Mr. Emerson may rest assured, as we know that he was not indifferent to the matter. Besides various pure and generous minds, even amongst the younger ministers of several denominations, who, as the writer happens to be aware, have perused his writings with uncavilling pleasure, there are others who merely desiderate a journal free from party, clique, or "denomination," for philosophical, artistic, and social topics, in order to do their part. These individuals are more or less favourable to current views; there is no enmity amongst them to the uniformity and orthodoxy which have hitherto seemed peculiarly Scottish; for orthodoxy has in this country done some of its best things. They only wish to counterbalance orthodoxy, to oppose to it that other pole which is its complement, and which alone can give it life. It is by antagonism that the old identity unfolds itself, ceases to be a seed, and becomes complete, harmonious, fruitful variety. We do not believe absolutely in our own beliefs. They are false for another or for all. Truth lies beyond and above us-it is with one and with another in forms that are uninterchangeable, and it will only descend in common shape upon the spears of all the combatants, when their points are at last laid together. So that if any one of us had the power to destroy dogmatism to-morrow, God forbid the word should be uttered. Dogmatism is needful to us, even had one not a sort of lingering pity for the cause that is weaker amidst its very hour of strength. As for the Church, the writer himself is the son of one of its most respected ministers; he looks back with love and veneration to the faith, the zeal, the steadfastness of his fathers. He was honoured to listen for four years to the voice of the wisest, loftiest, most eloquent teacher that Calvinism ever had; and saw laid in the grave the head of that burning, holy, and beloved man. But the corporate spirit here is bigoted and bitter: it would exclude the new or free thinker from speech, means of living, and from trying to do good. There would not now be a cry for the stake; but the heretic will be more delicately remanded to the future "eternal" fires, which were not enough for Arnold of Brescia or Servetus. Now, in the present case, Mr. Emerson's behaviour was characterised by the utmost delicacy. Knowing, it may be supposed, the tone of feeling here, he seemed to avoid such subjects as might bring him into contact with it. The lectures indicated a step in advance even since his verse-poems: with respect to direct love of humanity, sense of its wants, and hopefulness for an actual future; emotions more likely to be suggested just now in England than in America, perhaps. Still, there was a murmuring in ecclesiastical quarters. The "tide of infidelity," which has been for a good many years" sweeping in upon our land,' was again more heard of. Doctors in divinity doubtless skimmed over the "Essays;" newspaper editors crammed for the occasion, and then wrote about "Pantheism." We are waiting every day for the almost certain attack of the "Witness," a Free Church paper, conducted by a self-educated, masculine man of true genius, but intensely Scotch, whose lucubration has been probably delayed for solemnity's sake, since one of the editors was present on his selfdevoted post of audience. The "Scottish Guardian," I believe, has already delivered its fire, no doubt without compromise. Thomas Carlyle, till then in a measure unknown to strict Calvinists, has lately become quite popular with our clergymen, by writing in a Cromwellian manner concerning Cromwell; he would probably be again consigned to backsliding obscurity if he were to give us the biography of Blanco White in character. Emerson's lecture on the "Genius of the Present Age was in like fashion directed to some extent against his own spirit. He almost deplored the decay of ancient faith, and quoted from Puritan diaries. We heard two divinity students, as they went out, speak of his sneering at religion; the same lecture, I believe it was, received, from sundry "elders," the name of "rank infidelity;" and hints are given of ceasing to patronise, or of interfering with, the Institution which invited him, although a society wholly uncommitted to the dissemination of any particular religious views, indeed, necessarily avoiding them. I happened, yesterday, to stumble on a passage in "Monstrelet's Chronicles," which amusingly reminded one of these demonstrations, and I give it as applicable. "On the 15th of June, in this year, an extraordinary event happened. at the Palace at Paris, during the pleading of a cause between the bishop of Angers and a rich burgher of that town. The bishop had accused him of heresy and usury, and maintained that he had said, in the presence of many persons of honour, that he did not believe there was a God, a devil, a paradise, or a hell. It happened, that while the bishop's advocate was repeating the above words, as having been said by the burgher, the hall they were pleading