"in reality there is no other" (p. 521). But it would be a wilful borrowing of trouble to find any essential difficulty here. The development of all a man's faculties is in a way a mechanical means of expanding his personality and of making him more capable of receiving truth from above. "Tis inhuman to want faith in the power of education, since to ameliorate is the law of nature" (VI, 135); but at the same time "we feel that a man's talents stand in the way of his advancement in truth" (II, 270)—when they are cultivated for their own sake. On the practical side, "Education makes man prevail over circumstance" (J. V, 441); on the spiritual side the object of education is to remove obstructions and let natural force have free play (J. III, 416).

Hence the trouble with our colleges is that they "foster an eminent talent in any youth. If he refuse prayers and recitations, they will torment and traduce and expel him, though he were a Newton or Dante" (J. VII, 56). There is too much machinery in our educational system; we lose the central reality and graduate a dunce (J. III, 275). So strongly does Emerson insist upon the superiority of instinct over culture (XII, 34), of genius over talent (II, 270), which are alike merely the transcendence of the "Reason" over the "Understanding," that one sometimes feels, with Sadler,127 that he neglected the side of discipline; and indeed to impose discipline, even upon a child, did seem to Emerson a going beyond one's just prerogative. The child, he always believed, would instruct the teacher as to the best method of procedure, and this, of course, could never be by coercion. But accuracy, system, drill,— these were by no means omitted from Emerson's educational scheme. To each he pauses to render tribute (X, 145; VI, 114; VI, 77); but these were always secondary, obvious, and not in need of special emphasis. He notes the disciplinary value of mathematics and the languages; it is only when they ceased to have any "strict relation to science and culture" and "became stereotyped as Education" (J. VI, 289), that he objects to their crowding out of more vital and practical subjects.

127 Educational Review, XXVI: 459.

EMERSON'S ESTHETICS: THE MEANING OF BEAUTY; THE UTILITY OF Art. It is rather surprising that Emerson should have so little of value to offer us by way of an esthetic theory, since he was primarily a poet, and his idealism was a complete system which reached into all the essential divisions of philosophy. What his esthetic theory would necessarily be has already become apparent to anyone (if there is any such person!) who has read thus far in this essay. This is a tribute to Emerson's fundamental consistency, but not to the depth of his thinking. One could not read the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Pure Practical Reason, and then produce the Critique of Judgment, however consistent a part it may be of the Critical Philosophy. But Emerson's basic doc- 'a trine of Intuition and his Puritanical ancestry predetermined all he had to say regarding the meaning of beauty and the utility of art.

Emerson's ideas regarding beauty and art are among the first to find expression in his Journals. But even earlier than the theory are the critical judgments which are the logical if anticipatory conclusions of that theory, and they are not modified as the theory becomes formulated. He asserts that Wordsworth's "noble distinction is that he seeks the truth" (J. II, 430); whereas he is "frigid to the Byrons" (J. IV, 324), Tennyson he regards as "a beautiful half of a poet," 128 and to Shelley he refers so frequently and with such animosity that it would seem he entertained a religious aversion to all "art for art's sake." Later he becomes more tolerant: Shelley is good for others, so must not be overlooked, and Tennyson is good by one test-that he has a "liberating" effect on us (J. VI, 115, 218). It is the same with his judgment of fiction. At the age of twenty-one he writes in his Journal that one portion of the world's literature "seems specially intended for coxcombs and deficient persons. To this department belong the greatest part of Novels and Romances" (J. II, 13). Scott's Bride of Lammermoor appealed to him because of the nobility and symbolic significance of the characters (J. II, 371), whereas he was angry at having become so interested in Quentin Durward that he read it through; he "had been duped and dragged after a foolish boy and girl, to see them at last married and portioned, and I in

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128 Letter to Furness, 1838, in the latter's Records of a Lifelong Friendship,

stantly turned out of doors." Had one noble thought, one sentiment of God been spoken by them, he felt that he would not have been thus excluded (J. V, 515). Dickens succeeds because "monstrous exaggeration is an easy secret of romance" (J. VI, 312), and all "antiques" as those of Landor, Goethe, Coleridge, Scott-are "paste jewels" (J. VI, 400). His judgment is the same regarding all the arts. Let one striking instance stand for the rest. Speaking of the ballet between the acts at a certain performance he reflects that "Goethe laughs at who can't admire a picture as a picture. So I looked and admired, but felt it were better for mankind if there were no such dancers;" and he feels, moreover, that God agrees, since most of them are nearly idiotic (J. III, 113)!

These estimates of literature and the other arts would have been exactly what they are though Emerson had never had a philosophic or esthetic theory. Indeed, Emerson could not in sincerity have formulated any system of esthetics which would not have yielded just such results as these, however logically consistent it might have been. These, to him, were the facts; and the test of any theory was that it should explain the facts (I, 10). What, then, does Emerson believe must be the underlying basis of truth of which these facts are the outcroppings?

