certain of the ancient sages who were in the habit of guessing boldly at the open riddle of nature, made, amidst twenty absurd conjectures, one that has proved to be correct, we do not therefore give them the credit of a scientific discovery. One of these wise men of antiquity said that the sea was a great fish; he asserted also that the moon was an opaque body, and considerably larger than she appears to be. He was right about the moon; he was wrong about the fish; but as he speculated on both subjects in the same hap-hazard style, we give him very little more credit in the one case than the other. Perhaps his theory which transformed the sea into a fish, was that on which he prided himself most. Something of the same kind, though very different in degree, takes place in our judgment upon certain moral speculators. When a man of exuberant thought utters in the fervour or the fever of his mind what comes first, his fragments of wisdom seem as little to belong to him as his fragments of folly. The reader picks up, and carries off, what best pleases him, as if there were no owner there, as if it were treasure-trove, and he was entitled to it as first finder. He foregoes the accustomed habit of connecting his writer with the assemblage of thoughts presented to him, as their sole proprietor for the time being: "he cries halves," as Charles Lamb has said on some similar occasion, in whatever he pounces on.
The task of the critic on a writer of this class, becomes more than usually ungracious and irksome. He meets with a work abounding with traits of genius, and conspicuous also for its faults and imperfections. As a reader only, he gives himself up to the pleasure which the former of these inspire. Why should he disturb that pleasure by counting up the blemishes and errors? He sees, but passes rapidly over them; on the nobler passages he dwells, and to them alone he returns. But, as critic, he cannot resign himself entirely to this mood; or rather, after having resigned himself to it, after having enjoyed that only true perusal of a book in which we forget all but the truth we can extract from it, he must rouse himself to another and very different act of attention; he must note defects and blemishes, and caution against errors, and qualify his admiration by a recurrence to those very portions of the work which he before purposely hurried over.
We take up such a book as these Essays of Emerson. We are charmed with many delightful passages of racy eloquence, of original thought, of profound or of naive reflection. What if there are barren pages? What if sometimes there is a thick entangled underwood through which there is no penetrating? We are patient. We can endure the one, and for the other obstacle, in military phrase, we can turn it. The page is moveable. We are not bound, like the boa-constrictor, to swallow all or none. Meanwhile, in all conscience, there is sufficient for one feast. There is excellence enough to occupy one's utmost attention; there is beauty to be carried away, and truth to be appropriated. What more, from a single book, can any one reasonably desire? But if the task of criticism be imposed upon us, we must, nevertheless, sacrifice this easy and complacent mood, – this merely receptive disposition; we must re-examine; we must cavil and object; we must question of obscurity why it should stand there darkening the road; we must refuse admittance to mere paradox; we must expose the trifling conceit or fanciful analogy that would erect itself into high places, and assume the air of novel and profound truth.
Some portion of this less agreeable duty we will at once perform, that we may afterwards the more freely and heartily devote ourselves to the more pleasant task of calling attention to the works of a man of genius, – for we suspect that Emerson is not known in this country as he deserves to be. With some who have heard his name coupled with that of Carlyle, he passes for a sort of echo or double of the English writer. A more independent and original thinker can nowhere in this age be found. This praise must, at all events, be awarded him. And even in America – which has not the reputation of generally overlooking, or underrating, the merits of her own children – we understand that the reputation of Emerson is by no means what it ought to be; and many critics there who are dissatisfied with merely imitative talent, and demand a man of genius of their own, are not aware that he stands there amongst them.
When we accuse Mr Emerson of obscurity, it is not obscurity of style that we mean. His style often rises – as our readers have had already opportunities of judging – into a vivid, terse, and graphic eloquence, agreeably tinged at times with a poetic colouring; and although he occasionally adopts certain inversions which are not customary in modern prose, he never lays himself open to the charge of being difficult or unintelligible. But there is an obscurity of thought – in the very matter of his writings – produced first by a vein of mysticism which runs throughout his works, and, secondly, by a manner he sometimes has of sweeping together into one paragraph a number of unsorted ideas, but scantily related to each other – bringing up his drag-net with all manner of fish in it, and depositing it then and there before us.
Mysticism is a word often so vaguely and rashly applied, that we feel bound to explain the sense in which we use it. It is not because Mr Emerson is an idealist in his philosophy Рwhat we are in the habit in the present day of describing as the German school of metaphysics, though he does not appear to have drawn his tenets from the Germans, and more frequently quotes the name of Plato than that of Kant or Hegel Рit is not for this we pronounce him to be a mystic. Berkeley was no mystic. In support of this philosophy reasons may be adduced which appeal to the faculties, and are open to the examination of all men. We do not pronounce idealism to be mystical, but we pronounce him to be a mystic who upholds this, or any other philosophy, upon grounds of conviction not open to all rational men; whose convictions, in short, rest upon some profound intuition, some deep and peculiar source of knowledge, to which the great multitude of mankind are utter strangers. A man shall be an idealist, and welcome; we can discuss the matter with him, we can follow his reasonings, and if we cannot sustain ourselves in that nicely-balanced aerial position he has assumed, poised above the earth on a needle's point of faith, we can at least apprehend how the more subtle metaphysician has contrived to accomplish the feat. But the moment a man proclaims himself in the possession of any truth whatever, by an intuition of which we, and other men, find no traces in our own mind, then it is that we must, of force, abandon him to the sole enjoyment of an illumination we do not share, and which he cannot impart. We call him mystical, and he calls us blind, or sense-beclouded. We assume that he pretends to see where there is no vision, and no visual organ; he retorts that it is we, and the gross vulgar who have lost, or never attained, the high faculty of vision which he possesses. Whether it is Plato or Swedenborg, Pagan or Christian, who lays claim to this occult and oracular wisdom, we must proclaim it a delusion. It is in vain to tell us that these men may be the ̩lite of humanity, that they are thus signally favoured because they have more successfully cultivated their minds, both intellectually and morally, and purified them for the reception of a closer communion with the divine and all-sustaining and interpenetrating Intelligence, than is vouchsafed to the rest of mankind. We, who have nothing but our eyesight and our reason, we of the multitude who are not thus favoured, can, at all events, learn nothing from them. Whether above or beside human reason, they are equally remote from intellectual communion. We do not recognise their reason as reason, nor their truth as truth; and we call them mystics to express this unapproachable nature of their minds, this hopeless severance from intercommunion of thought, from even so much of contact as is requisite for the hostilities of controversy. These wisest of mankind are in the same predicament as the maddest of mankind; both believe that they are the only perfectly sane, and that all the rest of the world have lost their reason. The rest of the world hold the opposite opinion, and we are not aware that in either case there is any appeal but to the authority of numbers, to which, of course, neither the lunatic nor the mystic will submit.
We have frequent intimations in Mr Emerson's writings of this high intuitive source of truth. Take the following passage in the Essay on Self-reliance: —
"And now at last the highest truth on this subject remains unsaid, probably, cannot be said; for all that we say is the far off remembering of the intuition. The thought by what I can now nearest approach to say it, is this. When good is near you, when you have life in yourself, it is not by any known or appointed way; you shall not discern the foot-prints of any other; you shall not see the face of man; you shall not hear any name; the way, the thought, the good, shall be wholly strange and new; it shall exclude all other being. You take the way from man not to man. All persons that ever existed are its fugitive
