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Any strong passion does. The best, the happiest moments of life, are these delicious awakenings of the higher powers and the (reverential withdrawing of nature before its God. We are all aiming to be idealists, and covet the society of those who make us so, as the sweet singer, the orator, the ideal painter."

V

It is commonly said that Emerson's interest in morals is his inheritance from the Puritans. In this connection it is interesting to find him in the Journals connecting himself consciously with the loftiest Puritan of the seventeenth century, John Milton, of whom he writes: "Milton describes himself to Diodati as enamored of moral perfection. He did not love it more than I." Here indeed is a visible link in what we have grown accustomed to call the Puritan tradition. But, as a matter of fact, were Emerson and Milton more in love with moral perfection than Spenser, or was Spenser more in love with it than Dante, or Dante than Augustine, or Augustine than the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, or the Emperor than Socrates? There is a great community of minds enamored of moral perfection. It is no novel passion originating in New England or among the English Puritans. How explain the antiquity of the tradition? Dante, following Aristotle, explains it by declaring that "all things, by an intuition of their own nature, seek perfection." Emerson then, rediscovered what Aristotle had observed, that the impulse to self-perfection is a tendency in the constitution of man.

In America, the most important predecessor of Emerson in this rediscovery was a free-thinking man of the world, entirely out of sympathy with strait-laced and stiff-necked performers of barren rites and observances. I refer to the greatest liberalizing force in eighteenth-century America, Benjamin Franklin. Was he a Puritan? No one thinks of him as such, yet in truth he represents the normal reaction of a radical protestantism, of a living Puritanism, to an "Age of Enlightenment." By the courage of his moral realism he prepares the way for Emerson. He, too, begins

his independent studies after a revolt against ecclesiastical authority, as narrow and unrealistic. The course of his emancipation is set forth in the Autobiography, where he relates his disgust at a sermon on the great text in Phillipians: "Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, honest, just, pure, lovely, or of good report, if there be any virtue, or any praise, think on these things." In expounding this text, the clergyman confined himself to enjoining scrupulous Sabbath observances, respect to ministers, etc., etc. "These might," says Franklin, "be all good things; but, as they were not the kind of good things that I expected from the text, I despaired of ever meeting with them from any other, was disgusted, and attended his preaching no more."

Franklin attended that preaching no more. But note what follows, apparently as the consequence of his break with the church: "It was about this time that I conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection. I wished to live without committing any fault at any time, and to conquer all that either natural inclination, custom or company might lead me into." Everyone will recall how Franklin drew up his table of thirteen moral virtues, and how he studied the means for putting them into effect. But for us the most significant feature of this enterprise and of his proposed Art of Virtue was the realistic spirit in which they were conceived, the bold attempt to ground the virtues upon experience rather than upon authority, the assertion of the doctrine, "that vicious actions are not hurtful because they are forbidden, but forbidden because they are hurtful, the nature of man alone considered."

Emerson as moralist takes up the work which Franklin's political duties prevented him from carrying out. He repeats Franklin's revolt in the name of sincerity, truth, actuality. "Whoso would be a man," he declares in "SelfReliance," "must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness." He does not take up the virtues so methodically and exhaustively

as Franklin does. That is mainly because he conceives morality to lie in a right condition and attitude of the whole self, from which particular acts will result with a kind of instinctive and inevitable rightness. "The less a man thinks or knows about his virtues," he says in "Spiritual Laws," "the better we like him." He concerns himself less with particular acts than many less exacting moralists, because he demands as the evidence of goodness that one's entire life shall be "an alms, a battle, a conquest, a medicine." The grand business of the moral explorer, as he understands it, is to push past conduct to the springs of conduct, to blaze a path behind the virtues to that general moral power which is the source of all the virtues.

