The essays on Domestic Life, on Behaviour, on
Manners, are examples of the attention that Emerson paid to the right
handling of the outer conditions of a wise and brave life. With him
small circumstances are the occasions of great qualities. The parlour
and the counting-house are as fit scenes for fortitude, self-control,
considerateness, and vision, as the senate or the battlefield. He
re-classifies the virtues. No modern, for example, has given so
remarkable a place to Friendship among the sacred necessities of
well-endowed character. Neither Plato nor Cicero, least of all Bacon,
has risen to so noble and profound a conception of this most strangely
commingled of all human affections. There is no modern thinker, again,
who makes Beauty--all that is gracious, seemly, and becoming--so
conspicuous and essential a part of life. It would be inexact to say
that Emerson blended the beautiful with the precepts of duty or of
prudence into one complex sentiment, as the Greeks did, but his theory
of excellence might be better described than any other of modern times
by the [Greek: kalokagathia], the virtue of the true gentleman, as set
down in Plato and Aristotle.
So untrue is it that in his quality of Sage Emerson always haunted the
perilous altitudes of Transcendentalism, 'seeing nothing under him but
the everlasting snows of Himalaya, the Earth shrinking to a Planet, and
the indigo Firmament sowing itself with daylight stars.
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