Texts:Emerson/Representative: Difference between revisions

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<p class="head3">Ralph Waldo Emerson </p>

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<p>¶{{#counter: }} — I must not forget that we have a special debt to a single class. Life is a scale of degrees. Between rank and rank of our great men are wide intervals. Mankind have, in all ages, attached themselves to a few persons, who, either by the quality of that idea they embodied, or by the largeness of their reception, were entitled to the position of leaders and law-givers. These teach us the qualities of primary nature,&mdash;admit us to the constitution of things. We swim, day by day, on a river of delusions, and are effectually amused with houses and towns in the air, of which the men about us are dupes. But life is a sincerity. In lucid intervals we say, &ldquo;Let there be an entrance opened for me into realities; I have worn the fool&rsquo;s cap too long.&rdquo; We will know the meaning of our economies and politics. Give us the cipher, and, if persons and things are scores of a celestial music, let us read off the strains. We have been cheated of our reason; yet there have been sane men, who enjoyed a rich and related existence. What they know, they know for us. With each new mind, a new secret of nature transpires; nor can the Bible be closed, until the last great man is born. These men correct the delirium of the animal spirits, make us considerate, and engage us to new aims and powers. The veneration of mankind selects these for the highest place. Witness the multitude of statues, pictures, and memorials which recall their genius in every city, village, house, and ship:&mdash; </p>

Our loftier brothers, but one in blood;

At bed and table they lord it o&rsquo;er us,

<p>¶{{#counter: }} — How to illustrate the distinctive benefit of ideas, the service rendered by those who introduce moral truths into the general mind?&mdash;I am plagued, in all my living, with a perpetual tariff of prices. If I work in my garden, and prune an apple-tree, I am well enough entertained, and could continue indefinitely in the like occupation. But it comes to mind that a day is gone, and I have got this precious nothing done. I go to Boston or New York, and run up and down on my affairs: they are sped, but so is the day. I am vexed by the recollection of this price I have paid for a trifling advantage. I remember the <i>peau d&rsquo;ane</i>, on which whoso sat should have his desire, but a piece of the skin was gone for every wish. I go to a convention of philanthropists. Do what I can, I cannot keep my eyes off the clock. But if there should appear in the company some gentle soul who knows little of persons or parties, of Carolina or Cuba, but who announces a law that disposes these particulars, and so certifies me of the equity which checkmates every false player, bankrupts every self-seeker, and apprises me of my independence on any conditions of country, or time, or human body, that man liberates me; I forget the clock. </p>

<p>¶{{#counter: }} — These thoughts, in sparkles of light, had appeared often to pious and to poetic souls; but this well-bred, all-knowing Greek geometer comes with command, gathers them all up into rank and gradation, the Euclid of holiness, and marries the two parts of nature. Before all men, he saw the intellectual values of the moral sentiment. He describes his own ideal, when he paints in Timaeus a god leading things from disorder into order. He kindled a fire so truly in the center, that we see the sphere illuminated, and can distinguish poles, equator, and lines of latitude, every arc and node; a theory so averaged, so modulated, that you would say, the winds of ages had swept through this rhythmic structure, and not that it was the brief extempore blotting of one short-lived scribe. Hence it has happened that a very well-marked class of souls, namely those who delight in giving a spiritual, that is, an ethico-intellectual expression to every truth by exhibiting an ulterior end which is yet legitimate to it, are said to Platonize. Thus, Michel Angelo is a Platonist, in his sonnets. Shakspeare is a Platonist, when he writes, &ldquo;Nature is made better by no mean, but nature makes that mean,&rdquo; or, </p>

To follow with allegiance a fallen lord,

Does conquer him that did his master conquer,

<p>¶{{#counter: }} — Hamlet is a pure Platonist, and &lsquo;tis the magnitude only of Shakspeare&rsquo;s proper genius that hinders him from being classed as the most eminent of this school. Swedenborg, throughout his prose poem of &ldquo;Conjugal Love,&rdquo; is a Platonist. </p>

