|
Chapter XII
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, THE POET AS PHILOSOPHER
THE name of Emerson has become a synonym for essays. Speak his name in the presence of a dozen persons of average taste in literature, and in the minds of eleven of them will open a volume of prose beginning with the statement, "There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same, and to all of the same ;" and ending with the experience, " How sincere and confidential we can be, saying all that lies in the mind, and yet go away feeling that all is left unsaid, from the incapacity of the parties to know each other, although they use the same words."
The twelfth person will perhaps think of a book that makes an excellent piece of furniture, and gives the house, if not the thought and conversation of its inhabitants, a literary touch ; and both the eleventh and the twelfth will consign the author to the company of the philosophers—though he himself calls them "devil-spiders " " lined With eyes within." It is curious bow this erroneous and quite superfluous dignity of philosophy has been pressed upon Emerson in spite of himself, and in spite of the obvious philosophical inconsistency and mutual destructiveness of the sentences quoted in the first paragraph of this essay. It is not, of course, beyond a philosopher to fall into contradiction ; but the fall would be sideways, not headlong, and through oblique and hidden crevasses. No self-respecting philosopher would push out, as Emerson has done, an Alpha that cried aloud against his Omega.
The genius of orthodox philosophy is consistency, not necessarily perfectly achieved, but at least solemnly attempted. To Emerson consistency was the nightmare of small minds. The famous dictum is too well known to call for accurate quotation; it gives with one hand a nasty squelch to the consistent "devil-spiders," and with the other holds out much consolation to the little minds that know no difference between involuntary inconsistency and the splendid paradox of those who think outwards from a deeper centre than a system of formulae. Emerson had every respect for philosophy. 179 His utterance against mechanical consistency was no mere glorification of his own non-naechanical inconsistency, or the elevation of a necessity of his temperament to a place among the major virtues ; it was the enunciation of his own glimpse into the operation of tides and rhythms in all nature, and the perpetual oscillation of the evolving soul of humanity among the gathered spoils of its experience in life. It marks him out, not as a philosopher expressing himself within and in terms of a system, but as a poet using philosophy. He added much to the philosophy of history in the first essay of his book ; he added nothing to the history of philosophy, even though the last essay in his book concerns itself with philosophical terminology.
Emerson is not a poetical philosopher : he is a philosophical poet. He belongs to the small band of singers to whom the revelation of spiritual truth is a normal function, and is not reserved for the ecstatic moment or the purple patch. He is a protest against the dilletante superstition that would have the poet a genial shuttlecock of emotion.
Like his great compeer, George Meredith, Emerson has been overshadowed by himself, yet, like Meredith, he never lowered his value -of poetry, but set it first in his desire. That this conviction of his own true office in the hierarchy of revealers is well based is shown in the very character of his prose. His essays do not reason like philosophy, they state like poetry. They move like poetry. They rise and fall, expand and contract with the pulse of poetry. Indeed, there appears to have taken place in them the process of robbing Peter the poet, to pay Paul the prose writer, for Emerson's prose is exceedingly poetical, his poetry is very prosy. It is, moreover, often technically defective, as when he rhymes saw with door even in the very act of declaring the unity of Nature's rhythm and periodicity with the " musical order and pairing rhymes " of the poet !
Unity is his master-thought, even though its statement be far from masterly in the artistic sense. Nature to Emerson is god's poem : poetry is man's pathway to union with Divinity. His eye sees
Through man and woman, sea and star, The Dance of Nature forward and far.. His ear hears the invisible-inaudible music, Not only where the rainbow glows, Nor in the song of woman heard,
But in the mud and scum of things;
Emerson's attitude towards poetry is quite definite. The focal point of his inspiration is not in the physical plane, like the modern Continental schools before the war, nor in the emotional plane, like the bulk of present day English poetry. It is in the higher mental plane, sufficiently far back to preserve it from intellectual crystallisation, and yet to infuse it with the authenticity of his own spiritual intuition. Thought, therefore, is to Emerson the supreme power in life. The mountain, Monadnoc, recognises it:
For it is on Zodiacs writ, Adamant is soft to wit ; And when the greater comes again Withe my secret in his brain, I shall pass......
But this thought is not the Cortesian process. The European philosopher declare: I think, therefore 1 am. The American poet sets the phrase on its head. The Divine Consciousness, of which the human consciousness is a phase, is the only thing in the universe, and thought is one of its function. The thinkings of humanity are not creations of the transient personality, but terminal expressions from within outwards; and their significance is no matter for boasting on the part of the "creator" in sound or form I am, therefore I think. Nature, in the Vedantie sense,—the essential thing in the individual which is at one with universal law—is the inspirer and utterer:
" In their vaunted works of art The master-stroke is still her part."
It might have been better for the acceptance of Emerson's poetry if he had suffered some of the narrowness of literary enthusiasm, if he had worried himself more and his readers less over verbal awkwardness that a modern schoolboy could correct. Yet, when the shock, on ears attuned to the music of Shelly or Tennyson has been passed, familiarity with Emerson's matter makes mere critical nicety seem leseim-portant than it was thought to be. A new mental centre of interest is created. Even the devotee of Swinburne for the manner of his saying may become also a devotee of Emerson for the thing said. A subtle doubt will quaver in the voice that once with certainty quoted " Beauty is truth, truth beauty," for it will have become apparent that, while much that is beautiful in literature is by no means true, much of the truth that is in Emerson's poetry is by no means beautiful in expression. By and by, if a choice were necessary, it is probable that allegiance would be given to Emerson's own declaration,
Sweet is art, bat sweeter, truth.
