EMERSON
THERE was a child for whom the capital good and end of Hfe was to see wheels go round. Before a carriage in the street he would stop, plunged in ecstatic contemplation, and — like a Buddhist devotee with his mystic formula — ejaculate at intervals in adoring rapture, * Wheel-go-wound! wheel-go-wound 1' In the works of watches, in tops, in the spinning froth of his tea-cup, in everything whirlable, this unconscious vortical philosopher discerned and worshipped * wheel-go-rounds.' With that tyrannous mandate, ' Want to see wheel-gowound,' he insisted on paying his devotions to every such manifestation of orbital motion.
Which things are a parable. That child, it strikes us, should find his ripened ideal in Emerson's writing, which, as one critic has already remarked, revolves round itself, rather than progresses. The remark was made depreciatingly: but we prefer to regard this trait in Emerson as a characteristic, rather than a limitation. This vortical movement of his understanding impresses itself strongly on one's mind after reading a succession of his essays — or leftures, as many of them originally were. Perhaps, indeed, the necessities of a ledlurer, and the mental habit induced by much lefturing, may partly be responsible for it. An audience with difficulty follows an ascending sequence of thought, especially on abstruse subje6ls; where the snapping of a single link, a momentary lapse of attention, may render all which follows unintelligible; and, at the best, it is uneasy to pick up again the dropped clue. But if the le6lure circle round a single idea, such slips of fatigued attention are not fatal: what you have failed to grasp from one aspe£l is presently offered and seized from another. The advantages of such a method for such a purpose are obvious. It is, at any rate, Emerson's method to a very large extent. Some one idea is suggested at the outset, and the rest of the essay is mainly a marvellous amplification of it. In some of these essays he is like a great eagle, sailing in noble and ample gyres, with deliberate beat of the strong wing, round the eyrie where his thought is nested.
The essay on Plato is a notable example. He starts with the declaration of Plato's universality:
These sentences contain the culture of nations; these are the corner-stones of schools; these are the fountainliead of literatures. A discipline it is in logic, arithmetic, taste, symmetry, poetry, language, rhetoric, ontology, morals or pradlical wisdom. There was never such range of speculation. Out of Plato come all things that are still written or debated among men of thought.... Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato.
His genius allies the universal with the particular, so that it becomes all-continent. So Emerson begins, and round this declaration the whole essay revolves. This AUness of Plato, this combination of universality with particularity, — he takes this idea in his two hands, and turns it about on every side, surveys it from every aspe6l. Having trampled it out with his feet (one would say), he tosses it on his horns, till the air is alive with the winnowing of it. He conjures \\ith it, till the Protean modifications and transmutations and reappearances of it dazzle the attention and amaze the mind. He touches on Socrates, and Socrates forthwith becomes a reincarnation of the same idea, in his homely prafticality and da::monic wisdom — again the universal and the particular. We will not say but that we sometimes tire of these brilliant metamorphoses, these transmigrations of a single conception through innumerable forms. Sometimes we could cry ' Enough! ' and wish the repose of a more vertebrate method. But one thing he has effc6lually secured — we shall remember with emphasis that Plato was universal, and the synthesis at once of limit and immensity.
The ' wheel-go-round ' quality of his mind appears even in the detail of his style; as (in Swedenborg's image) each fragment of a crystal repeats the structure of the whole:
A man who could see two sides of a thing was born. The wonderful synthesis so familiar in nature; the upper and the under side of the medal of Jove; the union of impossibilities, which reappears in every objeft; its real and its ideal power, — was now also transferred entire to the consciousness of a man.
That Is a simple and casual, but charafteristic, example. Statements are not left single, but are iterated and reiterated in form on form. You have thus within the great volutions of the essay at large innumerable little revolutions, — w^heels within wheels like the motions of the starry heavens; nay, the individual sentence revolves on Its own axis, one might say. The mere opulence of his imagery is a temptation to this.
