Emerson on the Organic

 Principle in Art

by Norman Foerster

I

One could not desire a better instance of the need of defining critical terms than is afforded by a comparison of Poe's and of Emerson's definition of art. Since Poe defined poetry as "the rhythmical creation of beauty," he would necessarily have defined art in general as "the creation of beauty." Now, although Emerson's view of art is in striking contrast with Poe's, he begins with these very words. In his first book, Nature, he says, "The creation of beauty is Art." What does he mean?

In the Introduction to Nature Emerson inaugurates his career as a writer with the Aristotelian distinction between art and nature and between useful and fine art. Expanding these distinctions, he discusses Nature in section I, useful art in section II (Commodity), and fine art in section III (Beauty). The love of beauty, or Taste, exists in various degrees in all men; the creation of beauty, or Art, is the capacity of the few. These few, not content with admiring beauty, "seek to embody it in new forms"--to combine the innumerable forms of nature in such wise as to show that they are fundamentally the same. For "nature is a sea of forms radically alike," and "gliding through the sea of form" is that which makes the forms alike. Beauty.  Beauty is an ultimate end, "eternal beauty,"--"God is the all-fair." It cannot, therefore, as Emerson says elsewhere, be defined, lying, like Truth, beyond the limits of the "understanding."

But if we cannot define eternal beauty, we can indicate with some definiteness what we mean by "the creation of beauty." Much as the artist loves the manifold things of nature, he intuitively perceives that their differences are of small account, that, penetrated with his thought, they are all alike. "A leaf, a sunbeam, a landscape, the ocean, make an analogous impression on the mind." It is this intuition, this spiritual activity within the artist's mind, that is fundamental. Thought is supreme, and nature is only its vehicle, as Emerson asserts at length in the fourth section of Nature (Language). The objects of nature are symbols of our thought; "the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind." It is the office of the artist, not to know unity in unity, but to show unity in variety. He must relate the two worlds, connect his thought with an appropriate symbol or mass of symbols. If he dwells at the heart of reality, indeed, he finds all symbols expressive of all meanings. "In the transmission of the heavenly waters," Emerson writes in Representative Men, "every hose fits every hydrant"; or, to return to Nature, we may see in Shakespeare a sovereign mastery of the world of symbols: "His imperial muse tosses the creation like a bauble from hand to hand, and uses it to embody any caprice of thought that is uppermost in his mind. The remotest spaces of nature are visited, and the farthest sundered things are brought together, by a subtile spiritual connection." His symbols, literally "far-fetched," fit the thought perfectly, like print and seal. It is the lesser poets, whose symbols and thought are ill related, that give us figures far-fetched in the usual sense. The great poet shows the equivalence of symbolical value; he can reveal spiritual meaning, or beauty, in all of nature. To him there is no ugly, for what we call the ugly is merely that which is viewed alone--the "Each" seen out of relation with the "All." He takes the objects of nature, any objects of nature, unfixes them, "makes them revolve around the axis of his primary thought, and disposes them anew." That is "the creation of beauty."

Again and again, in the series of volumes that follows Nature, Emerson returns to these ideas, fully elaborating if not quite defining them. His favorite approach may be indicated by saying that he regarded all great art as organic expression.

