The eastern and medieval mystics commonly regarded human life by itself as an evil from which they were to escape, the one into unconscious identification with the universe, the other into the love of a personal God. The last words regarding human destiny, uttered by the expiring classic schools are the expression of a doubtful hope. "It is pleasant to die if there be gods; and sad to live if there be none." "As far," says our author, "as it is a question of fact respecting the government of the universe this sums the whole." But he scarcely accepts the latter half of the dilemma in the sense in which it was intended: in his writings there is no trace of the profound melancholy which we find in Tacitus and the later Roman Stoics; life, as it appears to him, is in itself a good; his belief in the gods, as far as human existence is concerned, resolves itself into a confident expectation of indefinite progress, and a reliance, in the meanwhile, on the principle of Compensation. But this principle, by which he endeavours to surmount the difficulties involved in his Optimism, often fails to meet particular cases. The proposition that every individual loss is recompensed by an individual gain, is, as far as this life goes, untrue. Job does not always recover his sons and daughters. The fact that what one loses another gains, does not justify the ways of Providence to the sufferer. A severe Stoical nature that can accept the saying, "Of progressive souls all loves and friendships are momentary," which is pure to the excess of being frigid, and almost repellant in its isolation, escapes from half the pain and struggle of life, but "the passionate heart of the poet" knows more of the wants of mankind. The author of Companions of my Solitude, whose calm judgments are ever softened by sympathy, has put the case more truly in a striking sentence :-"Living as we do in the midst of stern gigantic laws, which crush everything down that comes in their way, which know no excuses, admit of no small errors, never send a man back to learn his

lesson and try him again; living with such powers about us (unseen, too, for the most part), it does seem as if the faculties of man were hardly as yet adequate to his situation here. Such considerations tend to charity and humility; and they point also to the existence of a future state." Charity, in its wide sense, and Humility are the two Christian virtues which the Pagan world had least knowlege of: they are virtually, though not by name, excluded from all the more recent systems which, both for good and evil, revive the Pagan spirit; from Greek Art-worship, and Gothic Force-worship, the pursuit of "Geist," and Transcendentalism. For a definite belief in a Future State, Mr. Emerson substitutes the conception of our relationship with the whole chain of things, our share in the march of the mighty Laws. "The knowledge that we traverse the whole scale of being, from the centre to the poles of nature, and have some stake in every possibility, lends that sublime lustre to death which philosophy and religion have too outwardly and literally striven to express in the popular doctrine of the immortality of the soul." It cannot be denied that the popular views of another world are apt to be materialistic. The Homeric Hades which Plato desired to erase, and Lucretius afterwards so grandly dismissed, was better calculated to terrify weak, than to stimulate strong, natures. In later times mythological conceptions of future reward and punishment, like those dwelt upon by the morbid fancy of Shakespeare's Claudio, have often prevailed, and ridiculous ideas of immortality have been eagerly embraced by the sceptical credulity of a misnamed “Spiritualism." The higher Mysticism of all ages has done good service in protesting against the projected selfishness, which only drives a better bargain for its virtue, because it sees a little farther than the selfishness of the Epicurean. On the other hand, when we refine too much upon the belief in a future existence, when we reduce it to the impersonal perpetuity of the pure reason allowed by

Aristotle, by Spinoza, and by Emerson, we deprive it of its meaning and value as a general motive. That it is possible not only to exist, but to lead a noble life on the stern conditions of their creed, the names of those philosophers and some of the most lustrous pages of classic biography amply demonstrate. The near approach to identity in the practical precepts of Buddhism, of Christianity, and of modern Pantheism, establish the existence of Ethical standards independent of and compatible with all forms of belief. Warriors and patriots have always been found to die τοῦ καλοῦ ἕνεκα. The man of leisure and far-ranging thought, in the ancient world, might find consolation for the violence done to affections, seldom very keen, in speculation and the belief that in a vague sense he was θεοφιλέστατος. The modern sceptical physicist may reflect that he will be remembered as having done something to advance the knowledge of those majestic sequences which will continue to uphold the universe when he "is blown about the desert dust or sealed within the iron hills." The highlyeducated Comtist may claim a more disinterested satisfaction in his philanthropic faith, that while "the individual withers the race grows more and more." The Transcendentalist, like the Quietist, has his moments of exaltation, his elevated évépyeia, or glow of enthusiasm, in the sense of his communion. with the soul that breathes "through all this mystic frame," but his theory seems devised for a world from which want and misery and shame have been cancelled, where there is a fair field and free air and men ἀκηδέα θυμὸν ἔχοντες. But to the million it is a scornful sentence: they feel disinherited of all inducements to live better than the contemporaries of Seneca they ask for bread; it offers a string of pearls:

"It whispers of the glorious gods

And leaves us in the mire."

EMERSON AND CARLYLE.

287

CHAPTER IX.

EMERSON'S STYLE, POETRY, AND CRITICISM-THOREAU.

EMERSON has been, to weariness, compared with Carlyle, in some respects justly; but the contrasts between them are more instructive. They have in common a revolutionary spirit, a marked originality, an uncompromising aversion to decorous illusions, a disdain of traditional thought and stereotyped modes of expression: but in Carlyle this is tempered by respect for persons and a veneration for the Past, in which he holds out models for our imitation; while Emerson sees in its great men and events only finger-posts for the future, and is perpetually warning his readers to stay at home, lest they should travel away from themselves. The one, always a careful, though sometimes a perverse, historian, loves detail and hates abstractions. He delights to dilate on the minutiae of biography, and waxes eloquent even upon dates. The other, a brilliant, though not always a profound, generaliser, tells us that we must "leave a too close and lingering adherence to facts, and study the sentiment as it appeared in hope, not in history." "Everything," he writes, "is beautiful, seen from the point of the intellect or as truth, but all is sour if seen as Experience. Details are melancholy; the plan is seemly and noble. In the actual world-the painful kingdom of time and place-dwell care and canker and fear. With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy: round it all the Muses sing; but grief cleaves to names and persons, and the partial interests of to-day and yesterday."

Neither of these writers has the "dry light :" both exaggerate; but in different directions. The one dwells on the shadows of life; which, from his point of view, is hardly worth living. He is like a man bearing a burden, and bending over the riddle of the earth; till, when he looks up at the firmament of the unanswering stars, he can but exclaim, "It is a sad sight." The other is invigorated by the fresh breezes of the New World: his vision ranges freely over her clear horizons, and he leaps up elastic under her light atmosphere, exclaiming, "Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous." Carlyle is a half-Germanised Scotchman, living near the roar of our great metropolis, with memories of Goethe on the one hand, of the gray hills of the Covenant on the other. He is at bottom a Calvinist, with a coating of Weimar varnish. Emerson is a half-Grecized American, studying Swedenborg and the Phædo in his garden, far enough from the din of cities to enable him, "in seasons of calm weather," to forget their existence. "Boston, London, are as fugitive as any whiff of smoke; so is society, so is the world." In the chapter of Sartor Resartus entitled "Natural Supernaturalism" we have the same feeling of the dream-like character of the shows of things; but this mood of mind, transient in the one writer, prevails with the other. In most practical matters the one is strong where the other is weak. Mr. Emerson seems to have bought his experience cheaply. "Totus teres atque rotundus" at second hand, he writes poorly of the passions, whose gusts he has never felt. His Essay on Love is the description of a beautiful rainbow, not of a mastering power. His own instincts are innocent; and we might have predicted that his rules of life would be misapplied, as they have been, by grosser natures. His Threnody and Dirge are indications of his having passed through the "valley of the shadow ;" but he has encountered no Apollyons, and assumes himself in the Celestial City, without having