Essays Before a Sonata | Page 9

true nature of the thing represented, and on the
scorn of the imagination for all shackles and fetters of mere external
fact that stand in the way of its suggestiveness"--a possession which
gives the strength of distance to his eyes, and the strength of muscle to
his soul. With this he slashes down through the loam--nor would he
have us rest there. If we would dig deep enough only to plant a doctrine,
from one part of him, he would show us the quick-silver in that furrow.
If we would creed his Compensation, there is hardly a sentence that
could not wreck it, or could not show that the idea is no tenet of a
philosophy, but a 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