Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 386, December, 1847
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If there is some of the ideal in this account given of love and matrimony, there is, nevertheless, a noble truth in it. And surely in proportion as the sentiment of love is refitted and spiritualised, so also ought the moral culture, to which it is subservient, to be pure and elevated.
The longest essay in the collection, and that which approaches nearest to the more formidable character of a treatise, is that entitled "Nature." This exhibits, so to speak, the practical point of view of an idealist. The idealist has denied the substantial, independent existence of the material world, but he does not deny the existence of a phenomenal world. The Divine Nature reveals itself in the twofold form of finite mind and this phenomenal world. Thus, we believe, we may express the general creed of these philosophers, though it is a very delicate matter to act as interpreter to this class of thinkers: they are rarely satisfied with any expressions of their own, and are not likely to be contented with those of any other person. This phenomenal world has for its final cause the development and education of the finite mind. It follows, therefore, that all which a realist could say of the utility of nature can be advanced also by the idealist. He has his practical point of view, and can discourse, as Mr Emerson does here, on the various "uses" of nature which, he says, "admit of being thrown into the following classes: – commodity, beauty, language, and discipline."
We have not the least intention of proceeding further with an analysis of this essay; as we have already intimated, the value of Mr Emerson's writings appears to us to consist in the beauty and truthfulness of individual passages, not at all in his system, or any prolonged train of reasoning he may adopt. It is impossible to read this production without being delighted and arrested by a number of these individual passages sparkling with thought or fancy; it would be equally impossible to gather from it, as a whole, any thing satisfactory or complete.
On the beauty of nature he is always eloquent; he is evidently one who intensely feels it. "Every day, the sun; and, after sunset, night and the stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows." The shows of heaven and earth are with him a portion of daily life. "In the woods is perpetual youth." "We talk," he says in another place, "with accomplished persons who appear to be strangers in nature. The cloud, the tree, the turf, the bird are not theirs, have nothing of them; the world is only their lodging and table." No such stranger is our poet-philosopher. "Crossing a bare common, in twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. Almost I fear to think how glad I am."
The only quotation we shall make from the Essay on "Nature," shall be one where he treats of this subject —
"A nobler want of man is served by nature, – namely, the love of beauty. Such is the constitution of all things, or such the plastic power of the human eye, that the primary form, as the sky, the mountain, the tree, the animal, give us a delight in and for themselves; a pleasure arising from outline, colour, motion, and grouping. And as the eye is the best composer, so light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul, that intense light will not make beautiful. And the stimulus it affords to the sense, and a sort of infinitude which it hath, like space and time, will make all matter gay. But besides this general grace diffused over nature, almost all the individual forms are agreeable to the eye, as is proved by our endless imitations of some of them; as the acorn, the grape, the pine-cone, the wheat-ear, the egg, the wings and forms of most birds, the lion's claw, the serpent, the butterfly, sea-shells, flames, clouds, buds, leaves, and the forms of many trees, as the palm.
"The influence of the forms and actions in nature is so needful to man that, in its lowest functions, it seems to lie on the confines of Commodity and Beauty. To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone. The tradesman, the attorney, comes out of the din and craft of the street, and sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again. In their eternal calm he finds himself. The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired so long as we can see far enough.
"But in other hours nature satisfies the soul purely by its loveliness, and without any mixture of corporeal benefit. I have seen the spectacle of morning from the hill-top over against my house, from daybreak to sunrise, with emotions which an angel might share. The long slender bars of cloud float like fishes in the sea of crimson light. From the earth, as a shore, I look out into that silent sea. I seem to partake its rapid transformations; the active enchantment reaches my dust, and I dilate and conspire with the morning wind. How does nature deify us with a few and cheap elements! Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous. The dawn is my Assyria, the sunset and moonrise my Paphos, and unimaginable realms of faerie."
