which he taught to be proud of him. We have enough of irrational Theism in these islands in all conscience; but American Theism is a product so copious, so spontaneous, as to deserve a separate label in literary commerce You splash into it everywhere, in Mr. Howell's charming novels, in Mr. Lowell's admirable criticisms, in the novels and criticisms which are neither admirable nor charming. It reaches at times an astonishing degree of gaseousness. Mr. O. B. Frothingham, who has written an interesting and useful history of New England Transcendentalism, writes of the phenomenon, with apparent rationality, as "a wave of sentiment” which elated and transported a few people, and passed on. With probable truth he declares that it had a powerful influence on character. But beyond that point he becomes incoherent. “New Englaud character,” he affirms in one breath,

received from it an impetus that never will be spent.” In the next, we learn that “transcendentalism as a special phase of thought and feeling was of necessity transient-having done its work it terminated its existence.” It is not now surprising to learn that a phase of thought "os did its work, and its work was

And after that we can turn back with a scientific interest to the proposition that, in the Hegelianism of Bruno Bauer and Strauss, " by being adopted into the line of the intellectual development of mankind, Christianity, though dethroned and disenchanted, was dignified as a supreme moment in the autobiography of God." Comment here would not be superfluous, but I find it impossible. All I can manage to say is, that you need only give a Theist rope enough if you desire to see his philcsophic existence violently curtailed.

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glorious.” 1

VI.

It is a relief to turn from these phases of a state of mind which Emerson unluckily fostered, to others which can be contemplated with very different feelings. Taking his books in the mass, we

Transcendentalism in New England, pp. 355-6.

the average.

"1

may say of them that if his moonshine is much the same as other people's, his sunshine is peculiarly his own, and very much above

Matthew Arnold, after going in his gracefully incisive way over the points of Emerson's work, and settling that he is not a great writer of prose, because his style wants the requisite wholeness of good tissue,” and that he is not a great poet because he lacks plainness and concreteness and the power of evolution, finally decides that, nevertheless, “as Wordsworth's poetry is in my judgment the most important work done in verse, in our language, during the present century, so Emerson's Essays are, I think, the most important work done in prose. His work is more important than Carlyle's.”] He is not a great writer or man of letters in the sense that Cicero and Swift and Plato and Bacon and Pascal and Voltaire are great writers; but stiīl, in that he “ holds fast to happiness and hope ” as he does, he is the most important English prose writer of the century. That verdict is very characteristic of Arnold, in its suave arbitrariness; and of course his “most important" cannot be taken as final for Emerson any more thau for Wordsworth. Arnold had not the means or the method of finding out what is really “most important” in the literature of a century. He would pass over all Spencer with a graceful wave of the hand and the handkerchief, and sum up in a limpid phrase the heavy volumes he had not read. It would not ocour to him to ask how it was, precisely, that George Eliot, or Mill, was less “important” than Emerson; or wherein importance chiefly consisted, and why. But if we take the generalisation with the discount which is proper for Arnold's "paper," we shall find ourselves directed to a reasonably just conclusion. Emerson's hold of " happiness and hope” is not quite the most important thing in our nineteenth century English prose, because these are not the things of which we stand in the most pressing need; but when all is said, his gift to us in that regard is a splendid one. Certainly no one stimulates as he does. The morality of George Eliot has invalid airs and an indoors odour in comparison ; and the thinkers, while they instruct, exhaust us somewhat. But in

Emerson you have ever the air of the Concord woods and plains, the air that Thoreau breathed by Walden Lake. His very foible of booking all his inspirations has given us a multitude of tonic sentences, of exhilarations that pulse as if from the veins of spring. Arnold, and everybody else, has remembered how the young heart responds to some of his unmatchable phrases. “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. 1 He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of

. your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.”2 There is the pure note of the moral truth in the doctrine of the secret augury and the inward voice : the true note, neither sharp nor flat, concordant with all the master notes of human science. Again and again comes in that vibration, which is the breath in the nostrils of democracy:

“ Zoologists may deny that horsehairs in the water change to worms ; but I find that whatever is old corrupts, and the past turns to snakes. The reverence for the deeds of our ancestors is a treacherous sentiment. Their merit was not to reverence the old, but to honour the present moment; and we falsely make them the excuses of the very habit which they hated and defied. "3 “The reliance on property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance. Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long, that they have come to esteem the religious, learned, and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteern of each other by what each has and not by what each is. But a cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property, out of new respect for his nature. Especially he hates what he has, if he see that it is accidental-came to him by inheritance, or gift, of crime; then he feels that it is not having ; it does not belong to him, has no root in him, and merely lies there because no revolution or no robber takes it away."4

These maxims of his on politics are certainly worth many treatises as stimulants to what is best in men; and though States cannot any more than men live on stimulants, they may at times

Naturally Mr. Arnold did not quote this clause.
2 Self-Reliance, 3 Works and Days, 4 Self-Reliance.

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m

1

escape death or prostration by them. When I think of the resonant nobleness of some of his didactic verse I forgive its unfiled rudeness; and in the end I decline to subscribe to Arnold's dictum that a smoothly musical performance of Longfellow or Whittier is worth all Emerson's poetry. His song is short-breathed and soon broken, but he has caught notes of Apollo that they have never heard.

His poetic teaching has a quintessential quality that is to theirs what Milton is to Cowper; and at times it only needs the last magic of finish to compare with the noblest song in Goethe:

“Nor kind nor coinage buys

Aught above its rate.
Fear, Craft, and Avarice

Cannot rear a State.
Out of dust to build

What is more than dust-
Walls Amphion piled

Phoebus stablish must.
When the Muses nine

With the Virtues meet,
Find to their design

An Atlantic seat,
By green orchard boughs

Fended from the heat,
Where the statesman ploughs

Furrow for the wheat, -
When the church is social worth,
When the state-house is the hearth,
Then the perfect state is come,
The republican at home.”l

In other keys and measures he can attain to radiances of phrase and thought that are not for the Longfellows at their luckiest. And when we are dissecting, as we must, the fibre of his teaching, and rigorously weighing his message, even as he himself fully authorised us to do, we can hardly refuse to bow at least for a moment under the melodious rebuke which in one of his moods he passed on a friend :

Set not thy foot on graves ;

Nor seek to unwind the shroud
Which charitable Time

And Nature have allowed
To wrap the errors of a sage sublime.

“ Set not thy foot on graves ;

Care not to strip the dead
Of his sad ornament,
His myrrh, and wine, and rings,
His sheet of lead,
And trophies buried :
Go, get them where he earned them when alive ;
As resolutely dig and dive.

"Life is too short to waste

In critic peep or cynic bark,
Quarrel or reprimand ;

'Twill soon be dark ;
Up! mind thine own aim, and

God speed the mark !”1

But, indeed, there is small suggestion of the grave as yet about Emerson's teaching; nor will there soon be. He is the very poet of optimism, which it is not an easy thing to be : prosperity is prosaic, and the poetic instinct turns most spontaneously to shadow. It is his glory, and a glory not easily won, to have convinced men that every age must find its highest inspiration in itself if it is ever to be capable of giving inspiration to others. Before Walt Whitman, though Whitman seems to have forgotten it, he taught the people of America to frame a literature for themselves :-2

“The test or measure of poetic genius is the power to read the poetry of affairs--to fuse the circumstance of to-day ; not to use Scott's antique superstitions, or Shakespeare's, but to convert those of the nineteenth century and of the existing nations into universal symbols. 'Tis easy to re. paint the mythology of the Greeks or of the Catholic Church, the feudal castle, the crusade, the martyrdoms of mediæval Europe; but to point out