Back Aa

Anglo-American Memories

<h3> CHAPTER VII EMERSON IN ENGLAND—ENGLISH TRAITS—EMERSON AND MATTHEW ARNOLD </h3> Emerson's last visit to England was made in 1873, after his health had failed. He had been in Egypt and on the Continent, hoping to recover the freshness of his mental powers; but that was not to be. In London he and his daughter Ellen, who gave to her father a loving devotion without limits, lived in apartments in Down Street, Piccadilly. It was only too evident that, even after ten months of rest and travel, he was an invalid in mind. He could not recollect names—a failing common in advanced age, of course, but Emerson was only in his seventieth year and was to live ten years more. He resorted to all kinds of paraphrases and circumlocutions. "One of the men who seemed to me the most sincere and clear-minded I have met was—you know whom I mean, I met him at your house, the biologist, the champion of Darwin—with what lucid energy he talked to us." When I mentioned Huxley's name, Emerson said, "Yes, how could I forget him?" But presently the name had to be given to him again. The power of association {63} between people or things and the names of them had been lost. He was always, said the critics, a little déconsu; sentences, they insisted, succeeded each other without much obvious connection, or without the copula which would have brought them into their true relation. The truth is, he gave his reader credit for a little imaginative power. He took him into partnership. He was mindful of Voltaire's pungent epigram: "L'art d'être ennuyeux, c'est l'art de tout, dire." He had his own theory of style and of diction. His temperament left him no choice. If his quickness of transition from one subject to another, or from one thought to another, left some of his readers toiling after him in vain, they were not the readers for whom he wrote. Why should they read him if he wrote a language to them unknown? The interview between Huxley and himself to which Emerson referred was at breakfast; for breakfasts were then given almost as often as luncheons are now. There were a dozen or so people to meet him; men and women. I introduced each of them as they arrived. In each case they had been asked to make Emerson's acquaintance, but to some of them Emerson was an unknown name; or, if not wholly unknown, called up in their minds no clear image of the man or knowledge of his life's work. "Tell me who he is." "Tell me what he has done." "Is he English or American?" But I suppose there never has been a time when a knowledge of {64} literature, or of great spiritual influences, has been an indispensable passport to social position. Nor was it because Emerson was an American that he was unfamiliar to these delightful and, in many ways, accomplished women. Years afterward, in 1888, I was engaged to lunch on the day when news of Matthew Arnold's death had come. Arnold had been so good a friend to me that I did not like going on this first moment to such an entertainment, but I thought the talk would turn on Arnold, and I went. My hostess was a woman renowned in the world, or in her world, for great qualities, known to everybody, and I should have thought knowing everybody who had, as Arnold had, a place both in letters and in society. I referred to his sudden death. "Ah, yes," she answered, "an American, was he not?" That may be set off against the unacquaintance of these other ladies with Emerson. What Emerson cared for was to meet the men and women who stood in some spiritual or intellectual relation to him; or who were his disciples. Mr. Alexander Ireland, in his biographical sketch of Emerson, quotes an illustrative story. It was in Edinburgh, this same year, and Dr. William Smith, President of the Edinburgh Philosophical Association, was driving him about that wonderful city. Dr. Smith had told him of "a worthy tradesman in Nicholas Street who is his enthusiastic admirer." When Emerson heard of it, he proposed to call on him. They stopped at the {65} "worthy tradesman's," and Dr. Smith went into the shop and said: "Mr. ——, Mr. Emerson is at the door and will be glad to see you for a few minutes." "The five minutes were well spent," adds Dr. Smith; and the disciple was happy for the rest of his life. It was characteristic of Emerson, and of Emerson as an American. Very likely he did not quite understand how immense is the gulf which in this country separates the man who stands behind a counter from the man who stands in front of the counter. If he had understood, he would not have cared. What he cared for was the point of contact, and of discipleship. It was the master who sought his pupil, because he was his pupil. During Emerson's too brief stay in London I called often in Down Street. Miss Ellen was anxious to protect her father against the pressure from many quarters for public addresses, and to decline as many private invitations as possible. At Oxford it was the same, but neither in Oxford nor London did Emerson lecture except briefly at Mr. Thomas Hughes's Working-men's College. Between him and Tom Hughes—he was never called anything else—there was not very much in common except sterling qualities of character. Hughes was a good and amiable Philistine, English to the tips of his fingers, who wrote one book, Tom Brown's Schooldays, which is immortal, and half a dozen others that