This fruitful biological analogy, which had its origin in Plato and Aristotle but was submerged or ignored in the centuries that followed, was revived early in the romantic movement, and has been prominent ever since, markedly in the aesthetic of Benedetto Croce. Emerson doubtless encountered it in various places--in Coleridge at the least. In Coleridge, too, Poe probably encountered it, without being impressed; for although Poe asserts that Shelley contained his own law, in the main he thought of artistic laws as being consciously evolved by the critic and consciously applied--almost mechanically applied--by the artist. To Emerson, on the other hand, it was a fundamental conception capable of answering all our questions about the nature and practice of art. It is true that in his own writing, his own practice of art, Emerson was notoriously deficient in the organic law in its formal aspect; his essays and poems are badly organized, the parts having no definite relation to each other and the wholes wanting that unity which we find in the organisms of nature. Rarely does he give us even a beginning, middle, and end, which is the very least that we expect of an organism, which, indeed, we expect of a mechanism. Yet if he could not observe the law of organic form, he could interpret it; in this matter his practice and his theory are not equivalent--happily, he could see more than he could do. Moreover, he could both see and exemplify the workings of the organic law in its qualitative aspect. He is the friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit, because of his insight--rare in these times of inner disharmony--into the life of the spirit, and because of his power to speak as one having authority. Whatever the lapses into caprice and wilfulness of which he was guilty, in the main he makes us feel that his utterance proceeds from a transcendent reality.

Like Schlegel and Coleridge, Emerson distinguishes between the organic and the mechanic. The conception of beauty to which the preceding century tended, that it is "outside embellishment," he decisively rejects. Seeking analogies in nature, he reminds us that grace of outline and movement, as in the cat and the deer, are produced by a happily proportioned skeleton, and that "the tint of the flower proceeds from its root, and the lustres of the sea-shell begin with its existence." The difference between mechanical construction and organic form, he writes in the Journals,

. . . is the difference between the carpenter who makes a box, and the mother who bears a child. The box was all in the carpenter; but the child was not all in the parents. They knew no more of the child's formation than they did of their own. They were merely channels through which the child's nature flowed from quite another and eternal power, and the child is as much a wonder to them as to any; and, like the child Jesus, shall, as he matures, convert and guide them as if he were the parent.

The doctrine of the organic, though it does not appear in the earliest writing of Emerson, was readily assimilated into the idealism with which he began. Thus in Nature the way is already prepared in such a NeoPlatonic passage as this:

There seems to be a necessity in spirit to manifest itself in material forms; and day and night, river and storm, beast and bird, acid and alkali, pre-exist in necessary Ideas in the mind of God, and are what they are by virtue of preceding affections in the world of spirit. A Fact is the end or last issue of spirit.

The emanation which here explains the concrete facts of nature is paralleled by the inspiration which, in Emerson's philosophy of art, explains the concrete work of art. Fact and poem alike spring from the creative spirit, and the poet, as the romantic critics liked to say, repeats in the finite the creative process of the Infinite Creator, and is the agent of that Creator. So long as he is a faithful agent and reports truly his high message, his verse is necessary and universal. Intuition and expression alike are dictated by that supreme Life or Spirit, and so are organic in the profoundest sense. Spirit expresses itself in the poet's intuition, and the poet's intuition expresses itself in the words and music of the poem. Spirit gives the divine hint to the poet, and the poet passes it on to all men, using a form that is excellent in proportion as it is determined by the hint itself, not arbitrarily devised by the poet. "For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem,--a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing." Thus the poem, we may say--though Emerson does not use the terms--has organic beauty in a twofold sense, qualitatively and quantitatively. That is, it derives a qualitative beauty from the relative depth of the intuition or hint which the poet possessed, and a quantitative beauty from the degree of success with which he externalized, or expressed concretely, this intuition. If Emerson nowhere states his meaning quite so definitely, it is nevertheless plain that this distinction exists implicitly in his text. We are clarifying his sense, not distorting it.

Which of the two, quality or quantity, interested him the more needs no shrewd guess--he was engrossed in organic quality, as Poe was in mechanical quantity. Yet if he does not say much about the explication of the intuition, what he does say is well worth dwelling upon.