No prose-writer of his time had such resources of imagery essentially poetic in nature as Emerson — not even Ruskin. His prose is more fecund in Imagery,and happier in Imagery, than his poetry, — one of the proofs (we think) that he was not primarily a poet, undeniable though some of his poetry is. He had freer and ampler scope and use of all his powers In prose, even of those powers In their nature specifically poetic. It Is a thing curious, but far from unexampled. With such figurative range, such easy and Inexhaustible plasticity of expression, so nimble a perception, this Iterative style was all but Inevitable. That opulent mouth could not pause at a single utterance. His understanding played about a thought like lightning about a vane. It suggested numberless analogies, an endless sequence of associated Ideas, countless aspects, shifting facets of expression; and it were much If he should not set down a poor three or four of them. We, hard-pushed for our one pauper phrase, may call it excess In him: to Emerson, doubtless, it was austerity.
Moreover, when we examine closely those larger revolutions of thought on which we first dwelt, it becomes visible— even in such an essay as that * Plato ' which we took as the very type and extreme example of his peculiar tendency — that Emerson has his own mode of progression. The gyres arc widening gyres, each sweep of the unflagging wang is in an ampler circuit. Each return of the idea reveals it in a deeper and fuller aspeft; wdth each mental cycle we look down upon the first conception in an expanded prospeft. It is the progression of a circle in stricken water. So, from the first casting of the idea into the mind, its agitations broaden repercussively outward; repeated, but ever spreading in repetition. And thus the thought of this lofty and soHtary mind is cychc, not like a wheel, but like the thought of mankind at large; where ideas are always returning on themselves, yet their round is steadily ' widened with the process of the
It was an almost inevitable condition of his unique power that Emerson's mind should have a certain isolation and narrowness, a revolving round its own fixed and personal axis, corresponding with the tendency already analysed. Yet in another view it often surprises by a breadth of interest no one could have predi6^ed in this withdra-wn philosopher, this brooder over Plato and the Brahmins. He has a shrewd, clear outlook upon pra6llcal life, all the sounder for his serene detachment from it. For example, the English nation was never passed through so understanding and complete an analysis as hy this casual visitor of our shores. It took nothing less than this American Platonist to note at once with such sympathy and such aloof dispassionateness all the strength and weakness of the Saxon- Norman-Celtic-Danish breed. He perceives, let us say, the intense, vidlorious, admirable, exasperating common sense of the Englishman, with its backing of impenetrable self-belief; neither hating nor overpowered by it. Hear the enjoying verve of his brilliant summary:
The young men have a rude heakh which runs into peccant humors. They drink brandy like water, cannot expend their quantities of waste strength on riding, hunting, swimming, and fencing, and run into absurd frolics with the gravity of the Eumenides. They stoutly carry into every nook and corner of the earth their turbulent sense: leaving no lie uncontradi6led; no pretension unexamined. They chew haschisch; cut themselves with poisoned creases; swing their hammock in the boughs of the Bohan Upas; taste every poison; buy every secret; at Naples they put St Januarius's blood in an alembic; they saw a hole into the head of the 'winking Virgin,' to know why she winks; measure with an English foot rule every cell of the Inquisition, every Turkish caaba, every Holy of Holies; translate and send to Bentley the arcanum bribed and bullied from shuddering Brahmins; and measure their strength by the terror they cause.
It could only have been written by a man who united with the profound common sense of eminent genius the profound uncommon sense of eminent genius. The one gave him sympathy; the other enabled him to possess his soul before a spe^lacle which compels most foreigners either to worship or execration. So also he can write on wealth with a sanity of perception at once homely and philosophic, which is worth the reading either of a man of ledgers or a man of libraries, a poet or a pedlar. Uncle Sam had * hitched his wagon to a star '; but he kept a vigorous sap of the Uncle Sam who hitches his wagon to a prairie-hoss — and knows how to swop it.
