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(Brownson’s Quarterly Review, April, 1847)
If we could forget that Almighty God has made us a revelation, and by faith has solved for us the problem of man and the universe; and if we could persuade ourselves that we are here with darkness behind us, darkness before us, and darkness all around us, relieved only by the fitful gleam from the reversed torch of reason, at best serving only to confront us, turn we which way we will, with the dread unknown, we should greet these poems with a warm and cordial welcome, and saving the mere mechanism of verse-making, in which they are sometimes defective, assign them the highest rank among our American attempts at poetry. The author is no every-day man; indeed, he is one of the most gifted of our countrymen, and is largely endowed with the true poetic temperament and genius. He has a rich and fervid imagination, a refined taste, exquisite sensibility, a strong and acute intellect, and a warm and loving heart. He is earnest and solemn, and, taking his own point of view, a man of high and noble aims. If truth were no essential ingredient of poetry, if the earthly were the celestial, and man were God, and if the highest excellence of song consisted in its being a low and melodious wail, we know not where to look for anything superior to some of the wonderful productions collected in the volume before us. But the palm of excellence, even under the relation of art, belongs not to poetry which chants falsehood and evil. The poet is an artist, and the aim of the artist is to realize or embody the beautiful; but the beautiful is never separable from the true and the good. Truth, goodness, beauty, are only three phases of one and the same thing. God is the true, the good, the fair. As the object of the intellect, he is the true; as the object of the will, the good; as the object of the imagination, the passions, and emotions, the beautiful; but under whichever phase or aspect we may contemplate him, he is always one and the same infinite and eternal God , indivisible and indistinguishable. In his works it is always the same. In them, no more than in him, is the beautiful detached or separable from the true and the good; it is never anything but one phase of what under another aspect is good, and under still another is true. The artist must imitate nature, and he fails just in proportion as he fails to realize the true and the good in his productions. His productions must be fitted to satisfy man in his integrity. We have reason and will, as well as imagination; and when we contemplate a work of art, we do it as reasonable and moral as well as imaginative beings, and we are dissatisfied with it, if it fail to satisfy us under the relation of reason or will, as much as if it fail to satisfy us under that of the imagination. Moreover, the beauty which the artist seeks to embody is objective, not subjective, - an emanation from God, not something in or projected from the human soul. Mr. Emerson and the transcendentalists contend that beauty is something real, but they make it purely ideal. With them, it is not something which exists out of man and independent of him, and therefore something which he objectively beholds and contemplates, but something in man himself, dependent solely on his own internal state, and his manner of seeing himself and the world around him. But the ideal and the real are not identical; and if the beautiful were the projection or creation of the human soul, and dependent on our internal state and manner of seeing, it would be variable, one thing with one man and another thing with another, one thing this moment, another the next. We should have no criterion of taste, no standard of criticism; art would cease to have its laws; and the boasted science of aesthetics, so highly prized by transcendentalists, and on which they pride themselves, would be only a dream. Beauty is no more individual, subjective, than is truth or goodness. It neither proceeds from nor is addressed to what is individual, idiosyncratic; but it proceeds from the universal and permanent; and appeals to what, in a degree, is common to all men, and inseparable and indistinguishable from the essential nature of man. Mr. Emerson’s poems, therefore, fail in all the higher requisites of art. They embody a doctrine essentially false, a morality essentially unsound, and at best a beauty which is partial, individual. To be able to regard them as embodying the beautiful, in any worthy sense of the term, one must cease to be what he is, must divert himself of his own individuality, and that not to fall back on our common humanity, but to become Mr. Emerson, and to see only after his peculiar manner of seeing. They are addressed not to