BOOKS.

EMERSON.* THESE early Journals of Emerson, which are now published for the first time, begin in 1820 and end in 1832. Those years find him a College student of seventeen, and they leave him a young minister, retired from his pastorate, and on the eve of starting for his first journey to Europe. The Journals were published to complete the centenary edition of Emerson's works, and also to bring him closer to his admirers by showing his mind and style in the making. Such a test would be hard, and in many cases unfair, for the greatest intellects and stylists ; and it cannot be maintained that Emerson had a mind of the highest order, or that he was a stylist in the fuller meaning of the word. It must be confessed that in themselves these Journals are not very interesting in their matter, and they too seldom rise above the commonplace in their manner. The average reader in search of instruction or amusement had better leave them unread. Nevertheless they will have their value for Emerson's disciples and admirers. Beyond this, they may be worth exploring by those who are interested in the growth and development of character. Perhaps they are most interesting of all where they show us the society and scenery of the United States in those com- paratively early times. The accounts of persons, of inns, of living and travelling, are the best things in these volumes, and we regret there are not more of them. In other words, Emer- son's eyes have more to tell us in those early days than his undeveloped mind; and whatever riches the "inward eye" of a sage may draw from the stores of his memory and experience, the outward eye of youth is fresher and keener.

Perhaps two things may strike a reader of these volumes who goes to them hoping to increase his knowledge of a famous man. One is that Emerson, even from his earliest youth, looked out on the world with clear, frank, brave, and truthful eyes. The other is that his intention was always as candid and courageous as his glance, and his conduct was always a loyal expression of his intentions. These qualities, and they are high ones, are expressed in the most engaging portrait which is chosen as a frontispiece of the first volume. The eyes are the arresting feature in this portrait. Certainly they are large, candid, pleasant eyes. They gaze into the distance, but if they were turned on the beholder they would be alert and penetrating. The brows are strong, and the forehead is delicate. There is a certain weakness in the lower part of the face; but there is enough practical shrewdness to take its owner through the world without disaster, though not without disillusionment and pain. This portrait was taken in 1844, twelve years after the period of the Journals; but their self-portraiture, and the impression conveyed to the painter and passed on by her to us, agree very well together. Candour is the prevailing note of both; and candour may be taken as Emerson's motto, as the summary of his message to the world.

"I don't think he ever engaged in boys' plays," says Emerson's earliest friend ; "not because of any physical inability, but simply because, from his earliest years, he dwelt in a higher sphere. My own deep impression is, that, from his earliest childhood, our friend lived and moved and had his being in an atmosphere of letters, quite apart by himself." This account is borne out fully by the Journals. They bring before us a young student, immersed in books, reading voraciously but on the whole wisely ; with a dangerous taste for oratory, which was curbed fortunately by his candour and his mistrust of verbiage. He was in a still more dangerous atmosphere of theology, but he was saved again by his innate candour, and by certain liberal influences which were developed farther by his own tastes and reasonings. It is a pity, no doubt, that he was never thoroughly a boy; but, in spite of his earliest friend's testimony, he came of an unsound stock, and had a fragile constitution. One of his brothers • Jountals of Ralph Waldo Emerson. With Annotations. Edited by Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes. 2 vols. Loudon: Constable and CO. [6a net.

died young ; another was not wholly sane. Emerson himself only escaped by rest and care. The shadow of illness wan over him for many years, and his first wife died of consump- tion not long after their marriage.

The Journals plunge us into a world of debating societies, with their usual strained discussions, alleviated now and then by a convivial meeting. The universal and unbending teetotalism of Young America is evidently a legend, as coloured as most other traditions. At any rate, these young

Americans indulged themselves, and Emerson had both a discriminating taste and a lasting memory for liquors :— "The Southerners' were the reigning college etegans of that time, the merveilieux, the mirifiores, of their day. Their swallow- tail coats tapered to an arrow-point angle, and the prints of their little delicate calf-skin boots in the snow, were objects of great admiration to the village boys of the period."

This humanistic Southern element is a welcome relief to the pervading theology and sermons under which the Northernere appear to have been submerged. Emerson had a saving sense for much that was right and good in the Southern population of the States :—

"No man has travelled in the United States from the North to the South without observing the change and amelioration of manners. In this city [Charleston], it is most observable, the use of the conventions of address among the lowest classes, which are coarsely neglected by the labouring classes at the North. Two negroes recognise each other in the street, though both in rags, and both, it may be, balancing a burden on their heads, with the same graduated advances of salutation that well-bred men who are strangers to each other would use at Boston. They do not part before they have shaken hands and bid good-bye with an inclination of the head. There is a grace and a perfection too about these courtesies which could not be imitated by a Northern labourer where he designed to be extremely civil. Indeed, I have never seen an awkward Carolinian."

