Emerson

Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1,
Essay 5,
by John Morley

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Title: Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson
Author: John Morley
Release Date: November 27, 2006 [EBook #19935]
Language: English
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CRITICAL MISCELLANIES

BY
JOHN MORLEY
VOL. I.
Essay 5: Emerson
London MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED NEW YORK: THE
MACMILLAN COMPANY 1904

Introductory 293
I.
Early days 296
Takes charge of an Unitarian Church in Boston (1829) 297
Resigns the charge in 1832 298
Goes to Europe (1833) 299
Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Carlyle 300
Settles in Concord (1834) 301
Description of Concord by Clough 301
Death of his first wife 302
Income 303
Hawthorne 305
Thoreau 305
Views on Solitude 306

Effect of his address in the Divinity School of Harvard (1838) 307
Contributes to the Dial (1840) 309
First series of his Essays published in 1841 310
Second series three years later 310
Second visit to England (1847), and delivers lectures on 'Representative
Men,' collected and published in 1850 310
Poems first collected in 1847; final version made in 1876 310
Essays and Lectures published in 1860, under general title of The
Conduct of Life 310
And the Civil War 310
General retrospect of his life 312
Died April 27, 1882 312
II.
Style of his writings 313
Manner as a lecturer 314
Dr. Holmes 314
His use of words 314
Sincerity 316
And Landor 316
Mr. Lowell 316
Description of his library 317

A word or two about his verses 319
III.
Hawthorne 322
And Carlyle 323
The friends of Universal Progress in 1840 323
Bossuet 324
Remarks on New England 325
One of the few moral reformers 327
Essays on 'Domestic Life,' on 'Behaviour,' and on 'Manners' 329
Compared to Franklin and Chesterfield 330
Is for faith before works 333
A systematic reasoner 335
The Emersonian faith abundantly justified 337
Carlyle's letter to (June 4, 1871) 337
One remarkable result of his idealism 341
On Death and Sin 342, 344
Conclusion 346

EMERSON.
A great interpreter of life ought not himself to need interpretation, least
of all can he need it for contemporaries. When time has wrought

changes of fashion, mental and social, the critic serves a useful turn in
giving to a poet or a teacher his true place, and in recovering ideas and
points of view that are worth preserving. Interpretation of this kind
Emerson cannot require. His books are no palimpsest, 'the prophet's
holograph, defiled, erased, and covered by a monk's.' What he has
written is fresh, legible, and in full conformity with the manners and
the diction of the day, and those who are unable to understand him
without gloss and comment are in fact not prepared to understand what
it is that the original has to say. Scarcely any literature is so entirely
unprofitable as the so-called criticism that overlays a pithy text with a
windy sermon. For our time at least Emerson may best be left to be his
own expositor.
Nor is Emerson, either, in the case of those whom the world has failed
to recognise, and whom therefore it is the business of the critic to make
known and to define. It is too soon to say in what particular niche
among the teachers of the race posterity will place him; enough that in
our own generation he has already been accepted as one of the wise
masters, who, being called to high thinking for generous ends, did not
fall below his vocation, but, steadfastly pursuing the pure search for
truth, without propounding a system or founding a school or cumbering
himself overmuch about applications, lived the life of the spirit, and
breathed into other men a strong desire after the right governance of the
soul. All this is generally realised and understood, and men may now
be left to find their way to the Emersonian doctrine without the critic's
prompting. Though it is only the other day that Emerson walked the
earth and was alive and among us, he is already one of the privileged
few whom the reader approaches in the mood of settled respect, and
whose names have surrounded themselves with an atmosphere of
religion.
It is not particularly profitable, again, to seek for Emerson one of the
labels out of the philosophic handbooks. Was he the prince of
Transcendentalists, or