II

The law of the organic or necessary regarded quantitatively requires above all that there be a fitness of means to end. It holds not only of physical nature--the cell of the bee, the bone of the bird, having this perfect adaptation--but equally of spiritual nature--of the architect's building, of the poem. Emerson quotes Michelangelo's definition of art as "the purgation of superfluities" and holds that in artistic structures as in natural structures not a particle may be spared. The simplest expression, the severest economy, is the test of beauty of means. "We ascribe beauty to that . . . which exactly answers its end." There must be no fumbling with words, no acceptance of the nearly fit, no satisfaction in the rhythm that may be sung but does not sing itself, no embellishment, no laying on of colors, but the work of art must perfectly represent its thought. "Fitness is so inseparable an accompaniment of beauty that it has been taken for it"--beauty is more than fitness, but must include fitness. Wanting that, the poem, the picture, the sculpture, however high it may aim, will be frustrate, of negligible effect on the reader or beholder. Having fitness, it will stir men forever. All the great works of art, whatever the intuition they embody, have this perfect adaptation of means to end.

So intimate, indeed, is this adaptation in the work of the supreme artists that we shall try in vain to separate intuition and expression: here Emerson in large measure anticipates the expressionist criticism of Signor Croce. What form should the poet give to his intuition? Let him "ask the fact for the form. For a verse is not a vehicle to carry a sentence as a jewel is carried in a case: the verse must be alive, and inseparable from its contents, as the soul of man inspires and directs the body." The superior poem is unanalyzable; word and thought cannot be severed. But in the inferior poem they fall apart, and we can distinguish between the vaguely held thought and the awkward or conventional expression. In any poem, we can measure the degree of inspiration by the degree of necessity in the expression. In the ideal poem, this necessity is absolute, down to the single word. "There is always a right word, and every other than that is wrong," Emerson inscribed in his journal when he was but twenty-eight years old, long before Flaubert announced this austere doctrine. Not by calculation, by conscious selection, does the master find the right word: "There is no choice of words for him who clearly sees the truth. That provides him with the best word.""The master rushes to deliver his thought, and the words and images fly to him to express it; whilst colder moods are forced to respect the ways of saying it, and insinuate, or, as it were, muffle the fact to suit the poverty or caprice of their expression, so that they only hint the matter, or allude to it, being unable to fuse and mould their words and images to fluid obedience." The poet seeks to marry music to thought, "believing, as we believe of all marriage, that matches are made in heaven, and that for every thought its proper melody exists, though the odds are immense against our finding it, and only genius can rightly say the banns.""The poet works to an end above his will, and by means, too, which are out of his will. . . . The muse may be defined, Supervoluntary ends effected by supervoluntary means." In such passages as these Emerson anticipates the profoundest reaches of recent æsthetics.

Yet on one point he is curiously inconsistent. While holding this conception of the inseparableness of content and vehicle, Emerson was well pleased with translations, which are virtually a denial of this conception. One need not speak very strictly to say that the precious life-blood of a master-spirit cannot be successfully transfused; obviously, those who would really commune with the master must partake of his body and blood directly. The intuition that has been expressed we can experience only through its expression; for the translation is the equivalent, not of the original intuition, but of the translator's intuition, and between the two there is commonly a wide difference. Accordingly, Thoreau, for example, says that he does not read the classics in translations, for there are none; and he knows his Homer in Greek, long after college days. His friend Emerson, on the contrary, virtually loses his Greek, and although eager to do justice to Goethe, learns German reluctantly--as when Margaret Fuller administers five or six private lessons in that robust language, "rather against my will." Some years later he writes in his journal that to him the command is loud to read foreign books in translation, since not to do so would be as foolish as to forego the use of railroad and telegraph, or, as he says in Society and Solitude, to swim across the Charles River to Boston instead of using the bridge. To tell the truth, Emerson was never the scholar, in our rather than his sense of the term; he shrank from the labor of mastering a language, a mere instrument, and his view of translation is perhaps not so much the statement of conviction as the expression of temperament.

With this abatement, which subtracts little, Emerson set forth clearly the inalienable unity of thought and word, thought and music, thought and color, and the consequent law that the degree of inspiration may be measured by the work's approximation to this unity. Given a certain intuition, how completely has it been realized?--This must be our first question in the criticism of art, though not, as romantic critics have often assumed, the only question. The answer to this question will determine the quantitative beauty of the work of art; but there remains the question of qualitative beauty.