in shook very much, and a large stone fell down in the midst, but without hurting any one. However, all the persons present were exceedingly frightened, and left the hall, as the cause had been deferred to the next day but when the pleading recommenced, the room shook as before, and one of the beams slipped out of the mortice, and sunk two feet without falling entirely down, which caused so great an alarm lest the whole roof should fall and crush them, that they ran out in such haste that some left behind them their caps, others their hoods and shoes; and there were no more pleadings held in this chamber until it had been completely repaired and strengthened!" A prodigious phenomenon indeed, and well merited no doubt; but occurring, in all likelihood, not on account of the burgher's heresy, but of the advocate's lie. History is very instructive; and we have more reason to fear judgments here for the perversion of fact, and the repression of liberty, than for such comprehensive negations as that of the wealthy burgher; seeing the former is the more probable case, and falls under Hume's argument against miracles. Still, if ever there was a people led by the nose with names, formulas, and dogmas, or turned against a thing by a shout, it is the so-called "religious "Scotch: Pantheist, Infidel, Unitarian, Morisonian, Universalist, and soon, perhaps, Individualist, are names in everybody's mouth, no one almost knowing what they are, or stopping to ask. Let me crave room for a few remarks on a man who is already found to be one of the most remarkable in this or any age-it might be said, in some respects, the most remarkable, as more freshly and completely representing the age itself, in its present inevitable direction, than any other though not at all the "Coming Man," because that is the new Humanity itself; he, on the contrary, implies the necessities of the future man more clearly than ever. His very faults are, as it were, a personal temporary defect, in order to betoken what man requires, claims, and will be. Of all men, Emerson is the most freely, fully, and longingly open to the Future; it is his element; without it he dies; the everlasting morning all but breathes on him. In this he is national; America is the land of the Future; she is vague and abundant in airy undefined possibilities, somewhat cold to the actual necessities, the old griefs of men; she has food and land in store, and can afford to look out for truth. In Britain here we swarm in miseries; fellowsuffering softens our mutual heart, yet it is not truth, but good that we want; we have an object before us, and are climbing the scale of freedom with more practical degrees: when we give vent to the ideal, it is from passion into figures warm and breathing, while German seclusion walks abroad in symbol, and American solitude is almost phonotyped into trance-like fidelity. But Emerson's great peculiarity, of course, is, that he represents, for all times and for all states, in the purest and most universal way, "Man thinking" from himself. The constant frame of things fades before him, or rather is fluent, and lets him through, by the magic power of soul; the soul, or better, thought and thinking, alone are continually flowing first: no time to him, but a logical relation. The Platonic realism of Wordsworth would make him think of a preestablished harmony between Sense and Nature; Emerson's objectivity, like Schelling's, perceives that in Nature which is in himself-affinity of thought and thing, identity ever divided, ever transmuting. The reverse of a Mystic, he yet often appears one, from that mental clearness and marvellous expression by which he leads you into the unimagined depths, not of speculation, but of him and of yourself, dividing the light-beam of a consciousness, upon the invisible edge that is in it; not letting you conceive of an object. He is thus, at once the oldest and the newest of thinkers, the most Greek-like of all modern minds; and, therefore, in his nationality free of all times and countries. This suggests another feature of Emerson, which is thoroughly classic; along with Shelley, Wordsworth, and a few others, his meaning and expression keep the most perfect time, never overbalance each other; form does not, as in the ante-classic age, and in such writers as Carlyle, outweigh the spirit; nor spirit, suggesting what it cannot speak, straining and aspiring, now triumphant, and oftentimes deformed, surpass its form, as with Fouquè or Novalis. A fourth class, by the way, there is, identical in kind, who avoid all these in their world-wide geniality and vital instinct,-Shakespeare and Cervantes, Goethe, Scott, or Dickens. This is to be said; because, after all, Emerson is nothing else than a Poet; all his works are pure poems, and whatever uncertainty there may have appeared on the subject, it may be affirmed that his volume of verse is one of the finest contributions to our lyrical treasures since Wordsworth: for America, with one or two slight exceptions, the