patience, and bid our occasional wonderment be still, and read Emerson at the right times and in small quant.i.ties, we shall not remain strangers to his charm. He bathes the universe in his thoughts. Nothing less than the Whole ever contented Emerson. His was no parochial spirit. He cries out:

'From air and ocean bring me foods, From all zones and alt.i.tudes.'

How beautiful, too, are some of his sentences! Here is a bit from his essay on Shakspeare in _Representative Men_:

'It is the essence of poetry to spring like the rainbow daughter of Wonder from the invisible, to abolish the past, and refuse all history. Malone, Warburton, Dyce, and Collier have wasted their life.

The famed theatres have vainly a.s.sisted. Betterton, Garrick, Kemble, Kean, and Macready dedicate their lives to his genius--him they crown, elucidate, obey, and express--the genius knows them not. The recitation begins, _one golden word leaps out immortal from all this painful pedantry_, _and sweetly torments us with invitations to his own inaccessible homes_.'

The words we have ventured to italicize seem to us to be of surpa.s.sing beauty, and to express what many a play-goer of late years must often have dimly felt.

Patience should indeed be the motto for any Emerson reader who is not by nature 'author's kin.' For example, in the essay on _Character_, after reading, 'Everything in nature is bipolar, or has a positive and negative pole. There is a male and a female, a spirit and a fact, a north and a south. Spirit is the positive, the event is the negative; will is the north, action the south pole. Character may be ranked as having its natural place in the north'--how easy to lay the book down and read no more that day; but a moment's patience is amply rewarded, for but sixteen lines farther on we may read as follows: 'We boast our emanc.i.p.ation from many superst.i.tions, but if we have broken any idols it is through a transfer of the idolatry. What have I gained that I no longer immolate a bull to Jove or to Neptune, or a mouse to Hecate; that I do not tremble before the Eumenides or the Catholic Purgatory, or the Calvinistic Judgment Day--if I quake at opinion, the public opinion as we call it, or the threat of a.s.sault or contumely, or bad neighbours, or poverty, or mutilation, or at the rumour of revolution or of wonder! If I quake, what matters it what I quake at?' Well and truly did Carlyle write to Emerson, 'You are a new era, my man, in your huge country.'

Emerson's poetry has at least one of the qualities of true poetry--it always pleases and occasionally delights. Great poetry it may not be, but it has the happy knack of slipping in between our fancies, and of clinging like ivy to the masonry of the thought-structure beneath which each one of us has his dwelling. I must be allowed room for two quotations, one from the stanzas called _Give all to Love_, the other from _Wood Notes_.

'Cling with life to the maid; But when the surprise, First shadow of surmise, Flits across her bosom young Of a joy apart from thee, Free be she, fancy-free, Nor thou detain her vesture's hem, Nor the palest rose she flung From her summer's diadem.

Though thou loved her as thyself, As a self of purer clay, Though her parting dims the day, Stealing grace from all alive; Heartily know When half-G.o.ds go, The G.o.ds arrive.'

The lines from _Wood Notes_ run as follows:

'Come learn with me the fatal song Which knits the world in music strong, Whereto every bosom dances, Kindled with courageous fancies; Come lift thine eyes to lofty rhymes Of things with things, of times with times, Primal chimes of sun and shade, Of sound and echo, man and maid; The land reflected in the flood; Body with shadow still pursued.

For nature beats in perfect tune And rounds with rhyme her every rune; Whether she work in land or sea Or hide underground her alchemy.

Thou canst not wave thy staff in air, Or dip thy paddle in the lake, But it carves the bow of beauty there, And the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake.

Not unrelated, unaffied, But to each thought and thing allied, Is perfect nature's every part, Rooted in the mighty heart.'

What place Emerson is to occupy in American literature is for America to determine. Some authoritative remarks on this subject are to be found in Mr. Lowell's essay on 'Th.o.r.eau,' in _My Study Windows_; but here at home, where we are sorely pressed for room, it is certain he must be content with a small allotment, where, however, he may for ever sit beneath his own vine and fig-tree, none daring to make him afraid. Emerson will always be the favourite author of somebody; and to be always read by somebody is better than to be read first by everybody and then by n.o.body.

