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To the emigrants from the Old World, Murat explains the spirit of the New. Let nobody come from Europe to America, to settle and succeed, unless he shows a real partiality for American institutions. If one can boast of having been, in the Old World, the victim of some persecution, so much the better for him. He will be at home in the States. To succeed there, one must be the first to offer something new. To this fine bit of a program for an up-to-date publicity agent, Prince Murat adds the following, wherein Emerson might well have found one capital article of his own declaration of independence: "There [in America] all depends on individual exertion and self-reliance." To modern sociologists, Murat offers his theory that every new community is an experiment along the whole line of social growth and evolution. Come to the New World, those who want to see how societies grow and are born! Chapters XI and XII seem already to take for granted the views of later day travelers concerning "American energy" and "vie intense." Murat lays stress on what seems to him the very nerve and soul of life, individual, economic, and social in the United States: "Active, energetic, and persevering competition is the secret mainspring to our American system-fortune, power, love, and riches, all these treasures, are the rewards of the skilful and enterprising. The continual competition-this unceasing strife as it were, of all against all, creates an activity in the general intercourse of society, producing the most happy result.”

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The last pages of Murat's book are a short but suggestive attempt to give an interpretation of American art and literature. "Every one in America is more or less of a literary turn, for all received a good education." On the other hand, according to Murat, prejudices and the puritan restraint are too strong to allow art to grow. Liberty in politics ought to be duplicated by freedom in art, within the limits of "bienséances."

Efforts are now making in all parts of the States for the protection of the arts. Each town, large or small, has a museum, chiefly of busts in plaster, and mere daubs, decorated with the names of the great masters. All these are useless. The sentiment belonging to the fine arts, without which genius is nothing, exists not, and can never exist, in the United States, so long as such prejudice of opinion and manners remains the same.

Do away with the illiberal impediments and prudish "false delicacy," and you remove the reproach that America is deficient in the fine arts.

There is a palpable contradiction between the efforts now making for the encouragement of the fine arts in America, and the austerity of public morals in our present [1832] social state; we have no artists generally speaking, nor can we have.

The following are the last lines of America and the Americans:

We are not the people of poetry but reason-our soil is more adapted to the cultivation of the sciences than of the arts; and we look forward to happiness rather than pleasure. Which is preferable of the two? To obtain perfection in both, our social system requires to be inoculated with a little of the juste milieu. We then approach perfection without the sacrifice of virtuous sentiment.

Such is the man Emerson met in 1827, in Saint Augustine, and whom he probably visited at Tallahassee. We understand now the fascination he exerted on Emerson during their "incessant talks." The field of Murat's curiosity was very wide. He did not forget in his book the chief topic of interest for Emerson at that time, i.e., religion. Murat had inherited from the French philosophers of the eighteenth century their dislike for "superstition." His views on the subject betray the jacobin à la Jefferson or à la Thomas Paine. Living in the United States for a score of years, however, had made Murat fairly tolerant. His chapter on Unitarianism, written the year following his meeting with Emerson, shows a fair appreciation of that liberal and rational creed. "Nothing can be more simple than its tenets. Their worship [of the Unitarians] is pure, elegant,

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and free from all sort of ceremony and superstition; they address themselves solely to the mind's reason. . . . They have at their head a man of the rarest merit, and most exemplary virtue, a true Plato, Dr. Channing.' Murat, in a letter to Emerson, will go so far as to invite him to come to settle in the South as an Unitarian missionary.

During those nine days "becalmed" and "tempesttossed," from Saint Augustine to Charleston, Murat and Emerson discussed the religious problem. Though he still stood on orthodox grounds, Emerson's faith was none of the steadiest. Assailed by doubts, he tried to steer a middle course and, to quiet his growing revolts, he had recourse to a new method which he exposed to his Aunt Mary Moody: "Suppose we could lose our hold on the foundations of Christianity, would there be nothing satisfying in esteeming it also a great permitted engine of most exact and benign adaptation to the wants of many past ages, and so, yielding to an offensive aphorism, that what is absolutely false may be relatively true?" Against the growing claims of biblical, and especially German criticism, as against the skepticism of Hume and Gibbon, Emerson holds that, even deprived of historical or rational proofs, Christianity will do as a system of vital truths, or, as Ernest Renan had it, before the modernist theologians, that, while false concerning its object, religion may be true concerning the subject. "A humble disciple in the school of truth," Murat on this point met Emerson with his own challenge. He began by loosing on Emerson the heavy artillery of skeptical arguments, and the first encounter seemed to spell disaster for Emerson. The controversy lasted several months. In the fall of 1827 we see Emerson writing to Murat from Cambridge, and Murat's answer has been kept in Emerson's Journals with the original spelling. Murat writes from Bordentown, where he is visiting Joseph Bonaparte. He has been sick and unable

to keep his promise to continue the religious discussion with Emerson. Besides, Murat's attitude has changed. His doctrine of truth is not one of unflinching and readymade adhesion. "I must tell you candidly," writes Murat, "that the state of my mind has been altered since our meeting. Your system has acquired as much in proberbility as mine has lost in certainty, both seem to me now nearly equally proberable. I have accordingly only one test left-that of expediency." Reading the above by Murat, one recalls to mind the following by the chief sponsor of pragmatism: "The true," writes William James, "is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as the right is the only expedient in the way of our behaving." Really, "a new name for some old ways of thinking," is pragmatism. As "first a method, and second a genetic theory of what is meant by truth," the following of Murat still reads very much as an anticipation of William James. Murat believes that, if Emerson's views of religion may, "in barbarous time of obscurity and ignorance," "be more useful," the case is different "in a refined state of society." "A necessary preliminary, however, is to assertain how far we can have an absolute notion of truth. This is paramount to all subsequent indigations." Murat then announces that, as soon as he shall be home and feel better, he will write "a monography of truth" for which he has been collecting materials, and of which he has already spoken to Emerson.

This anticipation of the pragmatic method, in 1827, by Napoleon's nephew, the son of an ex-king of Naples, a colonel of Belgian lancers, and an American citizen by adoption, certainly deserves a special notice.

That Murat made a deep impression on Emerson is evident from the latter's Journals. Murat helped him to free himself from the shackles of dogmatism at the most critical period of his life. Bent upon reconciling sentiment and reason in a new definition of what true

religion must be, outside of any formal creed, Emerson took lessons from Murat. In fact Emerson never forgot that "ardent lover of truth." As he will write in Society and Solitude: "If we recall the rare hours when we encountered the best persons, we there found ourselves and then, first, society seemed to exist. That was society, though in the transom of a brig, or on the Florida Keys." Achille Murat remained one of Emerson's representative men. He quotes him, along with Wordsworth, as a type of "heroic manners," and praises him for his "sweet tempered ability and a scientific estimate of popular opinion." Some ten years after their meeting, he still ranks Murat among "the scattered company who have ministered to his highest wants," "a strange class, plain and wise, whose charm is wonderful, how elevating! How far was their voice from the voice of vanity, of display, of interest, of tradition!" Those men have been to Emerson what the Wanderer was to Wordsworth in the Excursion. "They are the argument for the spiritual world, for their spirit is it. Nothing is impossible, since such communion has already been. Whilst we hear them speak, how frivolous are the distinctions of fortune, and the voice of fame is as unaffecting as the tinkle of the passing sleigh bell."

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