The Press. — London, England, 1856-09-13 00:00:00

SEPT. 13, 1856. fittrature. English Traits. By R. W. Emerson. London : Routledge and Co. WE do not share in the dissatisfaction which some critics have expressed with this latest production of Mr. Emerson. The little harm he speaks of us is neutralised by his admis sion of counterbalancing advantages, and a large surplus of unqualified eulogy remains, sufficient we should have thought to satisfy the most self-complacent worshippers of their country. There are, indeed, one or two rather serious mistakes which we shall notice ; for, though Mr. Emerson has seen a great deal of England, he has not lived here long enough to penetrate far below the surface, and we rather wonder, indeed, that he is as accurate as he is. He takes a broad and general view of our character and institutions, and under stands their operation and results in the gross with sufficient clearness. But the deeper springs of our conduct, and that inde finable essence which makes an Englishman or any other man what he is, would appear to lie beyond his reach. In the chapter upon English ability Mr. Emerson quotes a passage from Sir Kenelm Digby, of which he says, " there spoke the " genius of the English people." The passage and the comment are as follows : Sir Kenelm Digby wrote a book, " Of Bodies and of Souls," in which he propounds, that " syllogisms do breed or rather are all the variety of man's life. They are the steps by which we walk in all our businesses. Man, as he is man, doth nothing else but weave such chains. What soever he doth, swarving from this work, he doeth as defi cient from the nature of man : and, if he do aught beyond this, by breaking out into divers sorts of exterior actions, he findeth, nevertheless, in this linked sequel of simple discourses, the art, the cause, the rale, the bounds, and the model of it." There spoke the genius of the English people. There is a necessity on them to be logical. They would hardly greet the gocd that did not logically fall—as if it excluded their own merit or shook their understandings. They are jealous of minds that have much facility of association, from an instinctive fear that the seeing many relations to their thought might impair this serial continuity and lucrative concentration. They are im patient of genius, or of minds addicted to contemplation, and cannot conceal their contempt for sallies of thought, however lawful, whose steps they cannot count by their wonted rule. Neither do they reckon better a syllogism that ends in syllogism. For they have a supreme eye to facts, and theirs is a logic that brings salt to soup, hammer to nail, oar to boat, the logic of cooks, car• penters, and chemists, following the sequence of nature, and one on which words make no impression. Their mind is not dazzled by its own means, but locked and bolted to results. They love men, who, like Samuel Johnson, a doctor in the schools, would jump out of his syllogism the instant his major proposition was in danger to save that at all hazards. Their practical vision is spacious, and they can hold many threads without entangling them. All the stens they orderly take; but with the high logic of never confounding the minor and major proposition; keeping their eye on their aim, in all the complicity and delay incident to the several series of means they employ. There is room in their minds for this and that,—a science of degrees. There is a little confusion of thought here. To jump out of the syllogism the moment the major proposition is in danger is exactly that courageous and wise inconsistency for which M. de Montalembert has praised us so much. Yet the nation which does this systematically scarcely deserves the title of the most logical of peoples. In this particular chapter Mr. Emerson is peculiarly complimentary to the English. Of their fighting ability, he says : But conscious that no race of better men exists, they rely most on the simplest means, and do not like pon derous and difficult tactics, but delight to bring the affair hand to hand, where the victory lies with the strength, courage, and endurance of the individual combatants. They adopt every improvement in rig, in motor, in wea pons, but they fundamentally believe that the best stra tagem in naval war is to lay your ship close alongside of the enemy's ship, and bring all your guns to bear on him, until you or he go to the bottom. This is the old fashion, which never goes out of fashion, neither in nor out of England. Further on he says—" I supposo no people " have such thoroughness ; from the highest " to the lowest every man meaning to be " master of his art." In his description of the English character there is nothing novel. He notices our perse verance, our taciturnity, and our boisterous clergy and " turbulent sense," which we carry, he says, into every nook and corner of the earth, "leaving no lie uneontradieted, no pre- THE PRESS. " tension unexamined." Just here, however, his indignation at some of our national pecu