Indeed, it is hard to fancy a pleasanter destiny than to join the company of lesser authors. All their readers are sworn friends. They are spared the harsh discords of ill-judged praise and feigned rapture. Once or twice in a century some enthusiastic and expansive admirer insists upon dragging them from their shy retreats, and trumpeting their fame in the market-place, a.s.serting, possibly with loud a.s.severations (after the fashion of Mr. Swinburne), that they are precisely as much above Otway and Collins and George Eliot as they are below Shakespeare and Hugo and Emily Bronte. The great world looks on good-humouredly for a moment or two, and then proceeds as before, and the disconcerted author is left free to scuttle back to his corner, where he is all the happier, sharing the raptures of the lonely student, for his brief experience of publicity.

Let us bid farewell to Emerson, who has bidden farewell to the world in the words of his own _Good-bye_:

'Good-bye to flattery's fawning face, To grandeur with his wise grimace, To upstart wealth's averted eye, To supple office low and high, To crowded halls, to court and street, To frozen hearts and hasting feet, To those who go and those who come,-- Good-bye, proud world, I'm going home, I am going to my own hearth-stone Bosomed in yon green hills, alone, A secret nook in a pleasant land, Whose groves the frolic fairies planned; Where arches green the livelong day Echo the blackbird's roundelay, And vulgar feet have never trod, A spot that is sacred to thought and G.o.d.'

THE OFFICE OF LITERATURE.

Dr. John Brown's pleasant story has become well known, of the countryman who, being asked to account for the gravity of his dog, replied, 'Oh, sir! life is full of sairiousness to him--he can just never get eneugh o'

fechtin'.' Something of the spirit of this saddened dog seems lately to have entered into the very people who ought to be freest from it--our men of letters. They are all very serious and very quarrelsome. To some of them it is dangerous even to allude. Many are wedded to a theory or period, and are the most uxorious of husbands--ever ready to resent an affront to their lady. This devotion makes them very grave, and possibly very happy after a pedantic fashion. One remembers what Hazlitt, who was neither happy nor pedantic, has said about pedantry:

'The power of attaching an interest to the most trifling or painful pursuits is one of the greatest happinesses of our nature. The common soldier mounts the breach with joy, the miser deliberately starves himself to death, the mathematician sets about extracting the cube- root with a feeling of enthusiasm, and the lawyer sheds tears of delight over _c.o.ke upon Lyttleton_. He who is not in some measure a pedant, though he may be a wise, cannot be a very happy man.'

Possibly not; but then we are surely not content that our authors should be pedants in order that they may be happy and devoted. As one of the great cla.s.s for whose sole use and behalf literature exists--the cla.s.s of readers--I protest that it is to me a matter of indifference whether an author is happy or not. I want him to make me happy. That is his office. Let him discharge it.

I recognise in this connection the corresponding truth of what Sydney Smith makes his Peter Plymley say about the private virtues of Mr.

Perceval, the Prime Minister:

'You spend a great deal of ink about the character of the present Prime Minister. Grant all that you write--I say, I fear that he will ruin Ireland, and pursue a line of policy destructive to the true interests of his country; and then you tell me that he is faithful to Mrs. Perceval, and kind to the Master Percevals. I should prefer that he whipped his boys and saved his country.'

We should never confuse functions or apply wrong tests. What can books do for us? Dr. Johnson, the least pedantic of men, put the whole matter into a nutsh.e.l.l (a cocoanut sh.e.l.l, if you will--Heaven forbid that I should seek to compress the great Doctor within any narrower limits than my metaphor requires!), when he wrote that a book should teach us either to enjoy life or endure it. 'Give us enjoyment!' 'Teach us endurance!'

Hearken to the ceaseless demand and the perpetual prayer of an ever unsatisfied and always suffering humanity!

How is a book to answer the ceaseless demand?

Self-forgetfulness is of the essence of enjoyment, and the author who would confer pleasure must possess the art, or know the trick, of destroying for the time the reader's own personality. Undoubtedly the easiest way of doing this is by the creation of a host of rival personalities--hence the number and the popularity of novels. Whenever a novelist fails his book is said to flag; that is, the reader suddenly (as in skating) comes b.u.mp down upon his own personality, and curses the unskilful author. No lack of characters and continual motion is the easiest recipe for a novel, which, like a beggar, should always be kept 'moving on.' n.o.body knew this better than Fielding, whose novels, like most good ones, are full of inns.

