53

STUDIES IN THE PROPHETIC NATURE.

EMERSON, AS THINKER AND WRITER.

In the last essay we have already seen that the term 'prophet' or 'seer' conveniently designates a particular kind of literary man, whom it would be hard to describe in any other way. The essential characteristic of the species is the impossibility of defining it by positive affirmations. The prophet in literature has nothing positive about him except his name. He can only be negatively indicated by showing that he is not a series of other characters, like, yet unlike. And hence it is hard to discover his exact place in the economy of nature. He is not a philosopher, though he is like one; for though he dabbles in philosophic opinions, and may even be a historian of philosophy, he does not possess a reasoned system of his own, and many of his opinions are not mutually consistent. Nor is he a poet, though he has many poetic traits; for as a rule, though he can feel, he cannot sing; he possesses imagination, but lacks the sacred fire. Is he then a preacher, an anointed priest of the Lord? Yes and no. He is eminently hortatory; the

whole cast of his mind is didactic, authoritative, dogmatic; but he is consumed with fiery indignation against his fellow-preachers, whom he accuses of tainting the sincere milk of the word. Still less is he the cultivated littérateur, for though he cares for style, it is only as strictly subordinate to the sermonic qualities of his writings-to give wings to his exalted moods, and press home his ethical lesson. He never delivers a purely literary verdict, but under the fatal dominion of the Æsopian manuer, abruptly ends his criticism with a "here beginneth the moral." He resents the imputation of being the child of the age; he dislikes science; he loathes utilitarianism; he combines a belief in freedom of the will with some stern admiration of a presiding fate; he is a firm advocate of the moral sentiment; he is fond of teleologic interpretation; he has two or three capital thoughts which he is never weary of emphasizing; he worships a God whom he is unable to expound to any one else. He is above all things holy, which being analyzed into its elements would appear to signify that he is a mystical and spiritualist thinker, full of a graceful emotion and an engaging romance. What useful office can such a man fulfil? He can inspire, he can communicate an impulse. Like the guiding hand over some complicated machinery, like the leader in a cotillon, like the general on the dawn of a day of battle, he can give the word of command.

If this be true in different measure of the Isaiahs, the Swedenborgs, the Carlyles, and the Ruskins of our humanity, the difficulty of estimation is greater when we

come on a possibly second-rate prophet, with regard to whom there is some doubt whether he succeeded in catching the prophetic mantle as it fell. For then all our negative definitions return with greater force, and it is doubtful whether anything is left except the sound of some hollow, ineffectual voice and the gestures of some invisible phantom. Hence the curiously different estimates which have been held about Emerson, from the glowing and somewhat indiscriminating enthusiasm of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Mr. Moncure D. Conway, to the appreciative but critical estimate of Mr. Morley, and the cold and ambiguous compliments of Mr. Matthew Arnold. For Emerson is always giving the impression of a just balked ascendancy, a narrowly intercepted splendour; fine and almost imperceptible lines seem to divide him from the highest and the best. He is always highly commended but rarely in the first class. Proxime accessit is the fit epitaph for his tombstone.

However little the prophet may feel himself the result of antecedent conditions, however strong may be his belief in the freedom of the will and the ascendancy of the personal initiative, science obtains her revenge on him by resolving him into his circumstances, and his forefathers. When it is said that a great man lays the burden on his contemporaries of understanding him, the phrase is in reality full of gentle irony. For it is just what contemporaries are debarred from doing: being too near the object, they cannot get the right perspective; or, rather, for the very reason that they are his contemporaries, they

are too full of the subtle influence of personality which a great man inevitably exhales. In the presence of a great man we irresistibly believe in the freedom of the will. It is only when we study long periods of time that we gain the scientific attitude, and are able to mark the courses and lines of fate and destiny which have moulded the limbs of the hero. Perhaps we are too near Emerson; perhaps the difficulty of estimation is the most decisive proof of his greatness. But, meanwhile, it is not without interest to see how certain predisposing forces found their proper issue in his person and character, and prefigured, as Leibnitz said of the veins of the marble, the form of the statue.

Nothing, for instance, seems clearer than that he was bound to preach. Emerson calls himself “an incorrigible spouting Yankee," and the remark, though of course exaggerated, contains substantial justice. He came of an ancestry who were preachers. The first of the line, the Reverend Joseph Emerson, was minister of the town of Mendon, Massachusetts. Peter Bulkeley, minister of Concord, was one of his forefathers. Edward Emerson, son of Joseph, was deacon, at all events, of the first church in Newbury. William Emerson, Waldo's grandfather, was pastor of the church at Concord, and a notable patriot at the outbreak of the Revolutionary war. William, his father, preached in Harvard and in Boston, and appears to have been a liberal and enlightened theologian as well as a man of attractive personal appearance, and possessed of a melodious voice. Pesides, Ralph Waldo Emerson spent much time in the family of Dr. Ezra Ripley, whom his

grandmother married as her second husband. Here was certainly, as Dr. Holmes has said, "an inheritance of theological instincts." It is true that he tried himself to be a minister, and failed, owing to a want of sympathy with his congregation on the subject of the Eucharist; but though the ostensible title was wanting, the spirit and the instincts remained. He adopted the profession of lecturing, an object of ambition about which, as he told Carlyle, he felt very strongly; and he brought to the task not only a captivating manner and a voice of singular sweetness, but all the force and aptitude of a forensic and didactic cast of mind. Hence, though on a superficial view he appears to oppose the clerical faction by a certain Socratic quality of inquiry, a dangerous leaning to Pantheism, and by being, as he himself says, "an iconoclast and an unsettler always," he will be found at bottom not untrue to the traditions of his lineage.

In their effects on literary style there is much in common between the lecturing-desk and the pulpit, and whatever of unchastened expression or irritating phrase may be found in Emerson's prose may generally be traced to this source. The speaker or lecturer is never chary of his sentences; to produce his picture he adds stroke on stroke through excess of caution lest he should fail to produce his effect. Thus there is a diffuseness, an unnecessary repetition, an over-elaboration of a thought. The eye in looking over a printed page gathers in a moment the thought of the writer, and is quick to anticipate the sequences and deductions, but the ear of the listener is not equally helped,