III

When Emerson says that the beauty of a work of art is "ever in proportion to the depth of thought"; when he says that "the Poet should not only be able to use nature as his hieroglyphic, but he should have a still higher power, namely, an adequate message to communicate; a vision fit for such a faculty," he avails himself of a standard of criticism that has to do with the kind, rather than the degree, of inspiration and expression. It is not enough that the poet should receive impressions and express them; he should question the authority of his impressions, whether inferior or superior, as his reader will likewise do. For, as Emerson declares when speaking of the impressionable, myriad-minded Goethe, "It is not more the office of man to receive all impressions, than it is to distinguish sharply between them." In the criticism of art we are to consider, then, not only exterior excellence, the virtue of explication, but also, and even more, interior excellence, the virtue of reality. The beauty of a work of art resides in both, and is supreme when there is a synthesis of perfect quality and quantity. This synthesis we find, for example, in Michelangelo, of whom Emerson writes that "Beauty in the largest sense, beauty inward and outward, comprehending grandeur as a part, and reaching to goodness as its soul--this to receive and this to import, was his genius."

The vital source of this fusion is ideal Nature. It is by taking a central position in the universe, by submitting to the guidance of Nature, and helping her, so to speak, to make herself known, that the poet attains his triumphs. Art imitates Nature--ἡ τέχνη μιμεἶται τὴν φύσιν--this doctrine, substantially in Aristotle's sense, Emerson teaches, most fully in the essay on Art in Society and Solitude, at the beginning of which his topic is art in its wide meaning, as embracing both fine art and useful art. "The universal soul," he writes, "is the alone creator of the useful and the beautiful; therefore to make anything useful or beautiful, the individual must be submitted to the universal mind. . . . Art must be a complement to Nature." That this is true of the useful arts may be seen at a glance; the airplane, to take an example that would have delighted Emerson, is useful, practicable, if it embodies a sort of continuation of nature's law, and fatally useless if it contradicts that law. Likewise "in art that aims at beauty must the parts be subordinated to Ideal Nature, and everything individual subtracted, so that it shall be the production of the universal soul." Hence the doctrine of necessity, which affirms that in the great poem what was written must be written; when you first hear it you feel that it was "copied out of some invisible tablet in the Eternal mind." To Shakespeare writing his plays, Emerson remarks finely, his thought must have come to him with the authority of familiar truth, "as if it were already a proverb and not hereafter to become one."

Art is therefore not idle play, nor a pleasurable expressive activity, but an arrestment and fixation of reality. For Poe, Wordsworth was far too solemn in his view of poetry as aiming at truth; for Emerson, he was not serious enough. In his enthusiasm for poetry's lovely revelation of truth, he tells himself in his Journals that poetry is "the only verity," adding, " Wordsworth said of his Ode it was poetry, but he did not know it was the only truth." The term "realism" or "realism in literature" recurs in the Journals; Emerson desires, as ardently as any modern realistic novelist, that literature shall give us that of which we can say with the fullest conviction that it is. But he will by no means deny reality to the ideal. Even while in college, writing a Bowdoin dissertation, he approvingly quoted Burke's assertion that "Nature is never more truly herself than in her grandest forms; the Apollo of Belvedere is as much in nature as any figure from the pencil of Rembrandt, or any clown in the rustic revels of Teniers." He might have substituted, "more in nature"; for he adopted, then or later, the classical conception of the ideal in art. For example, though never a lover of Aristotle, he reproduces in his Journals the dictum that poetry is more philosophical and higher than history (more true is Emerson's word), attributing it, however, to Plato. He is apparently repeating Aristotle again when he adjudges tragedy higher than the epic; and once more when he praises such statesmen as Pitt, Burke, and Webster, because [italics Emerson's] "They do not act as unto men as they are, but to men as they ought to be, and as some are." His view of art was remote from the equalitarian tendencies of modern realism, which inclines to find its reality in that which is most obviously widespread; it was selective, aristocratic, holding the best to be the realest of realities-men as they ought to be, and as some are.

