The House of Pain

 by Newton Arvin

No one knew better than Emerson that every generation goes through a necessary and proper ritual-slaying of its parents; that Zeus, as he would say, is forever destroying his father Cronos; and that, if the writers of one age reject, with a kind of sacrificial solemnity, the writers who have just preceded them, this is quite as it ought to be--is the Method of Nature herself. "Our life," he said, "is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens." He could not have been surprised, therefore, and probably he would not even have been much disturbed, if his sons, or his son's sons, turned upon him, metaphorically speaking, and put him to the knife on the reeking altar of literary and intellectual change. Certainly this is what happened. Emerson had been the Socrates and even the Zoroaster of the generation of young men and women for whom he first spoke, and to tell the truth, it was not until a third age had arrived that the Imitation of Emerson was followed by his Immolation. This rite was performed by the literary leaders of the period of the First World War. Almost forty years ago Mr. T. S. Eliot, whose voice was rightly to carry so far, remarked that "the essays of Emerson are already an encumbrance." Three or four years later D. H. Lawrence expressed a somewhat less drastic but in its implications almost equally repudiative view: "I like Emerson's real courage," he said. "I like his wild and genuine belief in the Oversoul and the inrushes he got from it. But it is a museum-interest. Or else it is a taste of the old drug to the old spiritual dope-fiend in me." Emerson, not as a tonic, but as a narcotic--this is the Emerson who came more and more to serve as an image of the man for the new era. The greatest poet of that generation put the case against him with almost filial finality. Speaking, in his autobiography, of his friend, the Irish poet AE, William Butler Yeats observed that he sometimes wondered what AE "would have been had he not met in early life the poetry of Emerson and Walt Whitman, writers who have begun to seem superficial," said Yeats, "because they lack the Vision of Evil." There was much in Emerson's writings, Heaven knows, to account for these rejections; but the ground on which Yeats put his was the most serious and the most fundamental--the deficiency in Emerson of what a Spanish writer of that period called famously the Tragic Sense of Life. And indeed it did not have to be left to the age of Eliot and Yeats to express a dissatisfaction with this blindness of Emerson's. There were writers, as there were doubtless readers, of his own time who found him terribly wanting in any true awareness of what one of them called the Power of Blackness. Hawthorne, who was his neighbor in Concord, had a due respect for Emerson as a man; but Emerson the transcendental optimist addressed no word of authority to the ear of Hawthorne--who described him as "Mr. Emerson--the mystic, stretching his hand out of cloudland, in vain search for something real." And Hawthorne's younger contemporary Melville could be even more severe; in the margin of his copy of Emerson's essays, adjoining a particularly cheerful passage in the essay on "Prudence," Melville wrote: "To one who has weathered Cape Horn as a common sailor, what stuff all this is." A much younger man than either Hawthorne or Melville, Henry James, would not have spoken of Mr. Emerson, his father's friend, in just this vein of disrespectful impatience, but he too could not refrain from remarking that there was a side of life as to which Emerson's eyes were thickly bandaged. "He had no great sense of wrong," said James--"a strangely limited one, indeed, for a moralist--no sense of the dark, the foul, the base." They all mount up--judgments like these, and there are a hundred of them--to what sometimes seems like not only a damaging but a fatal indictment of Emerson as a writer whom we can ever again listen to with the old reverential attention. A writer who lacks the Vision of Evil, who has no great sense of wrong--how can he be read with respect, or perhaps read at all, in a time when we all seem agreed that anguish, inquietude, the experience of guilt, and the knowledge of the Abyss are the essential substance of which admissible literature is made? It is a painful question to any reader who cannot suppress his sense of a deep debt to Emerson. But it is a question that must be asked, and one has to confess that, as one turns the pages of his essays, the reasons stare one in the face why Hawthorne and Melville, Eliot and Yeats, should have answered it so negatively. Certainly it is hard to understand how a writer of even the least seriousness could dispose so jauntily as Emerson sometimes does of the problem of moral evil--genially denying, in fact, or seeming to, that it is a problem at all. Are we really listening to a moralist who expects to be heard respectfully when we find Emerson saying, apropos of young