liarities comes in to qualify his praise : There are multitudes of rude young English who have the self-sufficiency and bluntness of their nation, and whc, with their disdain of the rest of mankind, and with this indigestion and choler, have made the English traveller a proverb for uncomfortable and offensive manners. It was no bad description of the Briton generically, what was said two hundred years ago of one particular Oxford scholar : " He was a very bold man, uttered anything that came into his mind, not only among his companions, but in public coffee•houses, and would often speak his mind of particular persons then accidentally present, without examining the company he was in ; for which he was often reprimanded, and several times threatened to be kicked and beaten." The common Englishman is prone to forget a cardinal article in the bill of social rights, that every man has a right to his own ears. No man can claim to usurp more than a few cubic feet of the audibilities of a public room, or to put upon the company with the loud statement of his crotchets or personalities. But after this he relapses into a still more high-pitched strain of admiration. We are more intellectual than all other races—a dis tinction which may very well compensate for the absence of genius which in another place Mr. Emerson numbers among our defects, though that they who have the most intellect should also have the least genius is a rather extravagant dictum. We shape other races to our own model. We " proselytise and are " not proselytised." Unlike the Romans, no Greece has taken the British conqueror cap tive. Finally, he brings himself to utter the noblest compliment which could be paid to any nation—" The stability of England is the " security of the modern world." In his chapter upon wealth Mr. Emerson does not seem to see how forcibly much of what he says could be turned against his own country. The opening remarks are very unfair• : There is no country iu which so absolute a homage is paid to wealth. In America, there is a touch of shame when a man exhibits the evidences of large property, as if, after all, it needed apology. But the Englishman has pure pride in his wealth, and esteems it a final certificate. No doubt mone3 is made too much of in England, but in America it is notorious that literally no other social test exists. American families who have been settled long in this country will almost always acknowledge this truth. When a young man runs through his property in America there is hardly any chance of his re covering his position in the world. There is scarcely such a thing known as a youth " sowing his wild oats," and then settling down into a sober member of society. The reason is that, when he has lost his money, he has lost his self-respect. He has no other claim to esteem—neither birth, nor education, nor even talent. There is no other aristocracy but that of gold, and when he has broken the laws which regulate that, he is an irrecoverable out cast. And yet Mr. Emerson can write in the following style about England:— England must be held responsible for the despotism of expense. Her prosperity, the splendour which so much manhood, and talent, and perseverance has thrown upon ♦ulgar aims is the very argument of materialism. Her success strengthens the hands of base wealth. Who can propose to youth poverty and wisdom when mean gain has arrived 'at the conquest of letters and arts; when English success has grown out of the very renunciation of princi- ples, and the dedication to outsides ? A civility of trifles, of money, and expense, an erudition of sensation takes place, and the putting as many impediments as we can between the man and his objects. Hardly the bravest among them have the manliness to resist it successfully. Hence it has come that not the aims of a manly life, but the means of meeting a certain ponderous expense, is that which is to be considered by a youth in England emerging from his minority. A large family is reckoned a misfortune. And it is a consolation in the death of the young that a source of expense is closed. This is the only passage in the whole work which we consider truly offensive ; yet it is less offensive than false. It would be more true to say that the love of family is at the bottom of our pursuit of wealth. The impu dence of such language, from the lips of an American, is certainly unrivalled. We turn to more pleasant topics. Of the aristocracy of this country Mr. Emer son writes with fairness. There is nothing in his remarks calling for special comment. The following passage is worth quotation from its candour and good feeling:— If one asks, in the critical spirit of the day, what service this class have rendered ?