Part 7

One can scarcely overrate the importance of thus holding fast to happiness and hope. It gives to Emerson’s work an invaluable virtue. 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. Let us be just to Carlyle, provoking though he often is. Not only has he that genius of his which makes Emerson say truly of his letters, that ‘they savour always of eternity.’ More than this may be said of him. The scope and upshot of his teaching are true; ‘his guiding genius,’ to quote Emerson again, is really ‘his moral sense, his perception of the sole importance of truth and justice.’ But consider Carlyle’s temper, as we have been considering Emerson’s! take his own account of it! ‘Perhaps London is the proper place for me after all, seeing all places are _im_proper: who knows? Meanwhile, I lead a most dyspeptic, solitary, self-shrouded life; consuming, if possible in silence, my considerable daily allotment of pain; glad when any strength is left in me for writing, which is the only use I can see in myself,—too rare a case of late. The ground of my existence is black as death; too black, when all _void_ too; but at times there paint themselves on it pictures of gold, and rainbow, and lightning; all the brighter for the black ground, I suppose. Withal, I am very much of a fool.’—No, not a fool, but turbid and morbid, wilful and perverse. ‘We judge of a man’s wisdom by his hope.’

Carlyle’s perverse attitude towards happiness cuts him off from hope. He fiercely attacks the desire for happiness; his grand point in _Sartor_, his secret in which the soul may find rest, is that one shall cease to desire happiness, that one should learn to say to oneself: ‘What if thou wert born and predestined not to be happy, but to be unhappy!’ He is wrong; Saint Augustine is the better philosopher, who says: ‘Act we _must_ in pursuance of what gives us most delight.’ Epictetus and Augustine can be severe moralists enough; but both of them know and frankly say that the desire for happiness is the root and ground of man’s being. Tell him and show him that he places his happiness wrong, that he seeks for delight where delight will never be really found; then you illumine and further him. But you only confuse him by telling him to cease to desire happiness; and you will not tell him this unless you are already confused yourself.

Carlyle preached the dignity of labour, the necessity of righteousness, the love of veracity, the hatred of shams. He is said by many people to be a great teacher, a great helper for us, because he does so. But what is the due and eternal result of labour, righteousness, veracity?—Happiness. And how are we drawn to them by one who, instead of making us feel that with them is happiness, tells us that perhaps we were predestined not to be happy but to be unhappy?

You will find, in especial, many earnest preachers of our popular religion to be fervent in their praise and admiration of Carlyle. His insistence on labour, righteousness, and veracity, pleases them; his contempt for happiness pleases them too. I read the other day a tract against smoking, although I do not happen to be a smoker myself. ‘Smoking,’ said the tract, ‘is liked because it gives agreeable sensations. Now it is a positive objection to a thing that it gives agreeable sensations. An earnest man will expressly avoid what gives agreeable sensations.’ Shortly afterwards I was inspecting a school, and I found the children reading a piece of poetry on the common theme that we are here to-day and gone to-morrow. I shall soon be gone, the speaker in this poem was made to say,—

‘And I shall be glad to go, For the world at best is a dreary place, And my life is getting low.’

How usual a language of popular religion that is, on our side of the Atlantic at any rate! But then our popular religion, in disparaging happiness here below, knows very well what it is after. It has its eye on a happiness in a future life above the clouds, in the New Jerusalem, to be won by disliking and rejecting happiness here on earth. And so long as this ideal stands fast, it is very well. But for very many it now stands fast no longer; for Carlyle, at any rate, it had failed and vanished. Happiness in labour, righteousness, and veracity,—in the life of the spirit,—here was a gospel still for Carlyle to preach, and to help others by preaching. But he baffled them and himself by preferring the paradox that we are not born for happiness at all.

Happiness in labour, righteousness, and veracity; in all the life of the spirit; happiness and eternal hope;—that was Emerson’s gospel. I hear it said that Emerson was too sanguine; that the actual generation in America is not turning out so well as he expected. Very likely he was too sanguine as to the near future; in this country it is difficult not to be too sanguine. Very possibly the present generation may prove unworthy of his high hopes; even several generations succeeding this may prove unworthy of them. But by his conviction that in the life of the spirit is happiness, and by his hope that this life of the spirit will come more and more to be sanely understood, and to prevail, and to work for happiness,—by this conviction and hope Emerson was great, and he will surely prove in the end to have been right in them. In this country it is difficult, as I said, not to be sanguine. Very many of your writers are over-sanguine, and on the wrong grounds. But you have two men who in what they have written show their sanguineness in a line where courage and hope are just, where they are also infinitely important, but where they are not easy. The two men are Franklin and Emerson.[5] These two are, I think, the most distinctively and honourably American of your writers; they are the most original and the most valuable. Wise men everywhere know that we must keep up our courage and hope; they know that hope is, as Wordsworth well says,—

‘The paramount _duty_ which Heaven lays, For its own honour, on man’s suffering heart.’

But the very word _duty_ points to an effort and a struggle to maintain our hope unbroken. Franklin and Emerson maintained theirs with a convincing ease, an inspiring joy. Franklin’s confidence in the happiness with which industry, honesty, and economy will crown the life of this work-day world, is such that he runs over with felicity. With a like felicity does Emerson run over, when he contemplates the happiness eternally attached to the true life in the spirit. You cannot prize him too much, nor heed him too diligently. He has lessons for both the branches of our race. I figure him to my mind as visible upon earth still, as still standing here by Boston Bay, or at his own Concord, in his habit as he lived, but of heightened stature and shining feature, with one hand stretched out towards the East, to our laden and labouring England; the other towards the ever-growing West, to his own dearly-loved America,—‘great, intelligent, sensual, avaricious America.’ To us he shows for guidance his lucid freedom, his cheerfulness and hope; to you his dignity, delicacy, serenity, elevation.

THE END.

_Printed by R. & R. Clark, Edinburgh._

[Footnotes]

1. _Philippians_, iv, 8.

2. Ὅσα σεμνά.

3. _Ecclesiastes_, viii. 17.

4. _Iliad_, xxiv. 49.

5. I found with pleasure that this conjunction of Emerson’s name with Franklin’s had already occurred to an accomplished writer and delightful man, a friend of Emerson, left almost the sole survivor, alas! of the famous literary generation of Boston,—Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. Dr. Holmes has kindly allowed me to print here the ingenious and interesting lines, hitherto unpublished, in which he speaks of Emerson thus:—

‘Where in the realm of thought, whose air is song, Does he, the Buddha of the West, belong? He seems a wingéd Franklin, sweetly wise, Born to unlock the secret of the skies; And which the nobler calling—if ’tis fair Terrestrial with celestial to compare— To guide the storm-cloud’s elemental flame, Or walk the chambers whence the lightning came Amidst the sources of its subtile fire, And steal their effluence for his lips and lyre?’