people who are troubled by the problems of original sin, the origin of evil, and the like: "These never presented a practical difficulty to any man,--never darkened across any man's road who did not go out of his way to seek them. These are the soul's mumps and measles and whoopingcoughs. . . . A simple mind will not know these enemies"? We rub our eyes as we read, and then open another volume and find the same sage and seer reassuring us even more blandly that "The less we have to do with our sins the better. No man can afford to waste his moments in compunctions." Did any writer on morals, we are tempted to ask at such moments, ever go farther than this toward inculcating a hard complacency, a shallow self-righteousness, in his readers? The feeling of unreality that rises in us at these times is almost dreamlike, and so it is on at least some of the occasions when Emerson turns his gaze reluctantly to what used to be called natural evil--to the facts of human misery and suffering--to the Tragic. Is it possible to recognize, in the sun-warmed landscape of the Emersonian center, the terribly familiar world of primordial human experience--that world in which sunshine and warmth have alternated, for most men, with bitter cold and darkness? It is easy to get the mistaken impression that, for Emerson, there were indeed no Cape Horns in experience, no jungles, no Arctic nights, no shark-infested seas; only the amiable rustic landscape of the Concord fields and wood-lots. "I could never give much reality to evil and pain," he wrote in his late fifties, and though he had also said quite different things from this, it is true that at the center of his mind the space was wholly free from either pain or evil. His thought may be in some sense on the hither side of the tragic; it may be in another sense beyond the tragic; non-tragic it undeniably is. He himself was quite clear about this. "And yet," he writes in a characteristic poem, And yet it seemeth not to me
That the high gods love tragedy. Nor did he love it himself. I am speaking now not of the literary form but of tragedy as an aspect of experience--a subject to which only once in his mature career did Emerson give sustained attention. This was in a short essay he contributed to the Dial, an essay called "The Tragic" that was based in part on a lecture he had given a little earlier. It is true that Emerson published this essay in a magazine, but characteristically he never reprinted it, and it was left for his literary executors to include it in a posthumous volume. The theme of this piece is that, after everything has been said that may be said on the topic of human misery, in the end one returns to the knowledge that suffering is a kind of illusion, that it has no absolute or ultimate reality. All sorrow, says Emerson, "is superficial; for the most part fantastic, or in the appearance and not in things . . . For all melancholy, as all passion, belongs to the exterior life. . . . Most suffering is only apparent." And he goes on to speak of the self-operating compensations for suffering in a passage about the horrors of the slave-trade that tempts one, for a moment, to throw his book into the fire, as Whittier is said to have thrown Leaves of Grass. To fix one's attention on passages such as this is to wonder how it is humanly possible for a man to have so weak a memory of his own sorrows or so little compassion for those of other men. Along with this there is that other strain in Emerson that has driven so many readers away from him--the strain in which he seems to be saying that progress, amelioration, an upward movement of things is a law of nature, like gravitation or natural selection, and that the painful human will is very little engaged in it. "Gentlemen," he said to one audience, "there is a sublime and friendly Destiny by which the human race is guided . . . to results affecting masses and ages. Men are narrow and selfish, but the Genius or Destiny is not narrow, but beneficent. . . . Only what is inevitable interests us, and it turns out that love and good are inevitable, and in the course of things." This is the very lotus-dream of progress, you will say, and so is that Emersonian conviction that good ends are always served whether by good men or bad; that rogues and savages are as effectual in the process as prophets and saints. "The barbarians who broke up the Roman Empire," he says, "did not arrive a day too soon." This apparently effortless emergence of good from evil, we are told, is a law not only of nature but of history. "Through the years and the centuries," says Emerson, "through evil agents, through toys and atoms, a great and beneficent tendency irresistibly streams." "Irresistibly," did you say? Did you say that "love and good are inevitable"? Are we to understand that the Destiny that guides human history is simply "friendly" and "beneficient"? To the ears of contemporary men there is a mockery of unreality in such language that makes the language