—uses appear. or they would have perished long ago. Some of these are easily enumerated, others more subtle make a part of unconscious history. Their institution is one step in the progress of society. For 879 a race yields a nobility in some form, however we name the lords, as barely as it yields women. The English nobles are high-spirited, active, educated men, born to wealth and power, who have run through every country, and kept in every country the best company, have seen every secret of art and nature, and, when men of any ability or ambition, have been consulted in the conduct of every important action. You cannot wield great agencies without lending yourself to them, and when it happens that the spirit of the earl meets his rank and duties, we have the best examples of behaviour. Power of any kind readily appears in the manners ; and beneficent power, le talent de Bien faire, gives a majesty which cannot be concealed or resisted. These people seem to gain as much as they lose by their position. They survey society as from the top of St. Paul's, and if they never hear plain truth from men, they see the best of everything, in every kind, and they see things so grouped and amassed as to infer easily the sum and genius, instead of tedious particularities. Theis• good behaviour deserves all its fame, and they have that simplicity, and that air of repose, which are the finest ornament of greatness. The upper classes have only birth, say the people here, and not thoughts. Yes, but they have manners, and it is wonderful how much talent runs into manners; nowhere and never so much as in England. They have the sense of superiority, the absence of all the ambitious effort which disgusts in the aspiring classes, a pure tone of thought and feeling, and the power to command, among their other luxuries, the presence of the most accomplished men in their festive meetings. He thinks the power of our aristocracy on the decline, but, like most foreigners, falls into the mistake of confounding gentility with titles. On the universities our author discourses with as little ignorance of the subject as could perhaps be expected. He acknowledges the merits of the system of education, and though assuming with laughable Yankee pertness that " their learning is obsolete," yet he still finds in Oxford " proof of the national fidelity and " thoroughness." There is, he says, a syste matic reading of the best authors, and a know ledge how the things whereof they treat really stand ; " whilst pamphleteer or journalist " reading for an argument for a party, or read " ing to write, or at all events for some by•end " imposed on them, must read meanly and " fragmentarily." He carries on the subject of the universities into his next chapter on religion. " The action of the university " ripens a bishop, and extrudes a philosopher." This is either a singularly wilful misrepresen tation, or inexcusable ignorance of facts. Locke and Newton, Sir William Hamilton and Professor De Morgan, the two Newmans— to say nothing of such men as Kingsley, and Maurice, and Thackeray—were all the product of a system which " extrudes philosophers !" Mr. Emerson's idea of philosophy is, probably, something like the savage's idea of nature— that it requires men to be naked, lawless, and homeless ; and that he is the best philoso pher whose mind is least encumbered by edu cation, ideas, and experience. For otherwise, if severe training in the highest philosophic studies, and familiarity with the best writers, both ancient and modern, can breed the philo sophic habit, a man must be a fool who de cries those institutions where Plato and Aris totle, Butler and Paley, Hamilton and Mill, are as it were the elementary text-books . The chapter on religion is merely a diatribe against the English Church, in which the taunts are all old, rusty, and blunted. In his endeavour to expose her hollowness, he only aiscoveis more plainly his own small cold nature, and his want of real acquaintance with English feeling. In several places we have observed that Mr. Emerson contradicts at the end of a chapter what he had said at the be ginning : there is a good specimen of this in the present chapter : The national temperament deeply enjoys the unbroken order and tradition of its Church ; the liturgy, ceremony, architecture ; the sober grace, the good company, the con. nection with the throne and with history which adorn it. And whilst it endears itself thus to men of more taste than activity, the stability of the English nation is passionately enlisted to its support from its inextricable connection with the cause of public order, with politics, and the funds. Good churches are not built by bad men ; at least, there must be probity and enthusiasm somewhere in the society. These misters were neither built nor filled by atheists. No church has had more learned, industrious, or devoted men; plenty of " clerks and bishops who, out of their gowns, would turn their backs on no man." Their arf hi tecture still glows with faith in immortality. Ye subsequently, he says that " the Church is " much to be pitied," as she has "nothing " left but possession." Passing on to our literature, Mr. Emerson finds himself once more in his own element, and his remarks become original and note worthy, though not always commanding ou