The Life of Emerson

[E. P. Dutton, $3.00]

THERE are certain writers who mystify Prince Posterity at his task of valuing the survivors of popular fashions and disasters. In the history of English letters, posterity will know, as we know, where to place Shakespeare and Milton, to what ordering to assign Chaucer and Addison and Thackeray. But Blake? There is as yet no sure judgment formed with which all the best readers must agree as to where Blake belongs in the hierarchy of English men of letters. And in American literature there is not yet delivered an estimate of Emerson that may be taken as standard. Irving, yes; Lowell, yes; Mark Twain, yes; but Emerson is our Proteus of letters, taking easily different shapes as different critical hands reach for his essence. Irving Babbitt and Norman Foerster have emphasized the humanistie phases of Emerson’s writing, and we grant that these are really present, but Professor Babbitt and Professor Foerster admit that Emerson was in part a romanticist, and in their admission we also concur. Van Wyck Brooks and his disciple, Lewis Mumford, do Emerson justice as a romanticist, and are convincing as we read them. I think we may say that American criticism so far lacks the really fine instruments for apprehending this fugitive essence that animated now classical and now romantic aspects of the same man. I think we have not advanced to a more accurate statement than Matthew Arnold’s: ‘ We have not in Emerson a great poet, a great writer, a great philosophy-maker. . . . He is the friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit.'

Under the circumstances, Mr. Brooks is probably sagacious in writing a biography that is not critical (like those models of critical biography in the old English Men of letters series, edited by John Morley); he has tried rather to bring out the emotional quality of Emerson’s life, to present him simply as one inspired and remarkably capable of inspiring others, ‘the friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit,’In this Mr. Brooks has succeeded well. His Life of Emerson flows swiftly on a current of eager love for the subject. As we should expect, Mr. Brooks is again very persuasive, felicitous in his metaphors, and exalted in his feeling for noble letters. For once he is concerned with what he conceives to be true success in American literary history, and the change is welcome after the theses of failure he advanced in the cases of Mark Twain and Henry James, and no one, I fancy, in the first moment of thankfulness for the long-delayed Life of Emerson, will make more than mention of the fact that Mr. Brooks probably exaggerates his thesis of Emerson’s fruition as much as he certainly exaggerated the ‘failure’ of James and Mark Twain.

Nor do I wish here to quarrel with Mr. Brooks’s method, which he defines as ‘imputed autobiography, the subject speaking for himself in phrases that are often his own. That method has involved Mr. Brooks in trouble in the past, notably when an authority on Henry James, Miss Edna Kenton, came to track down the autobiographical thoughts imputed to James. The method yields the virtues of vividness, actuality, liveliness, and the special insight that comes from standing very near to the subject even if perspective suffers. And some readers will be glad that psychoanalysis as a technique of interpretation no longer figures in Mr. Brooks s study (though it is true he identifies the Over-soul with the ‘unconscious’).

It is a triumph we ought to remark upon, and not this or that doubt, and the triumph is this: the whole Concord milieu stands before us, painted more charmingly, more clearly than ever before. Emerson is before us, but what is most delightful is that the entire company about him lives in warm colors — Thoreau, Channing, Alcott, Sanborn, Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, the Boston wits, Carlyle and Landor, the farmers, the politicians of the day. We are transported into the midst of the activities of the greatest school of writers our literature has produced, and our sense of being there in the midst of a group seems to me Mr. Brooks’s real achievement. GORHAM MUNSON