all men, but to a school, a peculiar school, a very small school, composed of individuals who, by nature or education, have similar notions, tastes, idiosyncrasies. As artistic productions, then, notwithstanding they indicate, on the part of their author, poetical genius of the highest order, they can claim no elevated rank. The author’s genius is cramped, confined, and perverted by his false philosophy and morality, and the best thing we can say of his poems is, that they indicate the longing of his spirit for a truth, a morality, a freedom, a peace, a repose, which he feels and laments he has not. We know Mr. Emerson; we have shared his generous hospitality, and enjoyed the charms of his conversation; as a friend and a neighbor, in all the ordinary relations of social and domestic life, he is one it is not easy to help loving and admiring; and we confess we are loath to say aught severe against him or his works; but his volume of poems is the saddest we have ever read. The author tries to cheer up, tries to smile, but the smile is cold and transitory; it plays an instant around the mouth, but does not come from the heart, or lighten the eyes. He talks of music and flowers, and would fain persuade us that he is weaving garlands of joy; but beneath them is always to be seen the ghastly and grinning skeleton of death. There is an appearance of calm, of quiet, of repose, and at first sight one may half fancy his soul is as placid, as peaceful, as the unruffled lake sleeping sweetly beneath the summer moonbeams; but it is the calm, the quiet, the repose of despair. Down below are the troubled waters. The world is no joyous world for him. It is void and without form, and darkness broods over it. True, he bears up against it; but because he is too proud to complain, and because he believes his lot is that of all men and inevitable. Why break thy head against the massive walls of necessity? Call thy darkness light, and it will be as light - to thee. Look the fiend in the face, and he is thy friend,- at least, as much as a friend as thou canst have. Why complain? Poor brother, thou art nothing, or thou art all. Crouch and whine, and thou art nothing; stand up erect on thy own two feet, and scorn to ask for aught beyond thyself, and thou art all. Yet this stoical pride and resolve require a violent effort, and bring no peace, no consolation, to the soul. In an evil hour, the author overheard what the serpent said to Eve, and believed it; and from that time, it would seem, he became unable to believe aught else. He loves and woos nature, for he fancies her beauty and loveliness emanate from the divinity of his own being; and he affects to walk the fields and the woods, as a god surveying his own handiwork. It is he who gives the rose its fragrance, the rainbow its tints, the golden sunset its gorgeous hues. But the illusion does not last. He feels, after all, that he is a man, only a man; and the enigma of his own being, “The fate of the
man-child, Torments him, and from his inmost soul cries out, and in no lullaby tones, for a solution. But, alas! No solution comes; or, if one, it is a solution which solves nothing, which brings no light, no repose, to the spirit wearied with its questionings. As a proof of this, take the poem with which the volume opens, entitled The Sphinx. In this the author proposes and attempts to solve the problem of man. He begins by chanting the peace, harmony, and loveliness of external nature, and proceeds:- “But man crouches and blushes,
absconds and conceals; “Outspoke the great mother,
beholding his fear;- “I heard a poet answer, aloud
and cheerfully, “‘The Fiend that man harries
is love of the Best; “‘Profounder, profounder,
man’s spirit must dive; “‘Pride ruined the angels,
their shame them restores; “‘Eterne alternation,
now follows, now flies; “‘Dull sphinx, Jove keep thy
five wits! Thy sight is growing blear; “‘Thou art the unanswered
question; couldst see thy proper eye, The contrast between moral and physical is founded in fancy. The disorders of the external world are not less striking than those of man, and the strife of elements is as terrible as that of the passions. There are blight and mildew, earthquakes and volcanoes, floods and droughts, in nature, as well as wars and revolutions in states and empires. But let this pass. Whence comes the evil in man? “The fiend that man harries is love of the Best.” That is, man is never satisfied with what he has; but imagines that he sees always something better just above and beyond him. Advance or ascend as he may, the ideal floats ever before him, urging him on, and bidding him climb higher up, ever higher up yet. There is no rest for him. What is good and what is evil in his condition springs alike from this aspiring