The creation of poetry is a matter of moods ; so also is its appreciation. The lover of one poet only is no true lover of poetry. Constancy here is the sign of unfaithfulness. The true lover will seek Keats to-day for gentleness and Whitman to-morrow for strength; and when the emotional qualities of the mind have been satisfied, and the soul claims its place in the evolving life, there will come a mood deeper than strength or gentleness, in which the cry will be heard:
Give me truths, For I am weary of the surfaces,
and the hand will find the book of him who littered, the cry, the book of Emerson's poetry, and in it find truths and satisfaction.
We have already observed that Unity is the master thought of Emerson. He sees the one-ness of Nature : Sea, earth, air, sound, silence, Plant, quadruped, bird, By one music enchanted,
One Deity stirred : tout the inclusion of sound and silence in the first line links Nature with humanity, in whose consciousness the significance of both exists. All response and interaction mean affinity We act under temporal and spatial illusion, but the very action is breaking down the illusion, and the personal experiences of
......Vision where all forms In one only form dissolve
that are now the possession of a few, are indicator's of the race's normal future.
Substances at base divided, In their summits are united ; There the holy essence rolls,
One through separated souls. From such principles as these follows naturally the doctrine of the unity of truth and inspiration which finds voice in Emerson's poetry. True, an attempt to discover order in the articulate thinkings of the apologist for inconsistency may meet with reprimand ; but we must not confuse two quite different qualities. To be inconsistent we need not necessarily be inherent: logic along a given line does not necessarily imply uniformity on all levels. Emerson's declaration to the effect that he did not know what argument meant in the statement of truth, is not an official renunciation of reason, though it may well appear so to those who regard logical argument as the highest function of the human consciousness. It was simply a declaration to the effect that his utterance sprang from realisation, not from thought; from conception in the deeper life, not from " hences " and " therefores " that crawl along the surface of the mind.
The serpent of ratiocination is the most logical of beasts : every inch " follows " from fang to tail. But the poetry of Emerson stands up with the looseness and inconsistency of a God-like human being, foot and hand in diverse modes, but all cohered in a cerebral function that eludes analysis. From a single premise of Emerson we might argue ourselves into a lunatic asylum ; but a tight grip on his central conception of Unity enables us to drop from plane to plane of his thought with sanity. He saw one Life in all lives, and in all their operations, Behind the phenomena of Nature 186 he saw the abstract (totality as Plato saw it, behind the phenomena of consciousness in its diversity of expression in individuals and in systems, he saw one abstract certitude. Hellenism was not all error ; Christianity was not all truth,—nor vice versa, whichever way the logical devotees of either may argue. Both were rooted in Unity.
Never from lips of cunning fell The thrilling Delphic oracle ; Out from the heart of Nature rolled The burdens of the Bible old ; The litanies of nations came, Like the volcano's tongue of flame, Up from the burning core below.
Between the essential unity and its multifarious and diverse expression Emerson observed a connection of processes which in science are called the laws of periodicity and rythm, and in certain philosophies are called the dualities or pairs of opposites.
Eterne alternation Now follows, now flies, And under pain, pleasure— Under pleasure, pain lies.
This is a universal experience: it is seen in history; it is seen in nature as expressed in " Monadnoc " and " Sea-shore ;" it is felt in the daily life; and the keenest and sincerest questioning is only satisfied by the assumption that the little wave on the surface of being that we call our life has a vital connection with the Great, Life, and that the origin and fulfilment of a momentary impulse are deeper than memory or anticipation. If Emerson did not say the word " reincarnation," it was probably due to the same reticence of the artist as drove Shelley to putting his ideas on the same matter into the mouth of Ariel in " Ariel to Miranda." Emerson's poem " Brahma " assures us of his familiarity with eastern teachings, and something oriental speaks through the opening lines of his ode to Beauty :
Who gave thee, O Beauty, The keys of this breast,— Too credulous lover Of blest and unblest ? Say, when in lapsed ages Thee knew I of old? Or what was the service For which I was sold ?
Elsewhere he says :
As garment draws the garment's hem, Men their fortunes bring with them. By right or wrong, Lands and goods go to the strong. Property will brutely draw Still to the proprietor :
which is excellent philosophy, but execrable rhyme.
In " Mayday " Emerson discloses his vision of evolution, with involution as its background and limitation as its spur. He sees progress as a movement from gross to fine, from objective to subjective. He accepts Destiny, and makes no attempt to wriggle out of it as a concession to human egotism; The qualities of nature are the only real operators ; human action is a reaction to them; but (and here is the quality that takes all sides in the hoary controversy of fate and free-will) the determining factor is within ; the responsibility for the deed rests with the spiritual nature, and its source recedes with each step we take towards it until the long chain of cause and effect is lost in the Absolute.
The teaching of renunciation as the law of spiritual progress, of concentration as a means to vfsion, and the declaration of the ancient doctrine of the genius or daemon overshadowing the personality, are details of Emerson's poetry that should tempt to further search those students whose eyes are open for signs of the Divine wisdom coming more fully into literature in the English language.
|