There is a familiar saying of Emerson's which would epitomize, if it were understood, most of what is important in all the Emersonian messages. Taken from its context in the essay on "Civilization," it has perhaps been more widely quoted than anything else that he uttered. Unfortunately, one never hears it quoted with any sense of what it means in the thought of Emerson, where its position is absolutely central. The saying is this: "Hitch your wagon to a star." If one asks a man from whose lips it has glibly slipped what "Hitch your wagon to a star" means, he replies "Aim high," a useful enough maxim of archery, but as a moral precept dreadfully trite and unproductive. What Emerson really means is: Put yourself in connection with irresistible power. In the physical world, let water turn your mill, let steam pull your cars, let the atmospheric electricity carry your words around the world. "That is the way we are strong, by borrowing the might of the elements." Likewise in the moral world, go where the gods are going, take the direction of all good men and let them bear you along, strike into the current of the great human traditions, discover the law of your higher nature and act with it. Presently you will notice that you are no longer fuming at obstacles and fretting at your personal impotence but are borne forward like one destined.)

At just this point, many stern critics have cried out against Emerson as a moral teacher, and have charged him.

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with counselling an optimistic passivity. Emerson bids us go with the current. The stern critic snatches at a figure and comes away with an error. Have not all the orthodox doctors taught that the good man goes against the current? Such misapprehension is the penalty for being a poet for not sticking faithfully to the technical jargon. Without resorting to that medium, however, it should be possible to clear Emerson of the charge of counselling a foolish optimism, an indiscreet or base passivity. It should, at any rate, be possible to clear him in the eyes of any one whose morals have, like his, a religious basis—for example, in the eyes of the sad and strenuous author of that great line: "In la sua voluntade è nostra pace-In his will is our peace." The point is, that Emerson does not urge us to confide in all currents, to yield to all tendencies. It is only after we have arrived by high thinking at a proud definition of man, that we are to take for our motto: "I dare do all that t may become a man." It is only after we have discovered by severe inquisition the instincts of our higher nature, that we are to trust our instincts, and follow our nature. We are to be confident and passive. Yes: when we are doing the will of God.

What made Emerson's teaching take hold of his contemporaries, what should commend it to us today is just its unfailingly positive character, the way it supplements our gospel of long-suffering by the restoration of classical virtues. There is a welcome in it for life, even before the quality is disclosed: "Virtue is uneducated power." There is a place in it for manly resistance: "Be as beneficent as the sun or the sea, but if your rights as a rational being are trenched on, die on the first inch of your territory." There is the strong man's relish of difficulty and hostility: "We must have antagonisms in the tough world for all the variety of our spiritual faculties or they will not be born." There is precept for use of the spur: "He that rides his hobby gently must always give way to him that rides his hobby hard." There is warrant for choosing one's path: It is a man's "essential virtue to carry out into action his own dearest ends, to dare to do what he believes and loves.

If he thinks a sonnet the flower and result of the world, let him sacrifice all to the sonnet." Even in his definition of friendship, Emerson drives at action: "He is my friend who makes me do what I can." It is obvious that he restores ambition, an aspect of magnanimity, to its proper place in the formation of the manly character, ambition to bring one's life to its fullest fruit.

This accounts for his extraordinary emphasis upon the virtue of courage: "It may be safely trusted - God will not have his work made manifest by cowards." Read from that cue, and presently you fancy that all forms of virtue appeared to him as aspects and phases of courage. He has praise for the courage of non-conformity, the courage of inconsistency, the courage of veracity, the courage to mix with men, the courage to be alone, the courage to treat all men as equals - but at this thought, he remembers his proud conception of man, his imagination kindles, and he cries: "Shall I not treat all men as gods?" and, elsewhere, "God defend me from ever looking at a man as an animal.” It sounds like extravagance. It may turn out to be a maxim of the higher prudence. Treating men like worms has been tried-without particularly gratifying results. Why not explore the consequences of assuming that men have a nobler destiny? If you are educating a prince, all the classical manuals enjoin it upon you to treat him like a prince. Why should not this hold of uncrowned sovereigns in general? Courage to do these extraordinary things Emerson learned of his aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, who taught him in his boyhood to face whatever he feared. Courage he praised in his last word on Carlyle, “He never feared the face of man."

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Moralists present to us in general three distinguishable sanctions for the virtuous life, or as Emerson would have preferred to call it, the heroic life. They may commend conduct as conducive to happiness in the future world the theological sanction. They may commend it as conducive to pleasure or happiness or convenience on earth the utilitarian sanction. Or finally they may commend it as in accordance with the proper nature of man- the human

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