For knowledge of the heart of man, we
must go to those who were closer to the passions and interests of actual
and varied life than Emerson ever could have been--to Horace, Montaigne,
La Bruyere, Swift, Moliere, even to Pope. If a hostile critic were to
say that Emerson looked at life too much from the outside, as the
clergyman is apt to do, we should condemn such a remark as a
disparagement, but we should understand what it is in Emerson that the
critic means. He has not the temperament of the great humorists, under
whatever planet they may have been born, jovial, mercurial, or
saturnine. Even his revolt against formalism is only a new fashion of
composure, and sometimes comes dangerously near to moral dilettantism.
The persistent identification of everything in nature with everything
else sometimes bewilders, fatigues, and almost afflicts us. Though he
warns us that our civilisation is not near its meridian, but as yet only
in the cock-crowing and the morning star, still all ages are much alike
with him: man is always man, 'society never advances,' and he does
almost as little as Carlyle himself to fire men with faith in social
progress as the crown of wise endeavour. But when all these deductions
have been made and amply allowed for, Emerson remains among the most
persuasive and inspiring of those who by word and example rebuke our
despondency, purify our sight, awaken us from the deadening slumbers of
convention and conformity, exorcise the pestering imps of vanity, and
lift men up from low thoughts and sullen moods of helplessness and
impiety.
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