IV

His debt was far greater, however, to Plato and the Platonists. Of the many doctrines that he owed mainly to them, perhaps the most important is the doctrine of inspiration, which winds its golden course in and out of nearly every poem and essay that Emerson wrote. Aristotle, even when interpreted generously, must have seemed to him too external in his conception of poetry; for ideal imitation is yet imitation, and therefore inferior in inwardness to the Platonic conception of inspiration. He suffered no delusion as to the light in which Plato himself viewed the poet's inspiration, but like many another Platonist chose to disregard the philosopher's disparagement of the poet's unconscious activity. He was content that the poet should be philosophic without being a philosopher:

The universal nature, too strong for the petty nature of the bard, sits on his neck and writes through his hand; so that when he seems to vent a mere caprice and wild romance, the issue is an exact allegory. Hence Plato said that "poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand."

Nor does he hesitate to quote Oliver Cromwell as saying that "A man never rises so high as when he knows not whither he is going." Mystical in his idea of truth, Emerson set small store by "knowing" and "understanding," as these are usually regarded. "I am gently mad myself," he confides to Carlyle after referring to the Transcendental reformers, no doubt secretly persuaded that his was a divine madness. It is true that five years later he felt that mysticism had been rather overdone, and that it ought to go out of style for a long time "after this generation"--a reservation that fortunately left him free to be inspired and to follow his genius as of old. And perhaps he was right; perhaps we ought occasionally to indulge a whole generation of mystics, in order to see, as Whitman might put it, what can be done "in that line."

From universal nature sitting on his neck, the poet derives his power. "'Beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself, by abandonment to the nature of things." He must speak somewhat wildly--"wildly well" says Poe--and with his mind used not as an organ or instrument but "released from all service and suffered to take its direction from its celestial life." Using a symbol significantly different from Plato's charioteer and horses, Emerson pictures the poet as a lost traveler who throws up the reins and trusts to the horse's instinct to guide him aright. The Platonic charioteer has abdicated, and there is but one horse, half black and half white, half celestial and half earthy, and there is no saying which half is leading the way, or whither it is carrying him! This apparent preference of abandon to control may be found in conceptual language at the end of the essay on Inspiration, where Emerson says that a chief necessity in life is "the right government" (the phrase is Greek), "or, shall I not say? the right obedience to the powers of the human soul" (which is rather Christian and Transcendental). Consequently Emerson is prepared to praise Michelangelo, for instance, on the ground that he has more abandon than the classical Milton.

Yet while it is true that Emerson leads the casual reader to think of him as urging enthusiasm, obedience to one's genius, without providing for the caprices of romantic emotionalism, it is also true that he does indicate the necessary safeguards. The poet's problem, he writes in his treatise on Poetry and Imagination, is "to unite freedom with precision"; thus, for example, "Dante was free imagination,--all wings,--yet he wrote like Euclid." The inexorable poetic rule is either inspiration or silence. "It teaches the enormous force of a few words, and in proportion to the inspiration checks loquacity." Here we have abandon with a difference; here we have a test of inspiration that regards it as valid according to its measure of restraint, a criterion that would make short work of the poets who offer us vaporous expansiveness instead of a truly inspired utterance. Again, there is the passage in the essay on Swedenborg, which most readers fail to connect with the ardors of the popular essay on SelfReliance:

The Spirit which is holy, is reserved, taciturn, and deals in laws. . . . The teachings of the high Spirit are abstemious, and, in regard to particulars, negative. Socrates' Genius did not advise him to act or to find, but if he purposed to do somewhat not advantageous, it dissuaded him. "What God is," he said, "I know not: what he is not, I know." The Hindoos have denominated the Supreme Being the "Internal Check." The illuminated Quakers explained their Light, not as somewhat which leads to any action, but it appears as an obstruction to anything unfit. But the right examples are private experiences, which are absolutely at one on this point.

