ch make the Jean Valjean of Victor
Hugo's noble romance not a figment of the theatre, but an all too actual
type? The believer who looks to another world to redress the wrongs and
horrors of this; the sage who warns us that the law of life is
resignation, renunciation, and doing-without (_entbehren sollst
du_)--each of these has a foothold in common language. But to say that
all infractions of love and equity are speedily punished--punished by
fear--and then to talk of the perfect compensation of the universe, is
mere playing with words, for it does not solve the problem in the terms
in which men propound it. Emerson, as we have said, held the spirit of
System in aversion as fettering the liberal play of thought, just as in
morals, with greater boldness, he rebelled against a minute and cramping
interpretation of Duty. We are not sure that his own optimistic doctrine
did not play him the same tyrannical trick, by sealing his eyes to at
least one half of the actualities of nature and the gruesome
possibilities of things. It had no unimportant effect on Emerson's
thought that he was born in a new world that had cut itself loose from
old history. The black and devious ways through which the race has
marched are not real in North America, as they are to us in old Europe,
who live on the very site of secular iniquities, are surrounded by
monuments of historic crime, and find present and future entangled,
embittered, inextricably loaded both in blood and in institutions with
desperate inheritances from the past.

There are many topics, and those no mean topics, on which the best
authority is not the moralist by profession, as Emerson was, but the man
of the world. The world hardens, narrows, desiccates common natures, but
nothing so enriches generous ones. For knowledge of the heart of man, we
must go to those who were closer to the passions and interests of actual
and varied life than Emerson ever could have been--to Horace, Montaigne,
La Bruyere, Swift, Moliere, even to Pope. If a hostile critic were to
say that Emerson looked at life too much from the outside, as the
clergyman is apt to do, we should condemn such a remark as a
disparagement, but we should understand what it is in Emerson that the
critic means. He has not the temperament of the great humorists, under
whatever planet they may have been born, jovial, mercurial, or
saturnine. Even his revolt against formalism is only a new fashion of
composure, and sometimes c