<p>¶{{#counter: }} — I have sometimes thought that he would render the greatest service to modern criticism, who shall draw the line of relation that subsists between Shakespeare and Swedenborg. The human mind stands ever in perplexity, demanding intellect, demanding sanctity, impatient equally of each without the other. The reconciler has not yet appeared. If we tire of the saints, Shakespeare is our city of refuge. Yet the instincts presently teach, that the problem of essence must take precedence of all others,&mdash;the questions of Whence? What? and Whither? and the solution of these must be in a life, and not in a book. A drama or poem is a proximate or oblique reply; but Moses, Menu, Jesus, work directly on this problem. The atmosphere of moral sentiment is a region of grandeur which reduces all material magnificence to toys, yet opens to every wretch that has reason, the doors of the universe. Almost with a fierce haste it lays its empire on the man. In the language of the Koran, &ldquo;God said, the heaven and the earth, and all that is between them, think ye that we created them in jest, and that ye shall not return to us?&rdquo; It is the kingdom of the will, and by inspiring the will, which is the seat of personality, seems to convert the universe into a person:&mdash; </p>

<p>¶{{#counter: }} — All men are commanded by the saint. The Koran makes a distinct class of those who are by nature good, and whose goodness has an influence on others, and pronounces this class to be the aim of creation: the other classes are admitted to the feast of being, only as following in the train of this. And the Persian poet exclaims to a soul of this kind: </p>

<p>¶{{#counter: }} — The privilege of this caste is an access to the secrets and structure of nature, by some higher method than by experience. In common parlance, what one man is said to learn by experience, a man of extraordinary sagacity is said, without experience, to divine. The Arabians say, that Abul Khain, the mystic, and Abu Ali Seena, the Philosopher, conferred together; and, on parting, the philosopher said, &ldquo;All that he sees, I know;&rdquo; and the mystic said, &ldquo;All that he knows, I see.&rdquo; If one should ask the reason of this intuition, the solution would lead us into that property which Plato denoted as Reminiscence, and which is implied by the Bramins in the tenet of Transmigration. The soul having been often born, or, as the Hindoos say, &ldquo;traveling the path of existence through thousands of births,&rdquo; having beheld the things which are here, those which are in heaven, and those which are beneath, there is nothing of which she has not gained the knowledge: no wonder that she is able to recollect, in regard to any one thing, what formerly she knew. &ldquo;For, all things in nature being linked and related, and the soul having heretofore known all, nothing hinders but that any man who has recalled to mind, or, according to the common phrase, has learned one thing only, should of himself recover all his ancient knowledge, and find out again all the rest, if he have but courage, and faint not in the midst of his researches. For inquiry and learning is reminiscence all.&rdquo; How much more, if he that inquires be a holy and godlike soul! For, by being assimilated to the original soul, by whom, and after whom, all things subsist, the soul of man does then easily flow into all things, and all things flow into it: they mix: and he is present and sympathetic with their structure and law. </p>

<p>¶{{#counter: }} — This path is difficult, secret, and beset with terror. The ancients called it ecstasy or absence,&mdash;a getting out of their bodies to think. All religious history contains traces of the trance of saints,&mdash;a beatitude, but without any sign of joy, earnest, solitary, even sad; &ldquo;the flight,&rdquo; Plotinus called it, &ldquo;of the alone to the alone.&rdquo; The trances of Socrates, Plotinus, Porphyry, Behmen, Bunyan, Fox, Pascal, Guion, Swedenborg, will readily come to mind. But what as readily comes to mind, is the accompaniment of disease. This beatitude comes in terror, and with shocks to the mind of the receiver. &ldquo;It o&rsquo;erinforms the tenement of clay,&rdquo; and drives the man mad; or, gives a certain violent bias, which taints his judgment. In the chief examples of religious illumination, somewhat morbid, has mingled, in spite of the unquestionable increase of mental power. Must the highest good drag after it a quality which neutralizes and discredits it?&mdash; </p>