Mr Emerson has published a volume of poems, and it has been generally admitted that he has not succeeded in verse. But there are touches of charming poetry in his prose. This discrepancy, which is not unfrequently met with, must result, we presume, from an inaptitude to employ the forms of verse, so that the style, instead of being invigorated, and polished, and concentrated by the necessary attention to line and metre, becomes denaturalised, constrained, crude, and unequal. We have looked through this volume of poems, but we should certainly not be adding to the reputation of the author by drawing attention to it. If we wished to find instances of the poetry of Emerson, we should still seek for them in his prose essays. Thus he says: —
"In this pleasing contrite wood-life which God allows me, let me record, day by day, my honest thought, without prospect or retrospect, and I cannot doubt it will be found symmetrical, though I mean it not and see it not. The swallow over my window should interweave that thread or straw he carries in his bill into my web also."
"Our moods," he says, "do not believe in each other. To-day I am full of thoughts; but yesterday I saw a dreary vacuity in this direction in which now I see so much; and a month hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder who he was that wrote so many continuous pages. Alas for this infirm faith, this will not strenuous, this vast ebb of a vast flow! I am God in nature – I am a weed by the wall!"
"A lady," he writes on another occasion, "with whom I was riding in the forest, said to me that the woods always seemed to her to wait, as if the genii who inhabit them suspended their deeds until the wayfarer has passed onward. This is precisely the thought which poetry has celebrated in the dance of the fairies which breaks off on the approach of human feet." The lady had a true poetic feeling. And the following thought is illustrated by a very happy image.
"In man, we still trace the rudiments or hints of all that we esteem badges of servitude in the lower races, yet in him they enhance his nobleness and grace; as Io in Ãschylus, transformed to a cow, offends the imagination, but how changed when as Isis in Egypt she meets Jove, a beautiful woman, with nothing of the metamorphosis left but the lunar horns, as the splendid ornament of her brows!"
In his philosophy, we have seen that Mr Emerson is an idealist, something, too, of a pantheist. In theology, we have heard him described as a Unitarian; but although the Unitarians of America differ move widely from each other, and from the standard of orthodoxy, than the same denomination of men in this country, we presume there is no body of Unitarians with whom our philosopher would fraternise, or who would receive him amongst their ranks. His Christianity appears rather to be of that description which certain of the Germans, one section of the Hegelians for instance, have found reconcilable with their Pantheistic philosophy. It is well for him that he writes in a tolerant age, that he did not make his appearance a generation too soon; the pilgrim fathers would certainly have burnt him at the stake; he would have died the death of Giordano Bruno. And we believe – if the spirit of his writings be any test of the spirit of the man – that he would have suffered as a martyr, rather than have foregone the freedom and the truthfulness of his thought. His essays are replete with passages such as this: – "God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please – you can never have both. Between these, as a pendulum, man oscillates ever. He in whom the love of repose predominates, will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets, – most likely his father's. He gets rest, commodity, and reputation; but he shuts the door of truth. He in whom the love of truth predominates, will keep himself aloof from all moorings and afloat. He will abstain from dogmatism, and recognise all the opposite negations, between which, as walls, his being is swung. He submits to the inconvenience of suspense and imperfect opinion, but he is a candidate for truth, as the other is not, and he respects the highest law of his being."
We gather from what little has reached us of his biography, that he has in fact sacrificed somewhat of the commodity of this life, to this "higher law of his being." In a work which has just fallen into our hands, entitled "The Prose Writers of America, with a Survey of the Intellectual History, Condition, and Prospects of the Country, by Rufus Wilmot Griswold," we find the following scanty account of Emerson. "He is the son of a Unitarian clergyman of Boston, and in 1821, when about seventeen years of age, was graduated at Harvard University. Having turned his attention to theology, he was ordained minister of one of the congregations of his native city, but, embracing soon after some peculiar views in regard to the forms of worship, he abandoned his profession, and retiring to the quiet village of Concord, after the manner of an Arabian prophet, gave himself up to 'thinking,' preparatory to his appearance as a revelator." Which meagre narrative, not very happily told, leads us to infer that the recluse of Concord has lived up to the high spirit of his own teaching.