When those who are addicted to what is called 'improving reading' inquire of you petulantly why you cannot find change of company and scene in books of travel, you should answer cautiously that when books of travel are full of inns, atmosphere, and motion, they are as good as any novel; nor is there any reason in the nature of things why they should not always be so, though experience proves the contrary.

The truth or falsehood of a book is immaterial. George Borrow's _Bible in Spain_ is, I suppose, true; though now that I come to think of it, in what is to me a new light, one remembers that it contains some odd things. But was not Borrow the accredited agent of the British and Foreign Bible Society? Did he not travel (and he had a free hand) at their charges? Was he not befriended by our minister at Madrid, Mr.

Villiers, subsequently Earl of Clarendon in the peerage of England? It must be true; and yet at this moment I would as lief read a chapter of the _Bible in Spain_ as I would _Gil Blas_; nay, I positively would give the preference to Don Jorge.

n.o.body can sit down to read Borrow's books without as completely forgetting himself as if he were a boy in the forest with Gurth and Wamba.

Borrow is provoking, and has his full share of faults, and, though the owner of a style, is capable of excruciating offences. His habitual use of the odious word 'individual' as a noun-substantive (seven times in three pages of _The Romany Rye_) elicits the frequent groan, and he is certainly once guilty of calling fish the 'finny tribe.' He believed himself to be animated by an intense hatred of the Church of Rome, and disfigures many of his pages by Lawrence-Boythorn-like tirades against that inst.i.tution; but no Catholic of sense need on this account deny himself the pleasure of reading Borrow, whose one dominating pa.s.sion was _camaraderie_, and who hob-a-n.o.bbed in the friendliest spirit with priest and gipsy in a fashion as far beyond praise as it is beyond description by any pen other than his own. Hail to thee, George Borrow! Cervantes himself, Gil Blas, do not more effectually carry their readers into the land of the Cid than does this miraculous agent of the Bible Society, by favour of whose pleasantness we can, any hour of the week, enter Villafranca by night, or ride into Galicia on an Andalusian stallion (which proved to be a foolish thing to do), without costing anybody a _peseta_, and at no risk whatever to our necks--be they long or short.

Cooks, warriors, and authors must be judged by the effects they produce: toothsome dishes, glorious victories, pleasant books--these are our demands. We have nothing to do with ingredients, tactics, or methods. We have no desire to be admitted into the kitchen, the council, or the study. The cook may clean her saucepans how she pleases--the warrior place his men as he likes--the author handle his material or weave his plot as best he can--when the dish is served we only ask, Is it good?

when the battle has been fought, Who won? when the book comes out, Does it read?

Authors ought not to be above being reminded that it is their first duty to write agreeably--some very disagreeable men have succeeded in doing so, and there is therefore no need for anyone to despair. Every author, be he grave or gay, should try to make his book as ingratiating as possible. Reading is not a duty, and has consequently no business to be made disagreeable. n.o.body is under any obligation to read any other man's book.

Literature exists to please--to lighten the burden of men's lives; to make them for a short while forget their sorrows and their sins, their silenced hearths, their disappointed hopes, their grim futures--and those men of letters are the best loved who have best performed literature's truest office. Their name is happily legion, and I will conclude these disjointed remarks by quoting from one of them, as honest a parson as ever took t.i.the or voted for the Tory candidate, the Rev. George Crabbe.

Hear him in _The Frank Courtship_:--

'"I must be loved;" said Sybil; "I must see The man in terrors, who aspires to me: At my forbidding frown his heart must ache, His tongue must falter, and his frame must shake; And if I grant him at my feet to kneel, What trembling fearful pleasure must he feel: Nay, such the raptures that my smiles inspire, That reason's self must for a time retire."

"Alas! for good Josiah," said the dame, "These wicked thoughts would fill his soul with shame; He kneel and tremble at a thing of dust!

He cannot, child:"--the child replied, "He must."'

Were an office to be opened for the insurance of literary reputations, no critic at all likely to be in the society's service would refuse the life of a poet who could write like Crabbe. Cardinal Newman, Mr. Leslie Stephen, Mr. Swinburne, are not always of the same way of thinking, but all three hold the one true faith about Crabbe.

But even were Crabbe now left unread, which is very far from being the case, his would be an enviable fame--for was he not one of the favourite poets of Walter Scott, and whenever the closing scene of the great magician's life is read in the pages of Lockhart, must not Crabbe's name be brought upon the reader's quivering lip?