Again, as a contrast, speaking this time of the North, he says :—" From the want of an upper class in society, from the

admirable republican equality which levels one with all, results a rudeness and sometimes a savageness of manners which is apt to disgust a polished and courtly man." Very curious, too, and rather charming, is the account of St. Augustine, an old Spanish town, where Emerson met the

eldest son of Murat, King of Naples, Napoleon's nephew, a very interesting man, with whom he formed a genuine friend-

ship. Emerson was delighted with the life, the colour, the picturesqueness, and the good manners of these Southern places. The extreme type of Puritanism has much to answer for; and there is a terrible quality, which Matthew Arnold describes as "Anglo-Saxon commonness " ; but the golden mean, however pleasant sounding, is attained and kept with difficulty. Very ominous is the account of St. Augustine,—

" the oldest town of Europeans in North America; 1564; full of ruins,—chimneyless houses, lazy people; horse-keeping intolerably dear, and bad milk from swamp-grass, because all the hay cornea from the north. 40 (?) miles from here is nevertheless the richest crop of grass growing untouched. Why ? because there is no scythe in St. Augustine, and if there were, no man knows how to use one:'

In the same place he describes the gambling, swindling, indebted Roman Catholic priest, and the ghastly punish- ments of the former Spanish Governors. A Nemesis has come upon all these things. Spain has been swept away; and the old Southern world has gone; but the millennium

has not come. The new order is not an unmixed good, and some of its problems are more serious than any that men have yet been called upon to solve. Many of Emerson's

rhapsodies about American achievements and ideals and prospects have much grim and unintentional satire as we look back on the past, and contemplate the present with all its difficulties and surprises.

But these graphic sketches of the outer world are the oases

in Emerson's Journals. A much greater space is occupied by a dusty and barren waste of theology and of theological

speculation. Emerson escaped the narrow and revolting Calvinism which seems to have been the prevailing fashion, but his own theories were scarcely leas crude and, so to

speak, mechanical. It is very difficult for us to realise that so short a time ago, and in an emancipated country, a man far above the average in reading and intelligence could hold Emerson's childish notions of Scripture, of what is called revelation. and of man's relation to the unseen. The passage on religion (VoL L, pp. 98-104) is worth reading in this con- nexion as marking the enormous change that has come over the world. The words are no doubt those of a raw youth,

but no average young man of any education could think and write now as Emerson did in 1826. He wrote six years later "Calvinism suited Ptolemaism," meaning, we may infer, that Calvinism was only credible if a certain theory of the universe were accepted as its basis and explanation. That system has gone for ever, or at any rate until there is a new flood of barbarism and ignorance ; and Calvinism has gone with it. This truth has been borne in upon one of the Calvinist strongholds, the Scottish Churches and their ministry; and similar truths, under the name of Modernism, are dissolving the structure of the Papacy. Emerson, how- ever, had the seeds of growth and progress in him, though he scarcely recognised the clue which he held actually in his hands. "Morals do not change," he wrote in 1826, "but the science of morals does advance ; men discover truth and relations of which they were before ignorant If ethics were an immovable science, the primeval altar of the Jews might serve as the model of our holy place." Here Emerson is standing on the very threshold of all that we understand by evolution in religious matters. We may guess how erdently he would have welcomed our present knowledge and attitude, how he would have rejoiced in the fruitful science of comparative religion. "Blessed are the eyes that see the things which ye see," he would have said to us ; and he might well have contrasted our liberating theology with the narrow Calvinism and the mad fanaticism which were possible in his youth ; such as the "monstrous absurdities" of some Methodists at a Camp Meeting, "several of these fanatics jumping about on all fours, imitating the barking of dogs and surrounding a tree, in which they pretended they had treed Jesus."

There are not, perhaps, many youthful diaries which would bear the light of publicity as Emerson's do. As we look back, we can say, without any reservations : Whatsoever things were lovely and of good report, in these he never failed. He was drawn to them, practised them, and gave his life to spreading them. A great poet he certainly was not, though he had a poetic soul and a fine taste for poetry. A great master of style he was not, though he had stores of reading, and a zeal for good literature ; and he often said fine and memorable things, as when he speaks of Milton's poetry "doing good in a golden way." A great thinker he was not, either; but he bade men think high and aim high. Above all, he advised them to be real and genuine, to be themselves, especially in spiritual and intellectual matters. He was a candid soul. He preached and practised candour ; and that gospel was never more wanted than it is to-day. We may add to it Emerson's fine definition of prayer : "The contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view." That view is too generally hidden by our theological and political confusions.