DANTE
THE enormous Roman Empire, blown upon by the winds of barbarism, split like a rending sail into East and West. Reunited for a space by Constantine, it tore again under his successors; and thenceforth
* East was East, and West was West.' The East shrank to the limp and meagre Byzantine Empire; the West smouldered away in Gothic fire, till Rome was tacitly abandoned to the Popes. Charlemagne took up the Western succession, and dreamed himself the father of a new Csesarean line, Overlords of Italy and the West. But the worms had not finished their imperial banquet in the sepulchre of Aix-la-Chapelle, when his own dominion fell asunder to East and West, parting into Germany and France. Germany itself was dashed to fragments by the Sclavs, till loosely recompa6ted by a Saxon chief. His son Otho entered Italy, like Charlemagne, to help the Pope; and obtained Charlemagne's reward — the succession to the Roman Emperors of the West.
Thus the title of the German Emperors had to do much less with Germany than with a
* Holy Roman Empire ' which was really as dead as Julius Cassar. But the Papacy had planted a thorn in its own side; for thenceforth the German Emperors were obsessed by the ambition to make their Italian title a sovereign fa<^; whence constant strife between Emperor and Pope, in which ItaUans took opposite sides.
This, which is so httle to us, was everything to Dante. For though his father had been a Guelf, he was a fierce Ghibelline, or partisan of the Emperor. To us, in the perspe6live of history, this Imperial claim seems the shadowiest anachronism. We wonder that sane Emperors could waste blood and treasure on it, with their own Germany turbulent and ununited behind them: as if Alfred had set out to conquer France before he had the petty kings of England under his heel. But four centuries of recognition had made the title real to the Italians, and all tradition was behind it. Moreover, it came to embody the perpetual struggle of State against Church: and it was in this practical hght that it appealed to Dante. But in Florence the viftorious Guelfs themselves spht into ' Blacks ' and ' Whites,' or Neri and Biaiichi; and the Ghibellines (including Dante) curiously joined the Bianchi, the popular party.
Into this distraded city Durante, or Dante, Alighieri was born. Who dreams that the supreme Itahan poet and the supreme English poet bore almost an identical surname? Yet so it is. Alighiero (the name of Dante's grandfather) is a German name, and probably was derived from Aldiger, which means ' Rulespear.' A better city for the growth of poet or artist there could scarce be than Florence. It was more like a Greek than a modern city, and of all cities most like Athens in her prime. The same ' fierce democracy ' clung with the same intense local patriotism to a fatherland nested within the city walls. The same fullness of trade nurtured it to importance. The same circumscribed life turned its energies inward, and created from a municipality the image of a State in miniature. Beyond the walls its territory was less than that of Athens. Its pent-up vitality seethed in the same relentless faftions, though the final result was different. And this inward-driven vitality broke forth, like a volcano, in the same surprising and abundant shower of diversified genius. Narrow limits are good for genius. Dante and Michael Angelo are proof enough.
All the narrowed intensity and greatness of Florence seem to be in Dante, and must have been fostered by its training. He grew up in a little grey city, full of pi6forial sight and sound, which was creating itself into art. He saw on market days, through its narrow streets overbrowed by the proje6fing upper stories of the houses, the mules pass laden v/ith oil and wine from the country, carts piled vAth. corn, and drawn by great white oxen, across their foreheads the beam which yoked them to the cart. The oxen shone in the sun which cut the large shadows. In the small squares whence were seen the numberless towers of Florence, sharp against the intense blue, the red and green and white-gowned citizens paused to chat of poHtics. He grew up a poHtician, for politics were a second business to every Florentine. Were you for Pope or for Emperor? Were you a White and for the people, or a Black and for the nobles? You might see Corso Donati, the able and reckless leader of the Blacks, the Castlereagh of Florence, riding through the streets on his black horse, with a troop of friends and kinsmen. The people, despite themselves, cheer the handsome and stately dare-devil whom they hate: the White leaders, our rising Dante among them, pass with bent brows, to which he returns a disdainful glance; and it is well if no broil arise. For Corso presently was Dante's bitter enemy; and our friend Guido Cavalcanti is rasher of temper than we. Dante as a youth had seen the houses of the Galigai go to the ground because one of the family had killed a Florentine — in France!