of the Arabian Nights seem to ring with the strong accents of realism. In the fearful light of what has happened in history since Emerson said these things--not to speak of what happened before--can one be merely indignant if some thoughtful men have long since settled it that Emerson is not for them? Can one even be wholly surprised if he has sometimes been relegated to the shabby company of faddists and faith healers, or the equally questionable company of those who have preached the gospel of success, the strenuous life, or the power of positive thinking? The truth is, these charlatans have often drawn, either directly or indirectly, on Emerson himself, and, alas, one can only too easily see why. Let us face it. If Emerson has been coarsened and vulgarized by these people, it is because there are aspects of his thought that have lent themselves to this process. And it is as certain as any human forecast can be that no writer of comparable scope and authority will ever again tell us in just those tones that moral evil is negligible and that suffering is a mere illusion. Yet no one in his senses supposes for a moment that Emerson really belongs in the company of Bruce Barton or Dale Carnegie any more than Plato belongs in the company of Norman Vincent Peale. A powerful instinct tells us that, as he himself remarked of Channing, Emerson is still in some sense our bishop, and that we have not done with him yet. There is no danger of our ever having too many guides or fortifiers, and we know perfectly well that, though we are determined to hold on to Hawthorne and Melville, we cannot afford to dispense with Emerson either. We can afford to dispense with him so little that I suppose most of us are willing now to look at the whole of his work dispassionately and raise for ourselves the question whether his essays are really, after all, a mere encumbrance--or drug. If there proves to be more than this to say, we can hardly be losers. And the more critically one looks at his work, the more it becomes clear that there is a good deal more to be said. No great writer is ever rectilinear--is ever unequivocal or free from contradictions--and Emerson, who consciously disbelieved in straight lines and single poles, is at least as resistant to simple formulas as most. Not only so, but, after all, the problem of evil--the tragic question--is hardly a simple one itself, and the truth is that men have given more than one answer to it. It is a matter of elementary critical justice, surely, to try to arrive at a view of Emerson not only in the flat but in depth. To tell the truth, there is a greater willingness nowadays to work toward such a view than there was thirty or forty years ago. It has become more usual than it once was to recognize that that celebrated optimism of Emerson's was somewhat less the product of good fortune or of a natively happy temper than it was an achievement both of intellectual and emotional discipline. It was a conviction he had arrived at after youthful years during which he had as good reasons as most men--poverty, ill health, bereavement, anxiety--for questioning the absolute rightness of things. No one who has read his early letters and journals can fail to be conscious of the minor strain that runs through them--the strain of sadness, apprehension, and doubtfulness of the goods of existence. The young Emerson can sound strangely like the mature Melville. He was only twenty, and a year or two out of college, when he wrote in his journal: "There is a huge and disproportionate abundance of evil on earth. Indeed the good that is here is but a little island of light amidst the unbounded ocean." Three or four years after this, forced by his alarming physical weakness, he gave up preaching temporarily and went South in search of recovery. It was a period of dire low spirits and anxiety for him, and one can understand his writing from St. Augustine to his aunt, Mary Moody Emerson: "He has seen but half the Universe who never has been shown the house of Pain. Pleasure and Peace are but indifferent teachers of what it is life to know." One might suppose that this outcry was only the bitter expression of a passing state of physical and emotional misery; but it was more than that. A dozen years had elapsed after his stay in the South when he contributed to the Dial the essay on "The Tragic" I have already alluded to. That essay, oddly enough, begins with one of the sentences from the old letter to his aunt; let me quote it again: "He has seen but half the Universe who never has been shown the house of Pain." And he goes on at once, in the essay, to say: "As the salt sea covers more than two thirds of the surface of the globe, so sorrow encroaches in man on felicity." Whatever his theory of suffering may have come to be, Emerson cannot be accused, at least in his earlier years, of having denied to it a kind of reality. On the contrary, there are passages in the sermons he preached as a young minister that remind