Essays Before a Sonata | Page 9

clear (though perhaps not clearly hurled on the canvas) illustration of universal justice-- of God's perfect balances; a story of the analogy or better the identity of polarity and duality in Nature with that in morality. The essay is no more a doctrine than the law of gravitation is. If we would stop and attribute too much to genius, he shows us that "what is best written or done by genius in the world, was no one man's work, but came by wide social labor, when a thousand wrought like one, sharing the same impulse." If we would find in his essay on Montaigne, a biography, we are shown a biography of scepticism--and in reducing this to relation between "sensation and the morals" we are shown a true Montaigne--we know the man better perhaps by this less presentation. If we would stop and trust heavily on the harvest of originality, he shows us that this plant--this part of the garden--is but a relative thing. It is dependent also on the richness that ages have put into the soil. "Every thinker is retrospective."
Thus is Emerson always beating down through the crust towards the first fire of life, of death and of eternity. Read where you will, each sentence seems not to point to the next but to the undercurrent of all. If you would label his a religion of ethics or of morals, he shames you at the outset, "for ethics is but a reflection of a divine personality." All the religions this world has ever known, have been but the aftermath of the ethics of one or another holy person; "as soon as character appears be sure love will"; "the intuition of the moral sentiment is but the insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul"; but these laws cannot be catalogued.
If a versatilist, a modern Goethe, for instance, could put all of Emerson's admonitions into practice, a constant permanence would result,--an eternal short-circuit--a focus of equal X-rays. Even the value or success of but one precept is dependent, like that of a ball-game as much on the batting-eye as on the pitching-arm. The inactivity of permanence is what Emerson will not permit. He will not accept repose against the activity of truth. But this almost constant resolution of every insight towards the absolute may get a little on one's nerves, if one is at all partial-wise to the specific; one begins to ask what is the absolute anyway, and why try to look clear through the eternities and the unknowable even out of the other end. Emerson's fondness for flying to definite heights on indefinite wings, and the tendency to over-resolve, becomes unsatisfying to the impatient, who want results to come as they walk. Probably this is a reason that it is occasionally said that Emerson has no vital message for the rank and file. He has no definite message perhaps for the literal, but messages are all vital, as much, by reason of his indefiniteness, as in spite of it.
There is a suggestion of irony in the thought that the power of his vague but compelling vitality, which ever sweeps us on in spite of ourselves, might not have been his, if it had not been for those definite religious doctrines of the old New England theologians. For almost two centuries, Emerson's mental and spiritual muscles had been in training for him in the moral and intellectual contentions, a part of the religious exercise of his forebears. A kind of higher sensitiveness seems to culminate in him. It gives him a power of searching for a wider freedom of soul than theirs. The religion of Puritanism was based to a great extent, on a search for the unknowable, limited only by the dogma of its theology--a search for a path, so that the soul could better be conducted to the next world, while Emerson's transcendentalism was based on the wider search for the unknowable, unlimited in any way or by anything except the vast bounds of innate goodness, as it might be revealed to him in any phenomena of man, Nature, or God. This distinction, tenuous, in spite of the definite-sounding words, we like to believe has something peculiar to Emerson in it. We like to feel that it superimposes the one that makes all transcendentalism but an intellectual state, based on the theory of innate ideas, the reality of thought and the necessity of its freedom. For the philosophy of the religion, or whatever you will call it, of the Concord Transcendentalists is at least, more than an intellectual state--it has even some of the functions of the Puritan church-- it is a spiritual state in which both soul and mind can better conduct themselves in this world, and also in the next--when the time