It is remarkable that Mr Griswold, in the prefatory essay which he entitles The Intellectual History, Condition, and Prospects of the Country, although he has introduced a host of writers of all grades, some of whom will be heard of in England for the first time, never once mentions the name of Emerson! Yet, up to this moment, America has not given to the world any thing which, in point of original genius, is comparable to his writings. That she has a thousand minds better built up, whose more equal culture, and whose more sober opinions, one might prefer to have, – this is not the question, – but in that highest department of reflective genius, where the power is given to impart new insights into truth, or make old truths look new, he stands hitherto unrivalled in his country; he has no equal and no second.
Very popular he perhaps never may become; but we figure to ourselves that, a century hence, he will be recognised as one of those old favourite writers whom the more thoughtful spirits read, not so much as teachers, but as noble-minded companions and friends, whose aberrations have been long ago conceded and forgiven. Men will read him then, not for his philosophy, – they will not care two straws for his idealism or his pantheism: they will know that they are there, and there they will leave them, – but they will read him for those genuine confessions of one spirit to another, that are often breathed in his writings; for those lofty sentiments to which all hearts respond; for those truths which make their way through all systems, and in all ages.
HOW I CAME TO BE A SLOVEN
A pretty question this, my dear Eusebius, – and that the question comes from you, who at no time of your life were a "Beau Nash," is rather extraordinary. It is after the fashion of most of your movements, however, and so far should not be thought extraordinary in you. For as you do not walk in the track that other men's shoes have made, nor dress your thoughts in other men's draperies; but both walk and think as few other men do, I ought not to wonder that you turn suddenly round upon me, eye me from head to foot, and ask me this curious question, How I came to be a sloven. Now, I can easily imagine your own slovenly attitude and attire when you wrote me this precious letter, and how fantastically conceited you fancied yourself standing before me, ωστε Ζωγραφης – like a painter, as says Hecuba, when she bad her rags and misery be looked at, – and thought to put me out of countenance with your own perfections. Perfections, indeed! Why, your whole wardrobe would not be worth exporting in charity to the land of Ne'erdo-weels – and I doubt not that the loss of a single suit, bad as it may be, would leave you in some small respects as bare as when you came into the world. You have been reading, you tell me, the "Ãsthetics of Dress," as you term them, those very amusing papers in Maga – from which you mean to cull materials for the history of the art, and to write a treatise on "The Philosophy of Tailors," wherein you intend to set forth upon what principles of the "Fitness of things" it is that nine tailors make a man. It is a whimsical notion of yours that the game of nine-pins was set up in honour of these nine worthies – "Knights of the thimble" – signifying how weakly they stand upon their pins, and how they go by the board at the very breath of a ball. You affect to think that the Templars were but the imitators of a more honourable cross-legged company – and that their antiquity is shown prior to the invention of Heraldry, for that the very term, the coat of arms, must have come from them. You say they can show parchments with the oldest companies and families, and cut to shivereens the longest pedigrees, and yet never go beyond their own measure.
What would a parliament be without them? They not only make their man, but seat him. Indeed, man is no man, till he is made one by these Novemviri, and hath been invested by them, as of old, with the toga virilis; and now-a-days (we vulgarise every thing even in the nomenclature) the first advance to manhood is to be "breeched: " – that first step when, with the dignity of newly assumed and duly authorised manhood, the dressed youth puts his best foot foremost, on the first step of the ladder of life, and is not ashamed, while ascending, to turn his back, and show what stuff he is made of.