Poetry, too, early engaged him. He was hand in glove with the Guido Cavalcanti already mentioned; and Cavalcanti had succeeded Guido Guinicelli as the second of mark to write Italian poetry in the ' New Style.' What had been written before, in Sicily for instance, was imitation of Provengal song. Dante himself had studied, perhaps written, Provencal verse, which was a second tongue to literary Italians. It had perished before the wrath of the Church which it assailed: the new stvle kept clear of the overt attack which had proved disastrous. Perhaps through his connexion with men Hke Cavalcanti he became the friend of Giotto the painter and most of the artistic and intelleftual ' set ' of Florence. This Dante whom Giotto painted is other than the Dante we know. Student, poHtician, poet, self-centred, doubtless strong of will and passions, but a softer, lighter, more sensitive, perhaps gayer Dante; a brilliant youth, to whom all things were possible. He and his friends picked sixty Florentine ladies whom they judged fairest, and referred to them by numbers in their poems. Not much melancholy here! Yet Dante, like Milton, it is likely, ' j oked wi' deeficulty,' as some verses of his hint, no better than Milton's on Hobson the carrier. At the same time he was having his baptism of war at Campaldino, and felt not a little frightened, as he ingenuously says. The flower of this time was that beautiful and mysterious poem, the Vita Nuova, on which no two critics agree. There was a Beatrice, doubtless; but already she is so overlaid with allegory that not a fa61: about her can be deemed certain — save that she was not Beatrice Portinari. That IS tne tantalizing truth.
After what he calls the death of Beatrice, our Dante went considerably astray. We may take that from outside witness; though even here his own language is so largely allegorical that we can say little more. Perhaps it was in rca(fl:ion from this that he made his fatal entry into leading poHtics. At any rate, it was no mere pohtical wrong which soured and hardened him. Fiery inner experience and dire spiritual struggle had gone over him and set the trenches on his brow, before Florence cast him without her walls. Now, too, he began the grim study which made him one of the most all-kno\\ing minds of the age. Then he came to power in a ' White ' government, to be overset by a ' Black ' revolution, was thrown forth from his city, and began that ' wandering of his feet perpetually ' which has made him, more truly than Byron, ' the Pilgrim of Eternity.'
Thenceforth he looked to a German invasion for his restoration; and a personal motive deepened the intensity of his stern Ghibelline politics. The ' bitter bread ' of clientage sharpened the iron lines about his mouth. All his learning, all his misery, all that Florence and his Florentine blood and the world had taught him, went to the making of his gieat poem. It is most narrow, most universal; it is the middle ages, it is Dante; it is Florence, it is the world. It is so ci\ic, that the damned and the saints amid their tortures and beatitudes turn excited politicians; and not merely politicians, but Italian politicians; and not merely Itahan politicians, but Florentine politicians; and not merely Florentine politicians but Ghibelline politicians; and not merely GhibeUine, but Dantean politicians. An aft of treacliery to Florence is enough for damnation. The heavens look forward and exult, to the coming of the German into Italy. We must realize that for Dante the Emperor meant the salvation of Italy, the Church, and himself, to understand these things.
Yet the vastness of his understanding and conception makes his poem overwhelmingly impressive to Teutons who look on mediaeval rehgion as a myth. That poem is so august, so shot with hghts of peace and tenderness, that it is accepted as the gospel of mediaeval Christendom. Withal it has a severitv stern even to truculence, which is of Dante pure and simple — another spirit from that ' Hymn to the Sun ' of the gentle Francis of Assisi. And all this because he is Dante — that strange unity of which we know so much, and so little.