This is Emerson's criticism of the bizarre revelations reported by the Swedish mystic; along with other passages it indicates conclusively that he recognized the need of a principle of restraint in inspiration as the credential of its quality. When he did not expressly insist upon that need, it is plain enough that he assumed it.

Nor does he fail to point out certain spurious intoxications that must be differentiated from the raptures of inspiration--the intoxications of alcohol and opium, and of wild passions, such as those of gaming and war, which "ape" the flames of the gods and are attractive to men who are unwilling to seek genuine inspiration through discipline. He reminds us that the experience of meditative men indicates agreement respecting "the conditions of perception," citing Plato again, to the effect that the perception demands "long familiarity with the objects of intellect, and a life according to the things themselves." Wine, coffee, narcotics, conversation, music, travel, mobs, politics, love, and the like are, he affirms, more or less mechanical substitutes for "the true nectar, which is the ravishment of the intellect by coming nearer to the fact." They do, indeed, release the centrifugal powers of a man, help him out into "free space"; but it is not the heavens that he attains, but "the freedom of baser places," for nature refuses to be tricked. "The sublime vision comes to the pure and simple soul in a clean and chaste body," he writes with the Puritan accent, and draws support from the noblest of all the Puritans, who would allow the lyric poet to drink wine but requires of the epic poet that he live sparely and drink water from a wooden cup. To this page on false intoxications in The Poet, writes Emerson in his journal, is to be appended the confession that "European history is the Age of Wine," an age that is at last waning as the new Age of Water begins. "We shall not have a sincere literature, we shall not have anything sound and grand as Nature itself, until the bread-eaters and water-drinkers come." What Emerson has in mind, of course, is simply the ancient virtues of simplicity and self-control, though he conceives them, it must be acknowledged, rather ascetically.

v

Closely related with the doctrine of inspiration is the distinction between genius and talent that plays such a large part in the history of romanticism. Although Emerson's distinction between the two terms differs widely from the orthodox romantic distinction, it nevertheless has its romantic aspect, or accent. To his teaching of self-reliance, of obedience to the genius or immanent universal, Emerson frequently gives a twist that all but reverses his actual meaning, inviting a wilfulness and irresponsibility quite alien to his intention. "I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim," he tells us; and many of his disciples not only would but did and do write it there. "No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature"; this may mean almost anything, and has consequently been interpreted in the sophistical sense dominant throughout the past century and a half. "Insist on yourself; never imitate." Here the diction is such that one naturally infers Emerson's approval of the eccentric man of genius, living from within with no concern for outer consequences. "Is it not the chief disgrace in the world . . . not to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear . . . ?" Surely we are to be pardoned if we are here reminded of Rousseau's declaration that he was made unlike anybody he had ever seen, and of the monotonous cult of idiosyncrasy that followed that temperamental declaration of independence. "Our moral nature is vitiated by any interference of our will" and people mistakenly "represent virtue as a struggle," writes the genuine "beautiful soul" of Concord; and again we cannot but remember the unbroken succession of dubious beautiful souls from Rousseau down to our own times. In such utterances as these more is involved than mere "accent"; for, after all, accent involves meaning, connotation, and Emerson's man of genius is not without relation to the typical man of genius in the rampant days of the Geniezeit.