disposition. In this originate his virtues, and in this his vices,- what is noblest in his being and character, and what is lowest and meanest; and his sorrow is at the distance there is ever between his aspirations and his realizations. But in this the author confounds the love of the best, or aspiration to the perfect, with pride. He teaches, and consciously, that Satan in aspiring to be God was actuated by love of the best, and therefore holds,- what his disciples do not hesitate to preach,- that Satan has been greatly wronged, and that the sin for which he was cast out of heaven and down to hell, and bound in chains of darkness for ever, was only the pure aspiration of a noble nature after a higher perfection! “Pride ruined the angels, their shame them restores.” Indeed, their ruin was no ruin, but a stage in their progress,- “And the joy that is sweetest lurks in stings of remorse.” But pride and the love of the best are not identical. Pride is the perversion of the love of the best, and consists in believing one’s self already perfect, not in seeking after a perfection not yet possessed. Lucifer did not rebel because he would be more perfect than he was, but because such was his lofty estimate of himself that he would acknowledge no being as his superior. This is the essential nature of pride. It believes itself to be the highest, and places all else below itself. The basis of love of the best is humility, and humility springs from a consciousness of our own defects, and the reverent contemplation of the superior merits of others, - a deep and living conviction that there is a being above us whom we are to love and obey, honor and exalt. Pride would usurp the perfect,- humility would love, reverence, and glorify it; pride would possess it to exalt and glorify itself,- humility for the sake of glorifying Him who is perfect. Humility loves perfection itself with a pure, disinterested love; while pride loves it only for the sake of self, and therefore loves only self, and not perfection at all. The sorrow of pride flows from the mortification of being compelled to admit that there are others which occupy positions above it; the sorrow of humility is that it can never worthily love and reverence, honor and exalt, the good and perfect God as it feels he deserves; but, unlike that of pride, it is a sorrow which has its own consolations, and which is compatible with inexpressible internal peace and joy. The love of the best, a love which is not the love of self, but really love of the best, is no “fiend that man harries”; it breeds no disorder, occasions no fall, no vice, no strife, but bears man onward and upward to God, his true beginning and end. But, mistaking pride for love of the best, Mr. Emerson makes it the glory of our nature; and as pride knows no peace so long as it sees aught above it, he teaches that we must always be harried, that we must run ever, but never attain our goal. The best dances ever before us, and above our reach. It is always further on, and higher up, and as man ascends, he sees new “Hills peep o’er hills, and
Alps on Alps arise.” Each height is
scorned as soon as gained, and man must be ever the child who, as soon as you
give him one bauble, throws it away and cries for another. “Couldst see thy proper eye,
always it asketh, asketh; and each answer is a lie. There is no remedy, no hope. Each new solution, as soon as obtained, ceases to be true. The answer to the question from one height discloses a height which is higher yet, from which it becomes a lie. There is no truth for us. The truth in the valley is falsehood on the mountain; the truth today is falsehood tomorrow. Thus are we, thus must we be, “ever learning, never able to come to a knowledge of the truth.” Ever does the secret intense longing for an unseen something spur us onward, upward from height to height, and ever must continue the same evils, the same vices, the same cries, the same misery and wretchedness,-endless motion, and yet no advance. “Eterne alternation, now
follows, now flies, What more sad and gloomy? In our very virtues lie and germinate the seeds of our vices; and what is lowest, meanest in us springs from what is purest, noblest, best. And this is man’s normal order, the glory of his being, the source of joy and gladness! No change, no deliverance, no day of pleasure without pain, of joy without sorrow, of virtue without vice, of love without hatred, of light without darkness, life without death, is ever to come, to be hoped for, or even desired! And this is the gospel of the nine-tenth century, preached in this good city of Boston, by one of the most gifted and loving of our countrymen, who has himself once worn the garb of a professed minister of Him who died that man might live! O my