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

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

assent. After asserting that we carry our
hardness, practicality, and materialism even
into poetry, he writes :
Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton, in their loftiest ascents,
have this national grip and exactitude of mind. This
mental materialism makes the value of English transcen-
dental genius; in these writers, and in Herbert, Henry
More, Donne, and Sir Thomas Browne. The Saxon ma-
terialism and narrowness exalted into the sphere of intel-
lect makes the very genius of Shakespeare and Milton.
When it reaches the pure element, it treads the clouds as
securely as the adamant. Even in its elevations, mate-
rialistic, its poetry is common sense inspired, or iron raised
to white heat.

A little further on he says, " The union of
" Saxon precision and Oriental soaring, of
" which Shakespeare is the perfect example,
" is shared in less degree by the writers of
"two centuries." Here seems to be "great
" cry and little wool." Where is the necessity
of dividing Shakespeare's mind after this
fashion? There is nothing distinctive or cha-
racteristic about such criticism as this. Any
writer whatever may be treated in the same
manner if we choose to call all that is fanciful
and imaginative, Oriental ; and all that is
clear, precise, and massive, Saxon. We might
as well talk of the union of Oriental fleetness
and Saxon patience, of which the mule is the
perfect example. The remark would be
equally true. Yet the writer who brought
this forward as a profound and novel ob-
servation upon natural history would be
thought a pompous prig. Mr. Emerson,
however, to do him justice, is a warm and
judicious admirer of the Elizabethan litera-
ture, and his general remarks upon it are
sound and instructive. " The unique fact in
" literary history, the unsurprised reception of
" Shakespeare--the reception proved by his
" making his fortune, and the apathy proved
" by the absence of all contemporary pane-
" gyric—seems to demonstrate an elevation in
" the mind of the people." Mr. Emerson is a
strong idealist. The expulsion of Platonism
by Locke he regards as a fatal event for Eng-
lish philosophy. He sees the same sort of
defect in our contemporary literature. Of
Macaulay he says:—
The brilliant Macaulay, who expresses the tone of the
English governing classes of the day, explicitly teaches
that good means good to eat, good to wear, material com-
modity; that the glory of modern philosophy is its direc-
tion on "fruit;" to yield economical inventions; and that
its merit is to avoid ideas and avoid morals. He thinks
it the distinctive merit of the Baconian philosophy, in its
triumph over the old Platonic, its disentangling the intel-
lect from theories of the all-Fair and all-Good, and pinning
it down to the making abetter sick-chair and a better wine-
whey for an invalid—this not ironically but in good faith—
that " solid advantage " as lie calls it, meaning always sen-
sual benefit, is the only good. The eminent benefit of
astronomy is the better navigation it creates to enable the
fruit-ships to bring home their lemons and wine to the
London grocer. it was a curious result, in which the civi-
lity and religion of England for a thousand years ends in
denying morals and reducing the intellect to a saucepan.
The critic hides his scepticism under the English cant of
practical. To convince the reason, to touch the conscience,
is romantic pretension. The tine arts fall to the ground.
Beauty, except as luxurious commodity, does not exist.

Pope's poetry is fit to put round a frosted
cake ! Walter Scott wrote a rhymed traveller's
guide to Scotland ! In a country which has
no art, and no traditions, it may not be sur-
prising that the two great masters of the
classic and romantic schools of poetry should
be undervalued. If Mr. Emerson chooses to
avail himself of this excuse, good ; but he
must resign all claim to lecture mankind upon
poetry after this proof of his own inability to
soar beyond the limits of American culture.
With one more quotation from the chapter
entitled " The Result," we must conclude our
notice :

So now we say, that the right measures of England are
the men it bred ; that it has yielded more able men in five
hundred years than any other nation ; and though we must
not play Providence, and balance the chances of producing
ton great men against the comfort of ten thousand mean
men, yet retrospectively we may strike the balance, and
prefer one Alfred, one Shakespeare, one Milton, one Sidney,
one Raleigh, one Wellington, to a million foolish democrats.
The American system is more democratic, more humane ;
yet the American people do not yield better or more able
men, or more inventions or books or benefits, than the
English. Congress is not wiser or better than Parliament.
France has abolished its suffocating old riginte, but is not
recently marked by any more wisdom or virtue.
The power of performance has not been exceeded—the
creation of value. The English have given importance to
individuals, a principal end and fruit of every society.
Every man is allowed and encouraged to be what he is, and
is guarded in the indulgence of his whim. "Magna
Charts," said Itushworth," is such a fellow that he will
have no sovereign." By this general activity, and by this