k not worthy to
dismay the fixed soul, so the optimist turns away his eyes from the
evil which he disposes of as merely negative, as the shadow of the
good. Hawthorne's interest in the problem of sin finds little place in
Emerson's philosophy. Passion comes not nigh him and _Faust_ disturbs
him with its disagreeableness. Pessimism is to him "the only
skepticism."

The greatest literature is that which is most broadly human, or, in
other words, that which will square best with all philosophies. But
Emerson's {455} genius was interpretive rather than constructive. The
poet dwells in the cheerful world of phenomena. He is most the poet
who realizes most intensely the good and the bad of human life. But
Idealism makes experience shadowy and subordinates action to
contemplation. To it the cities of men, with their "frivolous
populations,"

". . . are but sailing foam-bells
Along thought's causing stream."

Shakespere does not forget that the world will one day vanish "like the
baseless fabric of a vision," and that we ourselves are "such stuff as
dreams are made on;" but this is not the mood in which he dwells.
Again: while it is for the philosopher to reduce variety to unity, it
is the poet's task to detect the manifold under uniformity. In the
great creative poets, in Shakespere and Dante and Goethe, how infinite
the swarm of persons, the multitude of forms! But with Emerson the
type is important, the common element. "In youth we are mad for
persons. But the larger experience of man discovers the identical
nature appearing through them all." "The same--the same!" he exclaims
in his essay on _Plato_. "Friend and foe are of one stuff; the
plowman, the plow and the furrow are of one stuff." And this is the
thought in _Brahma_:

"They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly I am the wings:
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings."

{456} It is not easy to fancy a writer who holds this altitude toward
"persons" descending to the composition of a novel or a play. Emerson
showed, indeed, a fine power of character analysis in his _English
Traits_ and _Representative Men_ and in his memoirs of Thoreau and
Margaret Fuller. There is even a sort of dramatic humor in his
portrait of Socrates. But upon the whole he stands midway between
constructive artists, whose instinct it is to tell a story or sing a
song, ami philosophers, like Schelling, who give poetic ex