brother, how hast thou fallen! The old heathens themselves might shame thee. Their Islands of the Blest, nay, their dark Tartarean gulf, were a relief to thy cold and desolating philosophy. Warble no more such music in our ears. We would rather hear the ravings of the wildest fanaticism, or the mutterings of the foulest superstition. We have never read anything more heart-rending than the poem entitled Threnody. It is, indeed, a lamentation, and the saddest part is the consolation it offers. It is no imaginary lament. The author speaks is his own character, his own grief over the early death of his own son,- a son of rare sweetness and promise. It was a lovely boy, one a father might well love, and be pardoned for weeping. The grief is natural. The stern pride of the father gives way to it, and the stoic becomes wild, all but frantic, and blasphemes nature, his only god after himself. “Step the meek birds where
erst they ranged’ How different is this from the temper which the Christian father would have exhibited at the grave of his son cut down in early morning! He too might have wept, but he would not have been desolate; and a joy would have mingled with his grief, and turned it into gladness. He would not have felt that his child was lost to him or to nature; that a bright existence had been blotted out, a sun extinguished and gone to the wastes of nature; but he would have looked upon his boy’s death-day as his birthday, and rejoiced that he was so soon removed from the evil, so soon permitted to return from his exile, to be received to his home, and permitted to behold the face of his heavenly Father, and there in fullness of love and joy, by his prayers and intercessions, obtain new graces for the dear earthly parents whose term of exile had not yet expired. For nature, for the “flown muses,” for the mysteries to be unlocked for the race, for the glorious future the boy-sage was to usher in, he would have felt no uneasiness; because he would have known that the boy in heaven could effect more than the boy on earth; because there has been given to the world the Babe of Bethlehem; and because, as the old German proverb says, “The old God still lives,” and can take care of nature and of man. But the author checks the wildness of his grief, and is his excessive charity directs us to the sources of his consolation. But here he is sadder to us than in his grief. Here all becomes sombre and dark, vague and misty, and- what is rarely the case with Mr. Emerson- words, words with no distinct meaning, with scarcely any meaning at all. The verse flows on, but the sense stands still. The father’s heart recoils from the pit of annihilation; the proud, unbelieving philosopher scorns to yield to the sweet hope of immortality. The father shrinks with horror from the thought that his bright-eyed boy is lost forever; the transcendentalists disdains to believe in an uprising of the dead. What, then, shall he say? What hope can he indulge, what solace dare trust? The bright-eyed boy is not all extinguished. What was elemental in him could not die, and he lives absorbed in the infinite, as the drop in the ocean! “Wilt thou not open thy heart
to know Prayers for saints that inly
burned.- Heart’s love will meet thee again. Or bow above the tempest
bent; “Heart’s love will meet thee again.” Yes, love without the loving heart, love without a lover! O my brother, is this all thy consolation? Is this “What rainbows teach, and sunsets show?” Nay, most desolate father, not rainbows
or sunsets taught thee this; it was the moon, the moon, fickle goddess of
night; for no man not moonstruck would talk of hearts’ loves remaining when
hearts are no more. Thou consolest
thyself with a vain shadow, nay, not so much as a shadow, but a very
absurdity, a sheer impossibility; for who ever heard of heart’s love without
the loving heart, any more than of thought without a thinker, or act without
an actor? Thou boastest thyself wise,
thou makest the “great Heart” say to thee, And the past blasphemy of grief, And yet thou here revivest the old Hindu dream, stripped of its self-coherence, reduced to an absurdity so palpable that the veriest child can detect it; and this thou claspest as a spiritual balsam to thy torn and bleeding heart, and wouldest gravely persuade us that it is a sovereign remedy, that it heals thy wound and makes thee whole, a man, a hale and joyous man again. “Hearts are dust, hearts’ loves remain,”- remain when hearts are no more! O my brother, how true it is, that when we turn our back on God and his word, esteem ourselves wise, and boast that we have been taught “Beyond the reach of ritual, Bible, or of speech,” we become- fools! Thou art a man of rare gifts, and thou hast studied long and much, thou hast questioned