Emerson | Page 6

a kind of undertone in that rich barytone of his that sweeps our minds from their foothold into deep waters with a drift that we cannot and would not resist. Search for his eloquence in his books and you will perchance miss it, but meanwhile you will find that it has kindled all your thoughts.' The same effect was felt in its degree wherever he went, and he took pains not to miss it. He had made a study of his art, and was so skilful in his mastery of it that it seemed as if anybody might do all that he did and do it as well--if only a hundred failures had not proved the mistake.
In 1838 Emerson delivered an address in the Divinity School of Harvard, which produced a gusty shower of articles, sermons, and pamphlets, and raised him without will or further act of his to the high place of the heresiarch. With admirable singleness of mind, he held modestly aloof. 'There is no scholar,' he wrote to a friend, 'less willing or less able to be a polemic. I could not give account of myself if challenged. I delight in telling what I think, but if you ask me how I dare say so, or why it is so, I am the most helpless of men,' The year before, his oration on the American Scholar had filled Carlyle with delight. It was the first clear utterance, after long decades of years, in which he had 'heard nothing but infinite jangling and jabbering, and inarticulate twittering and screeching.' Then Carlyle enjoined on his American friend for rule of life, 'Give no ear to any man's praise or censure; know that that is not it; on the one side is as Heaven, if you have strength to keep silent and climb unseen; yet on the other side, yawning always at one's right hand and one's left, is the frightfullest Abyss and Pandemonium' (Dec. 8, 1837). Emerson's temperament and his whole method made the warning needless, and, as before, while 'vociferous platitude was dinning his ears on all sides,' a whole world of thought was 'silently building itself in these calm depths.' But what would those two divinities of his, Plato and Socrates, have said of a man who 'could not give an account of himself if challenged'? Assuredly not every one who saith Plato, Plato, is admitted to that ideal kingdom.
It was soon after this that the Dial was projected. It had its origin in the Transcendental Club, a little knot of speculative students at Boston, who met four or five times a year at one another's houses to discuss questions mainly theological, from more liberal points of view than was at that time common, 'the air then in America getting a little too close and stagnant.' The Club was first formed in 1836. The Dial appeared in 1840, and went on for four years at quarterly intervals. Emerson was a constant contributor, and for the last half of its existence he acted as editor. 'I submitted,' he told Carlyle, 'to what seemed a necessity of petty literary patriotism--I know not what else to call it--and took charge of our thankless little Dial here, without subscribers enough to pay even a publisher, much less any labourer; it has no penny for editor or contributor, nothing but abuse in the newspapers, or, at best, silence; but it serves as a sort of portfolio, to carry about a few poems or sentences which would otherwise be transcribed or circulated, and we always are waiting until somebody shall come and make it good. But I took it, and it took me and a great deal of good time to a small purpose' (July 1, 1842). On the whole one must agree that it was to small purpose. Emerson's name has reflected lustre on the Dial, but when his contributions are taken out, and, say, half a dozen besides, the residuum is in the main very poor stuff, and some of it has a droll resemblance to the talk between Mrs. Hominy and the Literary Ladies and the Honourable Elijah Pogram. Margaret Fuller--the Miranda, Zenobia, Hypatia, Minerva of her time, and a truly remarkable figure in the gallery of wonderful women--edited it for two years, and contributed many a vivid, dashing, exuberant, ebullient page. Her criticism of Goethe, for example, contains no final or valid word, but it is fresh, cordial, and frank, and no other prose contributor, again saving the one great name, has anything to say that is so readable. Nearly all the rest is extinct, and the Dial now finds itself far away from the sunshine of human interest.
In 1841 the first series of Emerson's Essays was published, and three years later the second. The Poems were first collected