istic sanction. This is the position taken by Marcus Aurelius in a passage extolled by Matthew Arnold. Which of these is Emerson's sanction? In the essay on "Compensation," which he thought one of his prime contributions, he argues that divine justice executes itself in this world in accordance with inevitable laws. It is essentially the argument of Franklin; one is still concerned with reward and punishment. But the general tenor of Emerson's life and teaching rise above this level. Habitually he speaks in the spirit of the Roman Emperor, so deeply appealing to the well-born soul: "A third in a manner does not even know what he has done, but he is like a vine which has produced grapes, and seeks for nothing more after it has once produced its proper fruit. As a horse when he has run, a dog when he has caught the game, a bee when it has made its honey, so a man when he has done a good act, does not call out for others to come and see, but he goes on to another act, as a vine goes on to produce again the grapes in season."

VI

Though Emerson had thought much about the relation of the individual to society and to the state, he was not in any practical diurnal sense of the word a politically-minded man: Politics is the art and science of governing masses. The art and science which appealed to his ambition are those which enable the individual to govern himself. So far as he was concerned, he felt little need of external government. Indeed, like many of the saints and sages, conscious that he himself was actuated by the purest internal motives, he looked with wary and somewhat jealous eye upon the existence of an external controlling power in the state, which might be actuated by motives far less pure and, in the exercise of its constituted authority, warp him from the bias of his soul. In this respect, he was distinctly a child of the time-spirit which followed the Revolution and preceded. the Civil War, that period when the first dire need of a powerful union had passed and the second dire need of it had not yet been fully manifested. He could sympathize

with his friend Thoreau, who withdrew from the social organization to the extent of refusing to pay his taxes. But Emerson's Yankee common sense preserved him from imitating this fanaticism of individualism. He perceived, as every intelligent lover of freedom does, that a decent conformity is the very secret of freedom.

He loved freedom too much to coquet with anarchy. The imaginative masters of his political speculations, Plato, More, Milton, Burke, Montesquieu, had confirmed him, furthermore, in the conviction that "politics rest on necessary foundations, and cannot be treated with levity." The foundation of government, he recognized, is in the constitution of man: "Every human society wants to be officered by the best class, who shall be masters instructed in all the great arts of life; shall be wise, temperate, brave, public men, adorned with dignity and accomplishments." He perceived that it was no true function of the philosopher to bring into contempt even imperfect instruments of order and liberty.

Like most Americans, however, he had pretty much lost respect for government by an hereditary aristocracy. He acknowledges the virtues of the hereditary principle but with a touch of disdain: it has "secured permanence of families, firmness of customs, a certain external culture and good taste; gratified the ear with historic names.' Its defect was its failure to make the laws of nature serve it. Nature did not co-operate with the system: "the heroic father did not surely have heroic sons, and still less heroic grandsons; wealth and ease corrupted the race."

He goes a long way towards accepting the principles of the French Revolution. His respect for efficient power makes him betray, in "Representative Men," a great admiration for Napoleon Bonaparte, qualified by grave reservations. He desires, with Carlyle, to bring forward a natural aristocracy, an aristocracy of talent. He would like to believe that democracy is the means for recruiting that talent, for organizing the superior class by which society needs to be officered. But his study of the tyrannies of an "efficient state" administered by Napoleonic officers,

to whose talents a career was opened, has awakened in him, as it never did in Carlyle, a deep suspicion of the "natural method," has put him on a criticism of democracy, which is the most valuable element in his political writing.

Might with right, Emerson never confused as Carlyle confused them-hopelessly; as democracies may, at any time, under bad leadership, confuse them. "Our institutions," he declares in his "Politics," "though in coincidence with the spirit of the age, have not any exemption from the practical defects which have discredited other forms. Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey the laws too well." His patriotism was free, emancipated. In the year when he became of age, 1824, he wrote in his Journal: "I confess I am a little cynical on some topics, and when a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and the purity of its heart." In his Journal of 1833-5 he wrote: "The life of this world has a limited worth in my eyes, and really is not worth such a price as the toleration of slavery." He cried out at the land-grabbing of the Mexican War. He spoke repeatedly between 1837 and 1861 in behalf of free speech, in behalf of emancipating the slaves, and in favor of violating the Fugitive Slave Law. Against the howling of mobs, as Mr. Woodberry shows in an admirable summary of his participation in the antislavery movement, "his civic courage was flawless." He interrupted his lecture on Heroism in 1838 to praise the brave Lovejoy, "who gave his breast to the bullets of a mob, for the rights of free speech and opinion, and died when it was better not to live." He received John Brown in Concord, and when two years later the law doomed him to die, he declared publicly in Boston that the new saint would "make the gallows glorious like the cross."

