Astronomy and the other sciences from heaven to earth. Yet the work in which this vein of thought is most conspicuous ends with the chapter on "Illusions," where he tells us that the affairs of every day are shadows after all, that, behind the veil of clouds and smoke, the gods are still sitting on their thrones, alone with the solitary and inviolable soul. When he has to deal with the means of life, he is an active and discriminating man of the world: when he comes to treat of its ultimate ends, the scene shifts, and we have again the mys tical Idealist. His combination of stern practical rectitude with an ideal standard is Mr. Emerson's point of contact with Puritanism. A chivalric nobility, in which beauty and goodness are blended, is at once the goal, the sanction, and the motive of his ethical system. In the verdict of an elevated conscience, which accepts it as such, he reposes an implicit trust. "The final solution, in which scepticism is lost, is the moral sentiment which never forfeits its supremacy. This is the drop which balances the sea." It is, at all events, our author's firmest anchorage, and he holds by it with a tenacity that never condescends to encounter the historical difficulties in his way. Praise of virtue, transcending prudence and disdaining consequences, is the refrain of his moral monologue. His belief in an absolute morality, and the rigid ethical criterion which he applies to men and things, are his connecting links with the old faith of New England. His severe censure of Goethe's artistic indifferentism, recalls the age when the Bible and theological commentaries were regarded as the sum of honest literature. He writes of our great dramatist in the spirit of the men who closed the theatres, "He was master of the revels to mankind. It must go into the world's history that the best poet led an obscure and profane life, using his genius for the public amusement"-sentiments far removed from the spirit of the modern art-worship, or even from the broader view which

accepts the facts of life without seeking to probe its secrets. But the sentences which follow, protesting against the opposite extremes of austerity, indicate another divergence. While Mr. Emerson is puritanic in the moral earnestness of his character and his criticisms, his own conception of the ultimate basis of morality is far removed from that of the Puritans.

The cardinal difference between all ancient and most modern ethical systems is the comparative Exclusiveness of the one, the Universality of the other. The Platonic virtues in their highest form can only be understood or fully practised by the golden race, who minister in the temple of his Hellenic state. The Aristotelean magnanimity and magnificence belong of right to a well-educated Athenian citizen. Stoicism was, in some respects, a bridge between the two eras. It broke down the walls of rank and wealth and race, and made morality, in a more modern sense, the chief end of man. But it was still fenced with intellectual pride, and the capacity of interpreting its precepts was confined to a new aristocracy of character. The ambiguity of the maxim, " Follow Nature ”—a maxim which Mr. Emerson emphatically endorses-proved fatal to its wide extension. Ancient morality was more or less artistic: it regarded a perfect life as the blooming of natural excellences, rarely as obedience to a law, and dwelt on the right or wrong of the action rather than on the merit or demerit of the actor. Christianity, in giving prominence to the latter conceptions, in associating the ideas of duty and self-sacrifice with motives generally realisable, added to ethics the side which is most capable of being brought to bear on the mass of men. It first announced a Heaven willing to stoop to feeble virtue: it first insisted on the obligation of the strong to succour the weak; and addressing itself, not to contemplate, but to aid, "the weary strife of frail humanity,” it first appreciated the difficulty of living well. Novalis says

ANCIENT AND MODERN ETHICS.

281

truly that "the summons to the good-will of all has made the fortune of the faith which recognises Grief and Self-abnegation." Mr. Mill, in his Liberty, asserts with no less truth that there is much still to be learned from the highest Pagan ethics; their positive ideals may be profitably opposed to the negations of mere abstinence; their public spirit to a pseudoreligious selfishness; their freshness to the over-refinements of modern casuistry. There are no nobler sentences than are to be found in the pages of Marcus Aurelius on the grace of those inherent virtues by which a man utters goodness as the mint utters coin, or "as a vine produces grapes." This aspect of morality is what we have everywhere presented to us in Mr. Emerson's essays. He prefers a constitutionallynoble nature, acting, ap' eşews, without forethought, to the Self-conquest that is the result of an internal combat; the "beautiful disdain" that recoils from evil as from ugliness to the sainthood that subdues "the world, the flesh, and the devil." "We love characters," he says, "in proportion as they are impulsive and spontaneous. Timoleon's victories are the best, which ran and flowed like Homer's verse." He reveres the individual grandeur of Plutarch's heroes, who are "natural powers like light and heat." With Carlyle, and more consistently, he decries Self-consciousness, too much analysis, too careful calculation. "The knots that tangle human creeds" are to him "the soul's mumps and measles and hooping-coughs." Shelley,' whom he often recalls, speaks for him in saying, "I have confidence in my moral sense alone, for that is a kind of originality." His pattern character needs no reminders of the law of duty. Unchartered freedom" never tires him, nor does he feel "chance desires" as a weight. He "lives by pulses, forgets usages, and makes the moment great." Emerson has the