are dead or were never really alive. But Hughes was one of our friends in the black days when we had few in England, {66} working-men excepted; and Emerson was too good a patriot to forget that; and too much a lover of manliness in men not to like one who had that supreme trait in a high degree, as Hughes had. So he made the exception in his favour, for the Working-men's College was an institution of high usefulness, in which Hughes's heart was bound up. As for society, Emerson was an invalid, and able on that ground to decline invitations without offence. He had studied English society, as one form of English life, when here in 1848; and was content with that experience. "I do not care for classes," he said. The nineteenth century produced two supremely good books on American and on English civilization: Tocqueville's De la Démocratic en Amérique and Emerson's English Traits, published in 1856. Tocqueville's book, published in 1835, remains the best book on the United States for the student who cares to get down to the foundation of things; who cares more for ideas, tendencies, and principles than for details. Of Emerson's the same thing may be said, yet no two treatises could be more unlike than those of the Frenchman and the American. But all I wish now to point out is the effect of English Traits upon the English themselves. Roughly speaking, it puzzled them. It is one of the truest books ever written. Yet to the English themselves its truth has never appeared quite true. On Emerson, as thinker, poet, philosopher, all kinds of judgments have been formed {67} in England, and expressed, in some cases, with vehemence. He has always had an audience and a following here; and always enemies. But the book they least understand is the book about themselves. Looking into the egregious Allibone for an apt quotation concerning the Traits I find none, but instead a remark by Allibone himself that "Mr. Emerson's writings have excited considerable interest on both sides of the Atlantic!" The space given to Emerson in the Dictionary of English Literature is less than a column, though fourteen columns are not thought too many for Longfellow; nor are they. In the Supplement Emerson gets a little more attention; still grudgingly given. Allibone does not matter, and the perplexity of the Philistine struggling with a book he cannot understand does not matter. But let us go at once to the best of English critics; to Matthew Arnold. Alas! we fare no better. Arnold's Discourse on Emerson has been resented by Emersonians as an elaborate disparagement of their Master. It is not that. Arnold was incapable of disparagement, and while he denies to Emerson many gifts which his readers find in him, his appreciation is still sympathetic, and he lifts himself to own from time to time Emerson's real greatness. He thinks the Essays "the most important work done in prose in our language" during the last century—"more important than Carlyle's." But he puts aside the English Traits because, compared with Montaigne, La Bruyère, {68} Addison (!), the Traits will not stand the comparison. "Emerson's observation has not the disinterested quality of the observation of these masters. It is the observation of a man systematically benevolent, as Hawthorne's observation in Our Old Home is the work of a man chagrined." And Arnold explains that Emerson's systematic benevolence comes from his persistent optimism. The book is too good-natured to be scientific. Yet, oddly enough—or perhaps not oddly—the criticism of the English Philistine is the exact opposite of Arnold's. The man in the street, if he has read the English Traits, complains that the criticism of things English is too relentless; that Emerson always has the scalpel and the probe in hand; that the inquiry is not critical but anatomical; and the atmosphere that of the dissecting room. He is appalled when he sees the most cherished beliefs of centuries and blended races put under the microscope, and when Character, Aristocracy, Plutocracy, the Church, Religion itself are made to take off their masks and yield up their secrets. They are not conciliated even when Emerson sums up the English as "the best of actual races." What care they for comparisons with other races, or for the opinion of other races, or of transatlantic critics upon England and the English and the institutions of this little island? Emerson's criticism is chemical, it resolves things into their elements, their primordial atoms. No doubt, but neither the Throne nor {69} the Church is shaken, nor a single Act of Parliament repealed. Arnold, recalling the influences which wrought upon him as a student at Oxford "amid the last enchantments of the Middle Ages," said to an American audience in Emerson's "own delightful town," Boston: "He was your Newman, your man of soul and genius visible to you in the flesh, speaking to your bodily ears, a present object for your heart and imagination. That is surely the most potent of all influences! Nothing can come up to it." And that is the influence which descended beneficially upon us of a past or passing generation, to whom it was given to see Emerson and to hear him. As I think it all over, I begin to doubt whether to have heard Emerson on the platform did not bring you a sense of greater intimacy than to have known him even in his Concord home. There was a