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In Volume 5,. in less than 500 pages, are contained almost all the wisdom of Emerson, a man believed by many up until 50 years ago to be the wisest of American thinkers, and above his rural-philosopher friend, Thoreau.
Ralph Waldo Emerson has something to say, fairly forthrightly and simply, about almost everything. Here is a snapshot of his prose – an essay on Nature, including one man’s experience (his own clearly) of a day in the northern hemisphere’s “Indian Summer’.
It is interesting to compare it with Thoreau’s prose.
The day, immeasurably long, sleeps over the broad hills and warm wide fields. To have lived through all its sunny hours seems longevity enough. The solitary places do not seem quite lonely. At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish. The knapsack of custom falls off his back with the first step he makes into these precincts. Here is sanctity which shames our religions, and reality which discredits our heroes. Here we find nature to be the circumstance which dwarfs every other circumstance, and judges like a god all men that come to her… (my emphases).
Another random example of Emerson’s writing is his definition of Beauty, a subject tackled by other essayists in these classical volumes (including Burke, whom I have quoted on the subject). Emerson writes:-
Elegance of form in bird or beast, or in the human figure, marks some excellence of structure: for beauty is only an invitation from what belongs to us. ‘Tis a law of botany, that in plants, the same virtues follow the same forms. It is a rule of largest application, true in plant, true in a loaf of bread, that in the construction of any fabric or organism, any real increase of fitness to its end is an increase of beauty. . .
All beauty must be organic. . . outside embellishment is deformity.
These may seem trite little aphorisms, but they are small fruits plucked from whole trees of rationalisation. What strikes one, reading the ‘wise men” of only 150 years ago is how swiftly knowledge has grown in the brief time since. And how knowledge has exploded in a mere few recent years – say 1980 to today. Also, it is worth pausing to appreciate the astonishing expansion and tightening of language in a single decade. Language has become more prosaic, and at the same time more specialised, in order to encompass most of this explosion of knowledge.
It is amusing to read how innocent were the views on ‘race’ in the nineteenth century. Emerson was no doubt ahead of his time when he wrote:
An ingenious anatomist has written a book to prove that races are imperishable, but nations are pliant political constructions, easily changed and destroyed. But this writer did not found his assumed races on any necessary law, disclosing their ideal or metaphysical necessity; nor did he, on the other hand, count with precision the existing races, and settle the true bounds; a point of nicety, and the popular test of the theory. The individuals at the extremes of divergence in one race of men are as unlike as the wolf to the lapdog. Yet each variety shades down imperceptibly into the next, and you cannot draw the line where a race begins or ends. . .
Emerson was, though, a great admirer of the English as a ‘race’.
The English composite character betrays a mixed origin. Everything English is a fusion of distant and antagonistic elements. The language is mixed; the names of men are of different nations, -three languages, three or four nations; - the currents of thought are counter: contemplation and practical skill; active intellect and dead conservatism; worldwide enterprise and devoted use and wont; aggressive freedom and hospitable law, with bitter class-legislation; a people scattered by their wars and affairs over the face of the whole earth, and homesick to a man; a country of extremes – dukes and chartists, Bishops of Durham and naked heathen colliers; nothing can be praised in it without damning exceptions, and nothing denounced without salvos of cordial praise.
But he contradicts his own statements (as English-speaking peoples are wont to do) when he writes in another essay:
I find the Englishman to be him of all men who stands firmest in his shoes. They have in themselves what they value in their horses: mettle and bottom. On the day of my arrival at Liverpool, a gentleman, in describing to me the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, happened to say, “Lord Clarendon has pluck like a cock, and will fight till he dies;” and what I heard first I heard last, and the one thing the English value is pluck. The cabmen have it; the merchants have it; the bishops have it; the women have it; the journals have it; the Times newspaper, they say, is the pluckiest thing in England . . .
I’m sure anyone making a less cursory reading than I have offered of Emerson (or Thoreau, or Ruskin) will find better morsels of thought than those I have hurriedly provided here.
With luck and skill you may sometimes gather more wisdom and mental delight in ten minutes of judicious reading than in ten days of skimming the electronic and air-waves. |