sole production of genuine and historical value, in verse. Emerson and Cooper are, in the writer's opinion, her two great national poets, from one of whom we may expect much more: the one exemplifying man and nature in their subjective fusion and their utterance; the other figuring, quite objectively, the ideal of human character, under influence from Nature, at sea and in forest. Unite these two minds, with reciprocal involution of their tendencies, and you have a third, which includes and which transcends them both combine the lyrical and the narrative imagination, there results the dramatic, setting before itself the theorem of an idea, to be wrought out through their materials. But one Shakespeare, the Shakespeare of true Humanity, will be enough for the new world too: another Poet for future Christianity, we may yet see equal to him, and as Schlegel thought Calderon, in a higher kind. As to his Christianity, if Emerson be not a Christian, what are we ? The bigots would force him from point to point by catechism, text, and syllogism, with a prurient desire to know what is his private thought. The notion of a lurking difference or a new aspect in any one from them, makes them strangely uneasy; but this is the very thing that Emerson disdains. He would say, "What I tell is yours, what I conceal is my own, and never will you know it. What is that to thee?" This, in fact, is the infidelity and unconscious Atheism of the dogmatist, the formalist, the uniformist. But Greek though he be, even as Plotinus or Proclus, Emerson is the consequence of Christianity. It lies hid at the bottom of his soul, and he likes not to talk of it; he has that love, peculiar to noble spirits, but pre-eminent in him, that refrains from its profoundest emotion, and which, when most unlike love, has it trembling on the tip of the tongue. It is the same towards humanity; you are impressed with the unutterable yearning this lonely soul has to others, but on seeing them, he finds them beneath his wish; he is silent with Herculean strength, or he speaks words of high disdain. He desires nobleness in another as he desires the light; he would fain have him nobler than himself, then would he do him reverence; but to give alms he cannot, he will not love you till you are independent of his love. This is a curious reversal of the New Testament letter; it would not do from a God and a Christ, but in our day it is required from some man. When we look at it in the light of historical development, we perceive the necessity of Emerson as the prophet of manliness,-manliness not merely practical but theoretical to the core of thought he "preaches the soul," as they say. Curiously enough, but in reference to the religion of the future, we have our two apostles of it from the land of the Future. Elihu Burritt is the John of this more fully unfolded gospel, and proclaims love; he leans to society and brotherhood, and, if he had the platonism of the beloved disciple, would write a new Apocalypse. Emerson, the individualist, is the apostle of intellect, like Paul, and partakes of his stoicism; it is he that dwells in Patmos, however, and with transcendental vision predicts the destiny of Humanity, so far as self-comprehended. Like Goethe, he sees in personal culture the fulcrum of millenial life, and scorns too much perhaps both nationalism and communism. He is called a Pantheist; and, did he sit down, after Spinoza, Schelling, or Hegel, gravely to propound the doctrine, the reproach might apply; but as a poet he is at one time as much the personal, empirical theist, as at another the percipient of interpenetrating divinity. He is so as much as every thinking man, thinking from himself, is so on occasion: he will not call on God to drive a nail: of living men he is the last to take the awful name in vain; but again, he sees the Absolute Being in a leaf falling at his feet, and God is "all-inall." In him this theistical sense is so strong, that with the caprice of love he delights to give new names, to place the object in all possible lights the formalist cannot recognise the same spirit in another form, and counts it as blasphemous to withhold the old shape and title as to profane them. Anthropomorphism is indeed the canker at the root of our divinity still, although Christ came to abolish it. Doubt not that in the moment of need, in the solemn trance when all companionship is annihilated, in grief or in joy, or on due demand, there is evolved from Emerson's secret personality that higher one which includes ours; to Emerson or to Blanco White, least of solitary thinkers, is unknown the φυγη μονου προς Μονον. * He says indeed in tranquillity : : "Alike to him the better, the worse, He is the axis of the star; He is the sparkle of the spar; He is the heart of every creature ; He is the meaning of each feature; And his mind is the sky Than all it holds more deep, more high." But the same man in his sorrow moans : * Fight of the lonely toward the Only.-PLOTINUS, apud DE QUINCY. |