that former state of life and circumstances as it does underlie my present, and will always all circumstance, and what is called life, and what is called death."
Whenever a man begins by telling us that he cannot find language to express his meaning, we may be pretty sure that he has no intelligible meaning to express; and Mr Emerson, in the above passage, fully bears out this general observation. "I cannot," he says in another place, "I cannot, nor can any man, speak precisely of things so sublime, but it seems to me, the wit of man, his strength, his grace, his tendency, his art, is the grace and the presence of God. It is beyond explanation. When all is said and done, the rapt saint is found the only logician. Not exhortation, not argument, becomes our lips, but pæans of joy and praise. But not of adulation: we are too nearly related in the deep of the mind to that we honour. It is God in us which checks the language of petition by a grander thought. In the bottom of the heart it is said 'I am, and by me, O child! this fair body and world of thine stands and grows. I am: all things are mine: and all mine are thine.'"
If we can gather any thing from this language, it must imply that the individual mind is conscious of being a part, an emanation of the Divine mind – is conscious of this union or identity – the pretension to which species of consciousness is, in our apprehension, pure mysticism.
But we shall not weary our readers by seeking further proofs of this charge of mysticism; for what can be more wearisome than to have a number of unintelligible passages brought together from different and remote parts of an author's works. We pass to that other cause of obscurity we have hinted at, – the agglomerations of a multitude of unrelated, or half-related, ideas. Sometimes a whole paragraph, and a long one too, is made up of separate fragments of thought or fancy, good or amusing, it may be, in themselves, but connected by the slightest and most flimsy thread imaginable. Glittering insects and flies of all sorts, caught and held together in a spider's web, present as much appearance of unity as some of these paragraphs we allude to.
For an example, we will turn to the first essay in the series, that on History. It is, perhaps, the most striking of the whole, and one which has a more distinct aim and purport than most of them, and yet the reader is fairly bewildered at times by the incongruous assemblage of thoughts presented to him. It is the drift of the essay to show, that the varied and voluminous record of history is still but the development and expansion of the individual being man, as he existed yesterday, as he exists to-day. "A man," he says, "is the whole encyclopædia of facts. The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are merely the application of his manifold spirit to the manifold world." This idea is explained, illustrated, amplified, and very often in a novel and ingenious manner. To exemplify the necessity we feel to recognise ourselves in the past, he says, – "All inquiry into antiquity, all curiosity respecting the pyramids, the excavated cities, Stonehenge, the Ohio circles, Mexico, Memphis, is the desire to do away this wild, savage, and preposterous There or Then, and introduce in its place the Here and the Now. It is to banish the Not me, and supply the Me. It is to abolish difference and restore unity. Belzoni digs and measures in the mummy-pits and pyramids of Thebes, until he can see the end of the difference between the monstrous work and himself. When he has satisfied himself, in general and in detail, that it was made by such a person as himself, so armed and so motived, and to ends to which he himself, in given circumstances, should also have worked, the problem is then solved, his thought lives along the whole line of temples and sphinxes and catacombs, passes through them all like a creative soul, with satisfaction, and they live again to the mind, or are now."
This is good, but by and by he begins to intercalate all sorts of vagrant fantasies, as thus: —
"Civil history, natural history, the history of art, and the history of literature, – all must be explained from individual history, or must remain words. There is nothing but is related to us, nothing that does not interest us, – kingdom, college, tree, horse, or iron shoe, the roots of all things are in man. It is in the soul that architecture exists. Santa Croce and the dome of St Peter's are lame copies after a divine model. Strasburg cathedral is a material counterpart of the soul of Erwin of Steinbach. The true poem is the poet's mind, the true ship is the ship-builder," and so forth. It would be waste of time and words to ask how "tree and horse," in the same sense as kingdom and college, can be said to have "their roots in man;" or whether, when it is said that "Strasburg cathedral is the material counterpart of the soul of Erwin of Steinbach," this can possibly mean anything else than the undoubted fact, that the architect thought and designed before he built.
This subject of architecture comes sadly in the way of the author, and of the reader too, whom it succeeds in thoroughly mystifying. "The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone, subdued by the insatiable demand of harmony in man. The mountain of granite blooms into an eternal flower with the lightness and delicate finish, as well as the aerial proportions and perspective of vegetable beauty. In like manner, all public facts are to be individualised, all private facts are to be generalised. Then at once history becomes fluid and true, and biography deep and sublime."
The fables of Pagan mythology next cross his path, and these lead to another medley of thoughts. "These beautiful fables of the Greeks," he says, "being proper creations of the imagination, and not of the fancy, are universal verities." And well they may be, whether of the fancy or the imagination (and the great distinction here marked out between the two, we do not profess to comprehend), if each mind, in every age, is at liberty to interpret them as it pleases, and with the same unrestrained license that our author takes. But how can he find here an instance of the present man being written out in history, when the old history or fable is perpetually to receive new interpretations, as it is handed down from generation to generation – interpretations which assuredly were never dreamt of by the original inventor?
"Apollo kept the flocks of Admetus, said the poets. Every man is a divinity in disguise, a god playing the fool. It seems as if heaven had sent its insane angels into our world as to an asylum, and here they will break out into their native music, and utter at intervals the words they have heard in heaven; then the mad fit returns, and they mope and wallow like dogs." Whether witty or wise, such interpretations have manifestly nothing to do with the fable as it exists in history, as part of the history of the human mind.
"The transmigration of souls: that too is no fable; I would it were. But men and women are only half human. Every animal of the barn-yard, the field and the forest, of the earth and of the waters that are under the earth, has contrived to get a footing, and to leave the print of its features and form in some one or other of these upright, heaven-facing speakers." Very good; only, if poets and wits are to set themselves to the task, we should like to know what fable there is in the world, whether the product of imagination or fancy, which might not be shown to abound in eternal verities.
Travelling on a little farther, we meet with the following paragraph, some parts of which are to be made intelligible by putting ourselves in the point of view of the idealistic philosopher; but the whole together, by reason of the incongruity of its parts, produces no other effect than that of mere and painful bewilderment, —
"A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world. All his faculties refer to natures out of him. All his faculties predict the world he is to inhabit, as the fins of the fish foreshow that water exists, or the wings of an eagle in the egg presuppose a medium like air. Insulate and you destroy him. He cannot live without a world. Put Napoleon in an island prison, let his faculties find no men to act on, no Alps to climb, no stake to play for, and he would beat the air and appear stupid. Transport him to large countries, dense population, complex interests and antagonist power, and you shall see that the man Napoleon, bounded, that is, by such a profile and outline, is not the virtual Napoleon. This is but Talbot's shadow;
"His substance is not here:
For what you see is but the smallest part,
And least proportion of humanity;
But were the whole frame here,
It is of such a spacious lofty pitch,
Your roof were not sufficient to contain it.
Columbus