one much more of the sombre Calvinist homilies of his forebears than of the characteristically hopeful and cheerful Unitarians in whose ranks he was for a time enlisted. A few weeks after he returned from St. Augustine, in 1827, he preached a sermon on the theme of change and mortality that strikes an even Biblical note of sorrow and affliction. "Have we brought in our hands," he asks, like a kind of Unitarian Job--"Have we brought in our hands any safe conduct to show to our ghastly enemies, Pain and Death? Shall we not, my brethren, be sufferers as all our fathers were? Shall we not be sick? Shall we not die?" And a little later in the same sermon he alludes, in a phrase that suggests Hawthorne rather than the familiar Emerson, to "the dark parable of human existence." It is quite true that these Old Testament accents become less and less characteristic of him as he approaches the maturity of his powers, and that the Emerson of the great middle period--of the famous addresses at Harvard, Dartmouth, and Waterville, and of all the best-known essays --is the Emerson whom we have to think of as the Orpheus of Optimism. But, even in this period, and certainly later, there is another tone, an undertone, in his writings which we should listen to if we wish to sensitize ourselves to the complex harmony of his total thought. That thought, to change the image, is a polarized thought, and if at one pole we find a celebration of the powers of the human will, at the other pole we find an insistence on its limitations--on the forces in nature that are not friendly but hostile and even destructive to human wishes, and on the discrepancy between what a man aspires to do and what nature and circumstance allow him to do. "The word Fate, or Destiny," he says in the essay on Montaigne, "expresses the sense of mankind, in all ages, that the laws of the world do not always befriend, but often hurt and crush us. Fate, in the shape of . . . nature, grows over us like grass. . . . What front can we make against these unavoidable, victorious, maleficent forces?" Are there, then, along with, or running counter to, the "great and beneficent tendency," forces of immense potency in nature which are not amiable but fierce and ruinous? Yes, so Emerson tells us--not only in this essay of the forties but in a lecture he delivered several times in the fifties and at last published as the essay on "Fate" in The Conduct of Life. It is an essay that should be read by everyone who imagines that for Emerson there were not really any Cape Horns in experience. "No picture of life," he says, "can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts." And he lays himself out to suggest what those facts are--the facts of nature's ferocity--with a grim thoroughness that suggests the authors of Candide or Rasselas or Moby Dick much more vividly than the author of "The Over-Soul." Here is all the familiar imagery of naturalistic pessimism-the imagery of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, of plagues and famine, of tooth and claw. "The habit of the snake and spider, the snap of the tiger and other leapers and bloody jumpers, the crackle of the bones of his prey in the coil of the anaconda"--these are all in nature, he insists, and so are "the forms of the shark . . . the jaw of the sea-wolf paved with crushing teeth, the weapons of the grampus, and other warriors hidden in the sea." Could Voltaire or Melville or Zola say more? Yet the savagery of nature--nature's Darwinism, to call it so--furnishes less of the stuff of the essay on "Fate" than what I spoke of a moment ago, the restrictiveness of nature; the tight limits set about the human will, human aspiration, human effort, by all the forces of heredity and circumstance that Emerson dramatizes by the old word Fate. "The Circumstance is Nature," says he. "Nature is what you may do. There is much you may not. . . . The book of Nature is the book of Fate." Within these merely natural and material boundaries men are the creatures of their conditioning. "How shall a man," asks Emerson, "escape from his ancestors, or draw off from his veins the black drop which he drew from his father's or his mother's life?" A demonstration of these painful truths that fascinated Emerson for a time, a few years earlier, had been the new science of statistics--the science that seemed to settle it that human behavior can be reduced to mathematical terms and predicted as confidently as the precession of the equinoxes. Perhaps it can, says Emerson, with a quiet smile, in the essay on Swedenborg: "If one man in twenty thousand, or in thirty thousand," he says, "eats shoes or marries his grandmother, then in every twenty thousand or thirty thousand is found one man who eats shoes or marries his grandmother." At any rate, viewed from the outside, as objects, as mere creatures of nature and society, men live and work within lines that are for the most part drawn not by them but for them. We must learn what not to expect.