Emerson attempts no definition of beauty, warned, he says, by the failure of many philosophers who have attempted it (VI, 274); but no modern thinker, says Morley, makes so much of the place of beauty in the scheme of things.129 This is because he regards beauty as the truest revelation of the mystery of nature.130 "In the eternal trinity of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, each in its perfection including the three, [the Transcendentalists] prefer to make Beauty the sign and head. ... We call the Beautiful the highest, because it appears to us the golden mean, escaping the dowdiness of the good and the heartlessness of the true" (I, 334, 335). “The new virtue which constitutes a thing beautiful is a certain cosmical quality, or a power to suggest relation to the whole world, and so lift the object out of a pitiful individuality. Every natural feature, sea, sky, rainbow, flowers, musical tone-has in it somewhat which is not private but universal, speaks of that central benefit which is the soul of Nature, and thereby is beautiful. . . . All beauty points at identity. . . . Into every beautiful object there enters somewhat immeasurable and divine . . . Beauty hiding all wisdom and power in its calm sky" (VI, 287-290).

The perception of such Beauty is of course an act of the Intuition, and

129 Crit. Misc., vol. I, p. 330.

130 See "The Poems of Emerson" by C. C. Everett, in Essays Theological and Literary.

its contemplation belongs to the Reason and not to the Understanding. "Every man parts from that contemplation [of the universal and eternal beauty] with the feeling that it rather belongs to ages than to mortal life" (II, 256). From this comes its ethical relationship, and from that in turn its practical utility when embodied in the form of art. From the very start Emerson insists upon this aspect of it: "Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue" (I, 25); and to this aspect of it he constantly returns: "All high beauty has a moral element in it, and I find the antique sculpture as ethical as Marcus Antoninus" (VI, 290).

It follows that "nothing is quite beautiful alone; nothing but is beautiful in the whole. A single object is only so far beautiful as it suggests this universal grace. .. The world thus exists to the soul to satisfy the desire of beauty" (I, 29). In its last analysis, Emerson regards this perception of the beauty of the totality of things as an ethical and religious matter, though he sometimes speaks of it more humanly as an act of reflection, of thought, or even by the esthetically technical term "imagination." "When the act of reflection takes place in the mind," he says somewhat vaguely, "when we look at ourselves in the light of thought, we discover that our life is embosomed in beauty" (II, 125). "Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful" (VI, 287). But the imagination which creates this final beauty as an interpretation of the universe is just as necessary in order to perceive any individual object as beautiful; and this is only another way of saying that “not in nature but in man is all the beauty he sees" (II, 140). Every schoolboy has noticed that. The squeak of a bicycle on a lonely road mistaken for the note of a bird in the bushes was piercingly beautiful until it was recognized, when it became piercingly annoying. Yet it remained the same sound. A/ philosopher who finds the primary qualities of objects existent in the perceiving mind need not register his conviction that beauty does not exist in the things themselves. This familiar discovery, which Emerson seems to have first found stated in 1823-"The theory of Mr. Alison, assigning the beauty of the object to the mind of the beholder, is natural and plausible" (J. II, 304)-he connected definitely with his idealism: "We animate what we see, and we see only what we animate. It depends on the mood of the man whether he shall see the sunset or the fine poem" (III, 54).

In his poems, particularly in the "Ode to Beauty," Emerson develops these and kindred ideas, but I find no new phases of his thinking in them. "Each and All' is perhaps his best statement of the thought that the individual object gets its beauty from its relation to the whole. But

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without discounting the high value of this and many other poems of Emerson, one may still look to his prose for the most adequate account of his actual thinking. This is the more remarkable inasmuch as Emerson holds that "Poetry preceded prose as Reason, whose vehicle poetry is, precedes the Understanding" (J. III, 492); and he constantly speaks of the poet as the inspired bringer of truth to men. But this is using poetry in its largest sense; it is identifying poetic inspiration with all mystical intuition,-as Emerson frankly does. "This is Instinct, and Inspiration is only this power excited, breaking its silence" (XII, 32).

Now as "Instinct," as he is here calling it, "has a range as wide as human nature, running all over the ground of morals, of intellect, and of sense" (XII, 33), so "the poet, like the electric rod, must reach from a point nearer the sky than all surrounding objects, down to the earth, and into the dark wet soil" (XII, 226). There is nothing new about this conception of the man of genius as the mediator between the highest and the most commonplace, except the mystical coloring which Emerson gives it. On the one hand, “when it [the Over-Soul] breathes through his intellect, it is genius" (II, 255); on the other hand, "to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,-that is genius" (II, 47). By the doctrine of Intuition, as has been noted earlier in this essay, all men may enter into a first-hand relationship with the source of wisdom; but there are many who prefer to dwell on the lower levels and who must therefore learn of the finer spirits who yield themselves to the reception of truth. It is the converse of the same matter to say, "What are these millions who read and behold, but incipient writers and sculptors? Add a little more to that quality which now reads and sees, and they will seize the pen and chisel," and "Common sense . . . is the basis of genius, and experience is hands and feet to every enterprise; and yet," Emerson hastens to add, "he who should do his business on this understanding would be quickly bankrupt” (III, 68, 69).

Emerson's doctrine of inspiration differs from Plato's, as brought out in the Ion and elsewhere, only in its greater insistence upon the practical usefulness of the message and in that the "some god" of Socrates becomes definitely the Over-Soul itself. To Plato he is careful to attribute the thought that "poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand" (II, 37), which he has 'paraphrased in the familiar lines from "The Problem,"

"He builded better than he knew;

The conscious stone to beauty grew."

But this, like the ethical purpose of poetry, is with Emerson, as with Plato, a mere corollary of the inspiration theory.