From our achievements, when performed at height,

<p>¶{{#counter: }} — Shall we say, that the economical mother disburses so much earth and so much fire, by weight and metre, to make a man, and will not add a pennyweight, though a nation is perishing for a leader? Therefore, the men of God purchased their science by folly or pain. If you will have pure carbon, carbuncle, or diamond, to make the brain transparent, the trunk and organs shall be so much the grosser: instead of porcelain, they are potter&rsquo;s earth, clay, or mud. </p>

<p>¶{{#counter: }} — The pursuing the inquiry under the light of an end or final cause, gives wonderful animation, a sort of personality to the whole writing. This book announces his favorite dogmas. The ancient doctrines of Hippocrates, that the brain is a gland; and of Leucippus, that the atom may be known by the mass; or, in Plato, the macrocosm by the microcosm; and, in the verses of Lucretius,&mdash; </p>

Ossibus sic et de pauxillis atque minutis

Visceribus viscus gigni, sanguenque creari

Blood, of small sanguine drops reduced to one;

Gold, of small grains; earth, of small sands compacted

<p>¶{{#counter: }} — and which Malpighi had summed in his maxim, that &ldquo;nature exists entirely in leasts,&rdquo;&mdash;is a favorite thought of Swedenborg. &ldquo;It is a constant law of the organic body, that large, compound, or visible forms exist and subsist from smaller, simpler, and ultimately from invisible forms, which act similarly to the larger ones, but more perfectly and more universally, and the least forms so perfectly and universally, as to involve an idea representative of their entire universe.&rdquo; The unities of each organ are so many little organs, homogeneous with their compound; the unities of the tongue are little tongues; those of the stomach, little stomachs; those of the heart are little hearts. This fruitful idea furnishes a key to every secret. What was too small for the eye to detect was read by the aggregates; what was too large, by the units. There is no end to his application of the thought. &ldquo;Hunger is an aggregate of very many little hungers, or losses of blood by the little veins all over the body.&rdquo; It is the key to his theology, also. &ldquo;Man is a kind of very minute heaven, corresponding to the world of spirits and to heaven. Every particular idea of man, and every affection, yea, every smallest spark of his affection, is an image and effigy of him. A spirit may be known from only a single thought. God is the grand man.&rdquo; The hardihood and thoroughness of his study of nature required a theory of forms, also. &ldquo;Forms ascend in order from the lowest to the highest. The lowest form is angular, or the terrestrial and corporeal. The second and next higher form is the circular, which is also called the perpetual-angular, because the circumference of a circle is a perpetual angle. The form above this is the spiral, parent and measure of circular forms; its diameters are not rectilinear, but variously circular, and have a spherical surface for center; therefore it is called the perpetual-circular. The form above this is the vortical, or perpetual-spiral; next, the perpetual-vortical, or celestial; last, the perpetual-celestial, or spiritual.&rdquo; </p>

<p>¶{{#counter: }} — Let a man learn to look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting; let him learn to bear the disappearance of things he was wont to reverence, without losing his reverence; let him learn that he is here, not to work, but to be worked upon; and that, though abyss open under abyss, and opinion displace opinion, all are at last contained in the Eternal cause.&mdash; </p>

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<p>¶{{#counter: }} — Shakspeare knew that tradition supplies a better fable that any invention can. If he lost any credit of design, he augmented his resources; and, at that day our petulant demand for originality was not so much pressed. There was no literature for the million. The universal reading, the cheap press, were unknown. A great poet, who appears in illiterate times, absorbs into his sphere all the light which is anywhere radiating. Every intellectual jewel, every flower of sentiment, it is his fine office to bring to his people; and he comes to value his memory equally with his invention. He is therefore little solicitous whence his thoughts have been derived; whether through translation, whether through tradition, whether by travel in distant countries, whether by inspiration; from whatever source, they are equally welcome to his uncritical audience. Nay, he borrows very near home. Other men say wise things as well as he; only they say a good many foolish things, and do not know when they have spoken wisely. He knows the sparkle of the true stone, and puts it in high place, wherever he finds it. Such is the happy position of Homer, perhaps; of Chaucer, of Saadi. They felt that all wit was their wit. And they are librarians and historiographers, as well as poets. Each romancer was heir and dispenser of all the hundred tales of the world,&mdash; </p>