It is said, that when a man marries he enters into a bond with society for his future good behaviour – but of what consequence is this, in comparison with that previous bottomry bond, to use a mercantile word suitable to these our mercantile days, that every man has entered into and given the surety of nine men besides, without which, whatever bottom he may show in the fight, the greatest hero would be but a sans culotte. Heroes! why, are not tailors the very models after which men should dress themselves? They have made, in all senses, the best regiments. And what a large slice of this globe is governed and commanded by the Board in Threadneedle Street.
Thread and thimble do wonders to make a man – rig him out with the best materials – no devil's dust, disdaining dishonest "thimble-riggery."
The son of Japetus admired not more his man-invention, than does the tailor. The fleshly life which he condescends to stuff into his manufacture, is with him but a secondary consideration; and it must be confessed he is often not very choice in these his human materials. Any thing that way will do to adorn the real "man of shreds and patches." Pegs and lay figures would answer the purpose quite as well as these, pattern-humanities, if they would but walk. Bad, however, as they are, as specimens per se, they are made so much of by the adornments, that their painted effigies and portraits, as they are exhibited in tailors' laboratories, saloons, and establishments, excite the envy and wonder of a gaping population. They are set forth, to show what the worst man may be made – to portray vividly the excellence of the art, and to "give the world assurance of a man," even built and fabricated out of next to nothing but his dress. It is no longer "Ex pede Herculem." The boot-maker has been defeated – Hoby dethroned – you may have a Hercules or an Apollo only according to cloth measure. Then will the proud artificer hold the mirror up to Nature to show her how vastly she is improved, even though it be by the slandered hands of "Nature's journeymen." Then, so various in its powers is the art, that the real professors will at the shortest notice turn the shopman into the esquire, and, if need be, the thief into an archdeacon. They will fit you with any character, fit or unfit: – will send you most genteelly to the court or to the gallows. Vain is the conceit of the scoffing world of fashion that affect to scorn the craft that makes them what they are; – nay, a great deal better, and to look what they are not. Let them try to set up for themselves, what sorry figures they would be – perfectly ridiculous, to be kicked out of Fop's Alley, and whipped by the beadle!! worse clad than Prince Vortigern in that despicable and invisible slip of a vestment,
"Which from a naked Pict his grandsire won
But that can never be to any extent. What man in his senses would enter upon this stage of the world, rushing in like a wild man of the woods, a general wonder, and without the introductory aid of his proper master of the ceremonies; when, too, at a trifling cost, he can take his ticket of admission, and go boldly certificated by the sign-manual of a Doudney or a Moses? No man dares to walk entirely out of rules sartorial, nor utterly to despise the images which it pleaseth the tailors to set up. Not that their laws are like those of the Medes and Persians, which alter not – their very principle is change – and every change is suitable. The seasons change not fast enough for them. Is a man to be married? – even then he is in the tailor's hands – he must have a new suit – nay, he must wait for it, he dare not appear without it. Is he to be hanged? – he must have a new suit; nay, before condemnation he is tried in his best, as if he were to be judged as much by appearance as evidence. The public, the real thinking public, take more notice of his appearance than of his crimes. Every journal is full of accurate detail, not of his doings, but of his looks and of his dress. The Pictorials present the very cut of his coat, and pattern on his waistcoat; and what the graver cannot, they supply in words, so that you may see not only the shape but the colour. Blue is the favourite colour at the altar of Hymen, – a suit of black on the platform of the hangman – but that is a compliment to the clergy – or a malice, that folk may think most who go out of the world that way are of the cloth – and that is what they call giving the culprit "the benefit of clergy."
Really man should be defined "a dressing animal." – Were all the powers of the earth to meet together to consult upon their everlasting interests, the previous question would be, in what are they to appear; and the first announcement of the great congress of the gentlemen of the press would be what they wore, – what they said, would be slurred over as of less importance. Thus, for example, the Roman historian is particular when he describes the great ambassador before the senate of the Carthagenains, making a fold of his robe, as if it alone were worthy to contain the fate and fortunes of empires, asking them which they would have, Peace or War – and so letting it fall loose out of his hand, – just as a modern senator on the opposition side might put his hands into his breeches pockets, make a show of searching, and taking them out with nothing in them, might, with all the dignity of senatorial energy, declare that he could not surmise where the minister would get his supplies.