the past and present, the living and the dead, the stars and the flowers, the fields and groves, the winds and the waves, the day and night, and thou hast a keen, penetrating glance, and thou hast a warm, sympathetic soul, and yet thou art solitary in thick darkness; thou seest not the plainest things under thy very nose, thou seest not clearly even thy hand before thee. There is a bright and glorious universe around thee, full of light, love, and gladness, of which thou dreamest not; angels hover around thee and fan thee with their soft breath, and thou feelest them not; angel voices call to thee, in sweet music that trances the soul, but thou hearest them not; and because thou art blind, and deaf, and insensible, in thy foolish pride thou deniest what to every faith-illumined eye is as clear as the sun in the heavens, and to every faith-opened heart as distinct and dear as voice of lover or of friend. Alas! We are not ignorant of the blindness and deafness of those who are without faith, or of the strange illusion which makes us obstinately persist that we both see and hear. There is something weird and mysterious in the thoughts and feelings which come to us, unbidden, when we leave faith behind, and fix our gaze intently upon ourselves as upon some magic mirror. The circle of our vision seems to be enlarged; darkness is transformed to light, worlds open upon worlds; we send keen, penetrating glances into the infinite abyss of being; the elements grow obedient to us, work with us and for us, and we seem to be strong with their strength, terrible with their might, and to approach and to become identical with the Source of all things. God becomes comprehensible and communicable, and we live an elemental life, and burn with elemental fire. The universe flows into us and from us. We control the winds, the waves, the rivers and the tides, the stars and the seasons. We teach the plant when to germinate, to blossom, or ripen, the reed when to bend before the blast, and the lightning when to rive the hoary oak. Alas! We think not then that this is all delusion, and that we are under the influence of the fallen angel, who would persuade us that darkness is light, that weakness is strength, that hell is heaven, and himself God. Under a similar influence and delusion labors the author of these poems. There are passages in them which recall all too vividly what we, in our blindness and unbelief, have dreamed, but rarely ventured to utter. We know these poems; we understand them. They are not sacred chants; they are hymns to the devil. Not God, but Satan, do they praise, and they can be relished only by devil-worshippers. Yet we do not despair of our poet. He has a large share of religiosity, and his soul needs to prostrate itself before God and adore. There is a low, sad music in these poems, deep and melodious, which escapes the author unbidden, and which discloses a spirit ill at ease, a heart bewailing its bondage, and a secret intense longing to burst its chains, and to soar aloft to the heaven of divine love and freedom. This music is the echo of the angel voices still pleading with him, and entreating him to return from his wonderings, to open his eyes to the heaven which lies around him, his ears to the sweet voices which everywhere are chanting the praises of God. We must hope that ere long he will, through grace, burst the satanic cords which now bind him, open his eyes to the sweet vision of beauty that awaits him, and his ears to the harmony which floats on every breeze. Bear with me; nature never intended thee for an Indian gymnosophist or a heartless stoic. Thou art a man, with a warm, gushing human heart, and thou wast made to love and adore. Say, Get behind me, Satan! To the vain philosophizing thou hast indulged; have the courage to say thou hast been wrong, open thy heart to the light of heaven as the sunflower opens her bosom to the genial rays of the sun, and thy spirit will be free, thy genius will no longer be imprisoned, and thy heart will find what is sighs after, and wail no more. One who was as proud as thyself, and who had wondered long in the paths thou art beating, and whose eye was hardly less keen than thy own, and who knew by heart all thy mystic lore, and had as well as thou pored over the past and present , as well as thou had asked “The fate of the man-child, the meaning of man,” and had asked the heavens and the earth, the living and the dead, and, in his madness, hell itself, to answer him, and whose soul was not less susceptible to sweet harmonies than thy own, though his tones were harsh and his speech rude,- nay, one who knows all thy delusions and illusions, assures thee that thou shalt not in this be deceived, and thy confidence will not be misplaced or betrayed. |