Efficient nature herself requires to be checked. Where is the check to be found? "The wise man is to settle it immovably in his mind, that he only is fit to decide on his best action; he only is fit to praise it; his verdict is praise enough, and as to society, 'their hiss is thine applause (Journals, 1833-5.) The contention of parties cannot be

trusted to guard the interests of truth. Emerson has no naïve respect for numbers. He has looked with disillusioned eye upon the wisdom of majorities. He confides to his Journal, for example, that if Jackson is elected "we shall all feel dirty." He says that if he were unduly in love with life, he would attend a Jackson caucus, and "I doubt not the unmixed malignity, the withering selfishness, the impudent vulgarity, that mark those meetings would speedily cure me of my appetite for longevity." Yet despite this bitterness, the Jackson party was, as he himself recognized, that towards which his own principles and sympathies in theory, broadly popular-should have inclined him. Speaking for publication, in his essay on "Politics,” he reveals, with less asperity, the fact that he is not captivated by either party. The paragraph that follows might have been written by a disappointed independent of 1920: "The vice of our leading parties in this country that they do not plant themselves on the deep and necessary grounds to which they are respectively entitled. Of the two great parties which, at this hour, almost share the nation between them, I should say that the one has the best cause, and the other contains the best men. The philosopher, the poet, or the religious man will, of course, wish to cast his vote with the democrat, for free-trade, for wide suffrage, for the abolition of legal cruelties in the penal code, and for facilitating in every manner the access of the young and the poor to the sources of wealth and power. [My italics.] But he can rarely accept the persons whom the so-called popular party proposes to him as representatives of these liberalities. They have not at heart the ends which give to the name of democracy what hope and virtue are in it."

Possibly Emerson's concern for the "unwashed masses" forged a bit ahead of his sympathies as a man of flesh and blood. Theoretically, he was not afraid of dirt. Before Whitman bade us shun "delicatesse," Emerson had perceived that the effective democrat must not be a "high priest of the kid-glove persuasion." Writing in his Journal at the age of thirty-two, he says: "I would not have a

man dainty in his conduct. Let him not be afraid of being besmirched by being advertised in the newspapers, or by going into Athenaeums or town-meetings or by making speeches in public. Let his chapel of private thoughts be so holy that it shall perfume and separate him unto the Lord, though he lay in a kennel.”

It ought to be possible to feel "inwardly perfumed and separated unto the Lord" without either showing or feeling that Brahminical spirit of exclusiveness which men like Holmes and Lowell exhibited, and of which they were obviously proud. Emerson was quite earnestly opposed to the celebrated Brahminism of Boston and Cambridge. As Mr. Brownell has finely said: "A constituent of his refinement was an instinctive antipathy to ideas of dominance, dictation, patronage, caste, and material superiority whose essential grossness repelled him and whose ultimate origin in contemptuousness - probably the one moral state except cravenness that chiefly he deemed contemptible was plain enough to his penetration." Henry Adams suggests, indeed, with a touch of characteristic humor, that Emerson, from the spiritual altitude of Concord, probably looked down on the Brahmins themselves, looked down, for instance, on the Adamses, as worldlings.

Now there is interesting evidence in the Journals that Emerson might have looked down on Henry Adams, but from a point of view remote from that indicated by Adams:

"I do not forgive in any man this forlorn pride, as if he were an Ultimus Romanorum. I am more American in my feelings. This country is full of people whose fathers were judges, generals, and bank presidents, and if all their boys should give themselves airs thereon and rest henceforth on the oars of their fathers' merit, we should be a sad hungry generation. Moreover, I esteem it my best birthright that our people are not crippled by family and official pride, that the best broadcloth coat in the country is put off to put on a blue frock, that the best man in town may steer his plough-tail or may drive a milk-cart. There is a great deal of work in our men, and a false pride has not yet made them idle or ashamed. Moreover I am more philosophical than