<p>¶{{#counter: }} — The influence of Chaucer is conspicuous in all our early literature; and, more recently, not only Pope and Dryden have been beholden to him, but, in the whole society of English writers, a large unacknowledged debt is easily traced. One is charmed with the opulence which feeds so many pensioners. But Chaucer is a huge borrower. Chaucer, it seems, drew continually, through Lydgate and Caxton, from Guido di Colonna, whose Latin romance of the Trojan war was in turn a compilation from Dares Phrygius, Ovid, and Statius. Then Petrarch, Boccaccio, and the Provencal poets, are his benefactors: the Romaunt of the Rose is only judicious translation from William of Lorris and John of Meun: Troilus and Creseide, from Lollius of Urbino: The Cock and the Fox, from the <i>Lais</i> of Marie: The House of Fame, from the French or Italian: and poor Gower he uses as if he were only a brick-kiln or stone-quarry out of which to build his house. He steals by this apology,&mdash;that what he takes has no worth where he finds it, and the greatest where he leaves it. It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature, that a man, having once shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at discretion. Thought is the property of him who can entertain it; and of him who can adequately place it. A certain awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts; but, as soon as we have learned what to do with them, they become our own. </p>

<p>¶{{#counter: }} — But whatever scraps of information concerning his condition these researches may have rescued, they can shed no light upon that infinite invention which is the concealed magnet of his attraction for us. We are very clumsy writers of history. We tell the chronicle of parentage, birth, birthplace, schooling, schoolmates, earning of money, marriage, publication of books, celebrity, death; and when we have come to an end of this gossip, no ray of relation appears between it and the goddess-born; and it seems as if, had we dipped at random into the &ldquo;Modern Plutarch,&rdquo; and read any other life there, it would have fitted the poems as well, It is the essence of poetry to spring, like the rainbow daughter of Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish the past, and refuse all history. Malone, Warburton, Dyce, and Collier, have wasted their oil. The famed theaters, Covent Garden, Drury Lane, the Park, and Tremont, have vainly assisted. Betterton, Garrick, Kemble, Kean, and Macready, dedicate their lives to this genius; him they crown, elucidate, obey, and express. The genius knows them not. The recitation begins; one golden word leaps out immortal from all this painted pedantry, and sweetly torments us with invitations to its own inaccessible homes. I remember, I went once to see the Hamlet of a famed performer, the pride of the English stage; and all I then heard, and all I now remember, of the tragedian, was that in which the tragedian had no part; simply, Hamlet&rsquo;s question to the ghost,&mdash; </p>

That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel

<p>¶{{#counter: }} — That imagination which dilates the closet he writes into the world&rsquo;s dimension, crowds it with agents in rank and order, as quickly reduces the big reality to be the glimpses of the moon. These tricks of his magic spoil for us the illusions of the green-room. Can any biography shed light on the localities into which the Midsummer Night&rsquo;s Dream admits me? Did Shakspeare confide to any notary or parish recorder, sacristan, or surrogate, in Stratford, the genesis of that delicate creation? The forest of Arden, the nimble air of Scone Castle, the moonlight of Portia&rsquo;s villa, &ldquo;the antres vast and desarts idle,&rdquo; of Othello&rsquo;s captivity,&mdash;where is the third cousin, or grand-nephew, the chancellor&rsquo;s file of accounts, or private letter, that has kept one word of those transcendent secrets. In fine, in this drama, as in all great works of art,&mdash;in the Cyclopaean architecture of Egypt and India; in the Phidian sculpture; the Gothic minsters; the Italian painting; the Ballads of Spain and Scotland,&mdash;the Genius draws up the ladder after him, when the creative age goes up to heaven, and gives way to a new, who see the works, and ask in vain for a history. </p>

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