Having given this modification all the force that it deserves, we are free to say that the stock antithesis between genius and talent is transformed by Emerson into one that is much nearer the truth. "Genius is but a large infusion of Deity." It is inspiration working through the intellect, rather than through will or affection. When, on the other hand, the intellect "would be something of itself" instead of being the agent of the divine, that is talent. Genius looks toward the cause, proceeding from within outward, while talent proceeds from without inward. Genius is organic (here we have the qualitative organic)--it is "the organic motion of the soul" and assumes a union of the man and the high fact; whereas talent is at best in the position of spectator, and at worst is merely "acquainted with the fact on the evidence of third persons." Genius is growth; talent is carpentry. Genius instructs; talent amuses. Genius beholds ideas and utters the necessary and causal; talent derives only power--not light--from above, and finds its models, methods, and ends in society, exhibiting itself instead of revealing what is above itself. Genius is not anomalous, but more like and not less like other men; content with truth, it may seem cold to readers "who have been spiced with the frantic passion and violent coloring of inferior but popular writers" --these latter are the men of talent. Genius is broadly representative, "a larger imbibing of the common heart"; the talent of most writers is, on the other hand, "some exaggerated faculty, some overgrown member, so that their strength is a disease." "Genius is always ascetic. . . . Appetite shows to the finer souls as a disease, and they find beauty in rites and bounds that resist it." Talent, on the other hand, is self-indulgent.

Here are distinctions ad nauseam; and indeed it must be confessed that Emerson devoted an excess of attention to these quarreling twins within his mind, recording in his journal that he and Alcott"talked of the men of talent and men of genius and spared nobody" and expressing himself in Transcendental jargon, as when he concludes that "Miss Edgeworth has not genius, nor Miss Fuller; but the one has genius-in-narrative, and the other has genius-in-conversation." Nevertheless, however much of "talent" Emerson may display in making these antitheses, the fact remains that he displays "genius" also in his intimate sense of a spiritual activity expressing itself through the happily endowed man when he has prepared for its reception by rising above the low plane of egotism and passion. Moreover, allowance must be made for the time and place in which Emerson sang the praises of genius,--a time of unblushing materialism on the one hand, and of self-indulgent emotionalism on the other, and a country characterized by "a juvenile love of smartness." As Emerson points out in the essay on Goethe, we Americans set great store by mere talent, as the English do, and the French even more. While Poe finds himself sympathetic with the brilliant and logical French mind, Emerson extols the very Germans that Poe ridiculed, on the ground that they have "a habitual reference to interior truth."

The German intellect wants the French sprightliness, the fine practical understanding of the English, and the American adventure; but it has a certain probity, which never rests in a superficial performance, but asks steadily, To what end? A German public asks for a controlling sincerity. Here is activity of thought; but what is it for? What does the man mean? Whence, whence all these thoughts?

In another essay he speaks of the Germans as "those semi-Greeks, who love analogy, and, by means of their height of view, preserve their enthusiasm, and think for Europe." He has in mind their philosophers; but when he considers their poets, he is obliged to say that the chief of them, Goethe, though deserving of ungrudging praise in such an age, is defective because of his worldly gospel of self-culture. "The idea of absolute, eternal truth, without reference to my own enlargement by it, is higher." And for his type of the inspired poetic genius he turns, after all, to the English Shakespeare.

There is an early journal passage in which Shakespeare is compared with a high mountain seen in the morning by the traveler, who deems he may quickly reach it, pass it, and leave it behind, but who, after journeying till nightfall, finds it apparently as far from attainment as in the morning light. The comparison recalls that of Poe, at the opening of his "Letter to B-----," where a succession of critics, from the fool onwards, are conceived as occupying ever higher steps on the Andes of the mind, "and so, ascendingly, to a few gifted individuals who kneel around the summit, beholding, face to face, the master spirit who stands upon the pinnacle." But although the comparisons are similar, Poe and Emerson themselves differ widely in their attitude toward the poet. Poe begins his career as a critic with a passage of pseudo-romantic veneration, and then an end--never again does he kneel before the master spirit on the pinnacle. Emerson, beholding the mountain in the morning of his life, studying its lineaments with a rapture akin to that of Keats on first reading Homer, strove toward it all his years. To Shakespeare, Emerson regularly yields supremacy over all other poets and intellects, and it is noteworthy that among his "authorities," in O. W. Holmes's table, Shakespeare easily stands first.