time, during Theodore Parker's illness and absence, when Emerson and Wendell Phillips used to take his place at stated intervals—in both cases, I think, once a month. Before the great audience of the Music Hall, Emerson had precisely the same manner as with a few hundred people. He hardly seemed to be aware of his audience. He stood there behind Parker's desk, towering above it, his slight figure adjusting itself to whatever attitude suited his mood for the moment; never quite erect; the body never quite straight; the hands fumbling with his {70} manuscript; turning over a dozen leaves at a time; turning back again another dozen, as if it scarce mattered in what order he read. Often he skipped; the large quarto pages were turned by the score and there was no return. His mind seemed to be carrying on processes of thought quite independent of those he had inscribed on his manuscript. He felt his way with his hearers; and his unconsciousness of their presence was therefore apparent only. Between them and him there was the flow of invisible, mysterious currents, whether of sympathy or antipathy. In Mr. Gladstone's fine image, they gave back to him in vapour what he poured out in a flood upon them. But that, of course, was far more completely true of an orator like Mr. Gladstone than of a lecturer like Emerson who read his discourse. But it was true in a measure of Emerson also. But Emerson was an orator too. He was not always above the arts of the orator. He could, and did, calculate his effects; observing the while whether they told or not. He delighted in a crescendo. His voice rose and fell and rose again; and he had unsuspected depths of resonant tone. At one moment clear and cold, then vibrating with emotion, in which the whole force of the man seemed to seek expression; then sometimes at the very end becoming prophetic, appealing, menacing; till the sentences came as if from the Judgment seat. He once read Allingham's poem, "The Talisman," as the peroration of his address in the Music Hall. I never heard anything like {71} it—like the wild, strange melody of his voice, which had in it the intonations and cadences which give to many Slavic airs, and most of all to the Hungarian Czardas, though that is dance music, a magic charm. I have spoken of the prejudice against Emerson which prevailed in Boston and elsewhere. It was most vehement in society. That worshipful company, which is necessarily a minority and prides itself on being a minority, likes to set its own standards and expects the rest of the world, so far as it comes in contact with these social law-givers, to conform to these standards. They soon became aware that to no standard but his own did Emerson ever conform; save so far as civility and kindness bade him. He gave way readily enough in little things. It is a sign of greatness to hold little things of little account; an aphorism by no means universally accepted. However, it was not Emerson's manners to which society objected, or could ever object. He had the manners of a king, without the demands of a king. He was a republican king. He stood for equality, in the sense that he looked down on no man. The society view is different. Society exists in order to look down on all who are not within its sacred circle. They must be inferior because they are outside. But its objection to Emerson lay deeper. It recognized in him the natural enemy of privilege and prerogative. There were distinguished members of this distinguished body who regarded a man who took {72} the liberty of examining the substructure on which all societies are built as an anarchist. They were afraid of him. They thought it safer to exclude him. By and by, they compromised. Is not, or was not, Boston the Home of Culture? So, as Emerson's fame grew, the exclusion policy was seen to be feeble. But when the closed doors were opened, what was the astonishment of these excellent persons to discover that Emerson did not seem to care whether they were open or closed. He had his own life to live, and lived it, serenely aloof. Nothing dies so hard as a prejudice. I have one of my own which lives in spite of my affection for Emerson, and my many debts to him, and my gratitude that he gave me a little of his friendship. I mean that on a too young mind he had, or might have, an influence not entirely for good. He set his ideals so high that, as you looked up to him and them, your feet sometimes went astray, or stumbled. He taught you, though he may not have meant it, to underrate precision of knowledge, and the value of details. When the things of the spirit and the spiritual life mattered so much, how could it be worth while to know all the tenses of Greek verbs or to be aware of the rudiments of toe in the palæontological horse? There are sentences and pages in The Conduct of Life and elsewhere which refute this view, and I do not press it. But I know the effect, not of this or that essay, but of Emerson's attitude toward education, and his philosophic indifference {73} to all but what is highest in thought. And I think even to-day I would not put his books into the hands of a boy who had not settled views about learning, and a conviction of the invincible necessity of an accurate method. {74} <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

1 of 2

2 of 2

Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.