1 Though Emerson never refers to Shelley, save with the most absurd depreciation.

tenacity of the Puritan, but he hates Puritanic glooms, dungeons in the air," as he hates sick people, who "pollute the morning with corruption and groans." "We should study rather to make humanity beautiful to each other." "Wisdom is cheerful, aliis lætus sapiens sibi.” 'Depression of spirits developes the plague."

Plato, in the Republic, draws a distinction between the doctors of the body and those of the soul, saying that the former should know disease by experience, the latter should only know vice by observation: but some sympathy with temptation, even to moral evil, enlarges the charity, and, if he has been victorious in the struggle, strengthens the power of the moralist. The mens sana in corpore sano of the American transcendentalist has little of this sympathy vice is to him a sign of bad blood, a flaw in the grain. To a properly-constituted being, he holds that a fairly moral life should be easy. "A few strong in

:

stincts and a few plain rules suffice."

His penal clause is

moral blindness. If we are slaves to sense we cease to see the claws of the siren. His reward is a deeper insight, his aim, ἐφ' ὅσον ἐνδέχεται ἀθανατάζειν, his rule of life, selfreliance. "The man that stands by himself the universe stands by him also." "Never imitate. That which a man can do best none but his Maker can teach him." "To believe in your own thought, that is genius." "Shy thou not hell, and trust thou well heaven is secure," are sentences which might have been uttered by the proudest of the Stoics, and graved among the illustrations of their porch. The following perfectly reproduce the aristocratic noli-me-tangere morality of Greece and Rome:

"We should meet each morning as from foreign countries, and, spending the day together, should depart at night as into foreign countries. In all things I would have the island of a man inviolate. Let us sit apart as the gods talking from peak to peak all round Olympus." "Looking where others look, and conversing with the same things, we

RELATION TO STOICISM.

283

catch the charm which lured them. Napoleon said you must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war." "We are either glad or sorry at a gift, and both emotions are unbecoming. You cannot give anything to a magnanimous person. After you have served him, he at once puts you in debt"-ÅVTEVEPYETIKÒS πλείονων. The new worship of this old magnanimity must be celebrated in "the church of men to come, without shawms or sackbuts or psaltery; but it will have heaven and earth for its beams and rafters ; science for symbol and illustration; it will fast enough gather beauty, music, picture, poetry. Was never stoicism so stern and exigent as this shall be. It shall send man home to his central solitude, shame these social supplicating manners, and make him know that, much of the time, he must have himself to his friend. He shall expect no co-operation, he shall walk with no companion. The nameless Thought, the nameless Power, the superpersonal Heart, he shall repose alone on that. He needs only his own verdict. No good fame can help, no bad fame can hurt him. The Laws are his consolers; the good Laws themselves are alive; they know if he have kept them; they animate him with the teaching of great duty and an endless horizon.”

To enlist popular feeling against this morality as inadequate, or to denounce the vagueness of this new religion, would be, in the eyes of the transcendentalist, a mere rhetorical appeal to the prejudices of that very ignorance above which he claims to have raised himself. Let us therefore waive for the present all considerations due to authority: let us concede that to him such an ideal life may be a self-sufficient end, and even grant that his faith may be the future philosophic creed; we are yet thrown back on the old exclusiveness, and are in danger of reverting to the egotism that vaunteth itself on its triumph over the world. Christianity, it has been said, differs from the highest Pagan wisdom not so much by enlarging the list of virtues as in "lighting up morality" with an inspiration in which all mankind may be partakers. Mr. Emerson thinks he has supplied to Stoicism the enthusiasm that it lacked, by the element of mysticism which he has added, and given it a broader basis by his sympathy with the industrialism of a democratic age. But the gulf between the remote idealism which crowns and the practical activities which underlie the whole is nowhere bridged in his philosophy.