namely, by the perception of the real and unreal, setting aside matter, and qualities, and affections or emotions and persons, and actions, as Maias or illusions, and thus arriving at the contemplation of the one eternal Life and Cause, and a perpetual approach and assimilation to Him . . . . . The way to freedom is through illusion to the central reality beyond; it is the Hindu way, for Emerson too. Let him speak for himself: But the Hindoos, in their sacred writings, express the liveliest feeling, both of the essential identity, and of that illusion which they conceive variety to be . . . . . And the beatitude of man they hold to lie in being freed from fascination. With this testimony to Oriental influence, Emerson goes on to present his version of the beatitude of man: "Every moment, new changes, and new showers of deceptions, to baffle and distract him. And when, by-and-by, for an instant, the air clears, and the cloud lifts a little, there are the gods still sitting around him on their thrones,—they alone with him alone." If I have made Emerson's thought clear, this experience will be realized because of the tenet of Fate, Worship of Morals, and the tenet of Freedom, which give unusual cogency to The Conduct of Life and reveal the power of Oriental influence on Emerson's mature conception of life. There are times in these last essays when the shadow of a meditating Buddha grows so deep as almost to obscure the Yankee who comes out in the vocabulary and startles us with his motor imagination. To readers, the contradiction which the speculative and practical sides of Emerson have always presented will assume alarming proportions if they are asked to see it as the opposition of passive Oriental and active Occidental. But one way of helping to solve a problem is to magnify the elements which seem irreconcilable. To think, to actthese are the simplest terms in which we can state the opposition. Think of the times when Emerson gives all to one or the other, or demands that one complete the other; are they merely instances of his asserted right to inconsis tency? To make matters worse, we remember that the man who could raise fine apples and sell them at the best prices in the Concord market was also the man who wrote, "The rich mind lies in the sun and sleeps, and is Nature. To think is to act."28 No wonder he was called shrewd; if these two ideas ever entered the minds of his hard-headed neighbors at the same time, he was probably thought of in much less flattering terms. Among these neighbors there certainly were many who thought as the father of "Poor Richard," who queerly enough appears as the antagonist of Transcendentalism in a passage in Emerson's Journals. In this clash between the practical and the Transcendental we should discover some answer to the contradiction which troubles us. "Transcendentalism says, the Man is all. The world can be reeled off any stick indifferently. Franklin says, the tools: riches, old age, land, health; the tools . . . . A master and tools, is the lesson I read in every shop and farm and library. There must be both. . . . . The wise man sees that we cannot spare any advantages, and that the tools are effigies and statues of men also . . . "29 Our answer is in that italicized and, though its efficacy rests on the philosophy of identity. Emerson, being a wise man, did not neglect the tools of life, though he never forgot that man was their master and that tools at their best are the effigies and statues of men, or that there is what he called, Law for man, and law for thing.30 He realized how necessary the last was to the building of town and fleet, but also how imperative its control was to man, lest it "the man unking." As in the Oriental doctrine of Maya, the law for thing was a discipline of the soul; and since Man could not spare any advantages, he worked out his perfection with tools that became his effigies and statues but never his masters. Emerson admired great doers and thinkers because both revealed the conquest of mind by virtue of the laws of the world, and the dualism which he saw in the world he recog 28 Spiritual Laws, Essays, First Series. 29 Journals, vol. 7, p. 268. 30 Ode to W. H. Channing. nized in his life. That he saw no essential contradiction in this recognition appears in a passage in the Journals which he quotes from the Bhagavat Ghita: Children only, and not the learned, speak of the speculative and the practical doctrines, as two. They are but one, for both obtain the self-same end, and the place which is gained by the following of the one is gained by the following of the other. That man seeth who seeth that the speculative doctrines and the practical are one.31 By virtue of the law of identity, the self-same end was the mastery of soul of the Brahman, or the development and perfection of man, as Emerson thought. However Mayalike the world might become to him, it was still the Beautiful Necessity to self-conquest and essential to the conduct of life. The Journals32 show that Chinese shrewdness in the economics of life appealed to Emerson and was no more contradictory to him than the dualism he saw in the world. He wavered no oftener in his allegiance to the idea I have outlined than he was puzzled by the illusions of life or moved by the envy which the black-coated race of men has for the workers. If at times he makes a special plea for thought, as in the conclusion to "The Transcendentalist," it is in reaction to his motor-minded environment, which at other times prompted him to glorify action at the expense of thought, and which kept him a Yankee in his respect for the law of things, but a Yankee who justified himself under the aspect of eternity. What seems to be a kind of Oriental passivity in Emerson is really his highest form of activity-thought, which moves the heavens and all the stars, and then most when the outward man is passive, or at best "a transparent eyeball" through which the currents of Universal Being pass to the induced activity of a mind in communion with the Over-Soul. But this Buddha of meditation was capable of turning his hand to the apple-cart of the Yankee. His character is at least no more difficult to understand than his 31 Journals, vol. 7, p. 68. 32 Cf. Journals, vol. 6, p. 459. The mere fact that Confucius appears so often in his reading is good evidence that practical Chinese thought satisfied part of his nature. world of thought, which draws the homage of both Orient and Occident in a land somewhere between. The essence of what I have said about Emerson the Oriental may be found in his poem "Brahma," with the commentary of Journal and essay, and may be explained by his psychological kinship with the East. In the last analysis, it seems to me that Emerson's chief concern is with the moral and spiritual laws of the mind; the mental constructions which the philosopher may claim in him are themselves the result of the structural action of his mind, and from that action derive their value for him. The essence of his thought is an idealism in which the equality sign makes strange bedfellows; to him things reveal their fundamental identity in the equation of the Over-Soul. Such ideas as the annihilation of time and space, the mystic view of nature, the doctrine of Illusions, the magnifying of fate, and the liberation of mind from matter are peculiarly Oriental,* but no less native to the mind of Emerson and necessary as the laws of his mental life. When he says, "To think is to act," it is the Oriental speaking in the soft idiom of the passive East. Never is he more Oriental than in his argument in "Experience" concerning the death of his son, and never does the blood of the Yankee seem more diluted with the ichor of Brahma than in that bloodless moment. Perhaps I have exaggerated the Oriental in Emerson at the expense of the Platonist; the Yankee we can never mistake. If I have, the exaggeration is necessary, for the Oriental has been too long overlooked or undervalued. When we least understand Emerson, it is because the Oriental is speaking in the Concord sage who found the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercised him.33 Criticism has yet to catch the asymmetrical mind of Emerson as the bust in the Concord Library has caught his asymmetrical face. * See J. Estlin Carpenter, Theism in Medieval India (London, Constable & Co., Ltd., 1926)—an exhaustive account of the Religions of India. For the ideas in brief, see pp. 172–197. SHIP MODELS CRISTEL HASTINGS You stand in shadowed nooks with all sails set You wait in quiet corners wistfully With sails high flung to trades that never blow, Your lines are taut with hidden eagerness To sail the seven seas and plow the blue, To listen to the chanting of the trades And see dim ports that once, in dreams, you knew. But never may you fly before the wind Hull down with your proud kin on sapphire streams While shelves above a hearth remain your piers Where voyages are made only in dreams. |