網頁圖片
PDF
ePub 版

XVI.

LITERARY JUDGMENTS.

WHILE Emerson has been a zealous believer in the

inward method of knowing, he has also been a great lover of books. If he has prized intuition as man's highest possession, he has prized literature as its chief means of expression. Books, he tells us, "proceed out of the silent living mind to be heard again by the living mind." His recognition of both these means of receiving and communicating truth has been expressed in these words:

66

'Always the oracular soul is the source of thought, but always the occasion is administered by the low mediation of circumstances. Nature mixes facts with thoughts, to yield a poem. In the spirit in which they are written is the date of their duration, and never in the magnitude of the facts. Every thing lasts in proportion to its beauty. In proportion as it was not polluted by any willfulness of the writer, but flowed from his mind after the divine order of cause and effect, it was not his, but Nature's, and shared the sublimity of sea and sky."1

He maintains that knowledge originates with "the oracular soul;" it is an intuition; and all writing is by the grace of God. The knowing soul is the one which sees into the spiritual nature of things, the one that is in harmony with the universe. To such a soul light is given by virtue of this harmony. Hence all true writing is a revelation, a direct gift from God to the intuitive soul. The greatest of all writings are therefore those which express the highest intuitions, which contain direct perceptions of spiritual realities, and reveal the immediate laws of the moral nature. As the intuitive nature relies much on the imagination, Emerson

1 The Dial, October, 1840; Thoughts on Modern Literature.

values highly all purely imaginative works. Next to direct intuition he values that power of the imagination which flashes light upon so many realities, giving to the poet his penetrating insight into the world without and within. In his own writings he has made a large and a noble use of this gift, especially in his poems. They are constantly beautified and made stronger by his wise and healthful use of the imagination. His pictures of Nature are penetrated with the effects of this power. He sees face to face; but, more than that, he reads the inmost meaning of nature with this richly endowed imagination of his. And next he prizes any book of facts which gives just expression to the realities of nature. He wishes Nature to speak, he believes in facts, and prizes all books which tell us what any genuine observer has seen. "The highest class of books, he says, are those which express the moral element; the next, works of the imagination; and the next, works of science, all deal in realities, what ought to be, what is, and what appears." And he finds that all books are ultimately measured by their depth of thought. So he sees in literature one of the best illustrations of the laws by which the world is governed, in that there is no luck in its final judgments, which proceed as if fated to measure out due rewards to those who write. He distrusts all repetition of other men's judgments and all theorizing, but would have us prize the truth which blooms afresh in each individual mind. If all minds were purely and truly intuitional, reading nature and life with open eyes, there would be no need of books; for each soul would then know all things; but as only a few persons are thus intuitional, books have a value of the greatest importance. They store up the intuitions of the past, bringing down to us only the words of the most rarely gifted minds; and by their aid our own minds are awakened to a knowing of the truth for ourselves. In the following paragraphs he brings out the comparative value of intuition and books, in accordance with his theory of knowledge:

"All just criticism will not only behold in literature the action of necessary laws, but must also oversee literature itself. The erect mind disparages all books. What are books? it saith; they can have no permanent value. How obviously initial they are to their authors. The books of the nations, the universal books, are long ago forgotten by those who wrote them; and one day we shall forget this primer learning. Literature is made up of a few ideas and a few fables. It is a heap of nouns and verbs enclosing an intuition or two. We must learn to judge books by absolute standards.

When we are aroused to a life in ourselves, these traditional splendors of letters grow very pale and cold. Men seem to forget that all literature is ephemeral, and unwillingly entertain the supposition of its utter disappearance. They deem not only letters in general, but the best books in particular, parts of a pre-established harmony, fatal, unalterable, and do not go behind Virgil and Dante, much less behind Moses, Ezekiel, and St. John. But no man can be a good critic of any book, who does not read in it a wisdom which transcends the wisdom of any book, and treats the whole extant product of the human intellect as only one age revisable and reversible by him.

