tants. On this side of his
genius Emerson broke away from all conditions of age or country and
represented nothing except intelligence itself.

There was another element in Emerson, curiously combined with
transcendentalism, namely, his love and respect for Nature. Nature,
for the transcendentalist, is precious because it is his own work, a
mirror in which he looks at himself and says (like a poet relishing
his own verses), "What a genius I am! Who would have thought there was
such stuff in me?" And the philosophical egotist finds in his doctrine
a ready explanation of whatever beauty and commodity nature actually
has. No wonder, he says to himself, that nature is sympathetic, since
I made it. And such a view, one-sided and even fatuous as it may be,
undoubtedly sharpens the vision of a poet and a moralist to all that
is inspiriting and symbolic in the natural world. Emerson was
particularly ingenious and clear-sighted in feeling the spiritual uses
of fellowship with the elements. This is something in which all
Teutonic poetry is rich and which forms, I think, the most genuine and
spontaneous part of modern taste, and especially of American taste.
Just as some people are naturally enthralled and refreshed by music,
so others are by landscape. Music and landscape make up the spiritual
resources of those who cannot or dare not express their unfulfilled
ideals in words. Serious poetry, profound religion (Calvinism, for
instance), are the joys of an unhappiness that confesses itself; but
when a genteel tradition forbids people to confess that they are
unhappy, serious poetry and profound religion are closed to them by
that; and since human life, in its depths, cannot then express itself
openly, imagination is driven for comfort into abstract arts, where
human circumstances are lost sight of, and human problems dissolve in
a purer medium. The pressure of care is thus relieved, without its
quietus being found in intelligence. To understand oneself is the
classic form of consolation; to elude oneself is the romantic. In the
presence of music or landscape human experience eludes itself; and
thus romanticism is the bond between transcendental and naturalistic
sentiment. The winds and clouds come to minister to the solitary ego.
Have there been, we may ask, any successful efforts to escape from the
genteel tradition, and to express something worth expressing behind
its back? This might well not have occurred as yet; but America i