It is extraordinary man is ashamed of nothing so much as of his own natural figure. It is a mean and low thing to appear to have flesh and blood, excepting in the face and hands, – this remark must, however, apply only to the male sex. The female is allowed a greater latitude. Even a Count D'Orsay would be hooted through the streets, should he dare to appear, on foot or on horseback, without a coat, and with his shirtsleeves tucked up, – such is the obeisance we make to the tailoring craft. And if it be a folly, it is one of an old growth, and is rife among our antipodes as ourselves. Savage and cultivated, civil and uncivil, all have the propensity. The Chinese exquisites felt the skirts of the coats of the members of our embassy, and burst out into immoderate laughter. They quizzed the cut and colour, proud of their own envelopes; and, to their cost, judged us by our clothes. They have since felt our arms. Your tailor is an important personage all the world over, but alas! he is too restricted in his commerce. He is confined to spots and spaces, that is, individually speaking, – universal is the race. It is quite curious to consider what free trade may do for him. The export and the import may quite change the appearances of all, men, women, and children. When navigation laws shall be done away with, and "free bottoms shall carry free goods," then, indeed, may it come to pass that "motley is your only wear." The picturesque will triumph; wondrous will be the variety; in apparel, China and Kamschatka shall meet and shuffle together in every public way. Then "all the world will be a stage," and all the men and women at least look like players. The drab world will be extinct – it is nearly so now. Quakers have been long since ashamed of their Sartorian antipathies, and from growing to be coxcombs in their own particular line, have pretty generally thrown off the dull garb, and plunged with eagerness into the emporium of fashion, and come out so as that their mothers would not know them. The snake throws off his old skin, and when he comes out shining in his new, looks with a sly leer from under the hedge, and seemeth to say, "Thanks, friend, thee hast complimented me by following my example, I am verily proud of thy similitude." Too many of us have a spice in our veins of the snake's venom, – shift skins, and turn coats, – but no more of that, Eusebius, it leads to fearful questioning, and we both eschew politics; and do not let us call up the evil one, whoever may be among the tailors. Yet let me remind you of a whimsical accident that happened the other day to a certain M.P., who, having bought a ready-made paletot, walked boldly into the streets, forgetting that he was thus ticketed on the back, "This neat article to be sold cheap." I dare to say, it was warranted to keep its gloss, and turn as good as new – and that the wearer peeled well in the house.
You would, I see, implicate me in fopperies. If it is not my humour to patronise by personal wear, I at least panegyrise all fraternities of tailors. You may make yourself look ridiculous if you please, and the change may not ill become your vagary-loving mind; but I do not mean to doff my old habit, not having faith in novelties, that I should trust the present easy motion of my limbs to unused ties and compressions. Dress, with such old ones as we are, Eusebius, should have the blessings Sancho bestows upon sleep, and "should wrap us warm like a blanket;" and what reason is there that we should think the worse of ourselves for showing the dates of our thoughts and ways, and bearing upon our coats the figures of a somewhat backward age. We may yet brighten up our countenances, and say out of the book of that dramatist who knew life so well, and may thus depict ours – even for some few years to come, my dear good Eusebius, —
"Though time hath worn us into slovenry,
But, by the mass, our hearts are in the trim."
They that have taken off and put on their clothes as often as you and I have done, may well look upon them as old friends, with their familiar looks, and see in their wear and tear a certain kinship with ourselves, and all our own elbow rubs that the world hath given us, and the thread-bare arguments that we have put upon ourselves, from which we imagined we could raise fine flattering maxims, and substantial truths, which have more deceived us in the wear than in the affection with which they retain us and are still retained.