“In our fidelity to the higher truth, we need not disown our debt in our actual state of culture, in the twilights of experience, to these rude helpers. They keep alive the memory and the hope of a better day. When we flout all particular books as initial merely, we truly express the privilege of spiritual nature; but alas! not the fact and fortune of this low Massachusetts and Boston, of these humble Junes and Decembers of mortal life. Our souls are not self-fed, but do eat and drink of chemical water and wheat. Let us not forget the genial miraculous force we have known to proceed from a book. We go musing into the vault of day and night; no constellation shines, no muse descends, the stars are white points, the roses brick-colored dust, the frogs pipe, mice peep, and wagons creak along the road. We return to the house and take up Plutarch or Augustine, and read a few sentences or pages, and lo! the air swims with life; the front of heaven is full of fiery shapes; secrets of magnanimity and grandeur invite us on every hand; life is made up of them. Such is our debt to a book. Observe, moreover, that we ought to credit literature with much more than the bare word it gives us.' "1

In another essay,2 in accordance with this last thought, he says the great man must be a great reader, and possess great assimilating power. He must depend upon others, because intuition is not constant; while we must try our own intuitions by those of other minds

1 The Dial, October, 1840; Thoughts on Modern Literature.
2 Quotation and Originality, in Letters and Social Aims.

In his address to the students of Howard University, he expressed even more emphatically his appreciation of the value of books.

"Whenever I have to do with young men and women, he said, I always wish to know what their books are; I wish to defend them from bad; I wish to introduce them to good; I wish to speak of the immense benefit which a good mind derives from reading, probably much more to a good mind from reading than from conversation. It is of first importance, of course, to select a friend; for a young man should find a friend a little older than himself, or whose mind is a little older than his own, in order to wake up his genius. That service is performed oftener for us by books. I think, if a very active mind, if a young man of ability, should give you his honest experience, you would find that he owed more impulse to books than to living minds. The great masters of thought, the Platos, - not only those that we call sacred writers, but those that we call profane, — have acted on the mind with more energy than any companions. I think that every remarkable person whom you meet will testify to something like that, that the fast-opening mind has found more inspiration in his book than in his friend. We take the book under great advantages. We read it when we are alone. We read it with an attention not distracted. And, perhaps, we find there our own thought, a little better, a little maturer, than it is in ourselves."

[ocr errors]

Great as is his praise of books, he says "the divine never quotes, but is, and creates.' Genius he regards, after all acknowledgments of the value of books, as surer of its own faintest presentiments than of all history. His theory of knowing, as well as his standard of judgment in literature, is in these words defining originality: "It is being, being one's self, and reporting accurately what we see and are." When we are true

to ourselves, in being true to Nature and the Over-soul, our thought becomes an accurate reporter and measurer of all things; and this direct perception of truth is an intuition, a gift of the grace of God. Those who have had this intuitive power most truly have written the great moral, religious, and personal books of the world, which Emerson prizes above all others. He specially values the bibles of the race, the writers of the great religious books, and such authors as Epictetus, Saadi, Thomas à Kempis, Pascal, and Boehme. These books,

he says, are to be read on the bended knee; and they are life to all who diligently peruse them. They come home to our hearts, because they contain the secrets which all nature, experience, and intuition teach us. “I read them," he says, "on lichens and bark; I watch them on waves on the beach; they fly in birds, they creep in worms; I detect them in laughter and eyesparkles of men and women. These are scriptures which the missionary might well carry over prairie, desert, and ocean, to Siberia, Japan, and Timbuctoo. Yet he will find that the spirit which is in them journeys faster than he, and greets him on his arrival, was there already long before him. The missionary must be carried by it, and find it there, or he goes in vain."

This sense of spiritual reality, the feeling of the infinite, which is the source of all religions and literatures, he finds to be a marked peculiarity of modern literature, and increasingly so. It is shown in one of its characteristic traits, in the modern tendency to accept all books of all ages and times, thus recognizing the universal workings of the Over-soul. The curious study into every phase of human history is an outcome of it, and it leads to a bold and systematic criticism of the past. Along with this tendency, which is largely skeptical, goes a subjectiveness which restores the organic unity of the universe to the conceptions of men. It "leads us to nature, and to the invisible awful facts, to moral abstractions, which are not less nature than is a river or a coal-mine; nay, they are far more nature, but its essence and soul." This feeling of the Infinite grows deeper and stronger, pervades all literature, gives form to moral purposes, makes men bold to fight old evils. It is producing a great literature of its own. Concerning this tendency, Emerson wrote these words in The Dial:

"Of the perception, now fast becoming a conscious fact, - that there is One Mind, and that all powers and privileges which lie in any, lie in all; that I, as a man, may claim and appropriate whatever of true and fair or good or strong has anywhere been ex

« 上一頁繼續 »