LITTELL'S LIVING AGE.-No. 320.-6 JULY, 1850.

From the British Quarterly Review. Representative Men. Seven Lectures. By R. W. EMERSON. London: J. Chapman. 1850.

of Great Men; Plato, or the Philosopher; Swedenborg, or the Mystic; Montaigne, or the Sceptic; Shakspeare, or the Poet; Napoleon, or the Man of the World; Goethe, or the Writer. The title, the names selected, and a certain tone, both of thought and phraseology, remind one of the " Hero-worship" of Carlyle. We take such things as they come, doing our best to sift them; using the good as we have opportunity, and calling the false, the bad, and the pernicious, when we find them, by their right names, according to our sober way of thinking.

Ir is not necessary to inform our readers that Mr. Emerson is an American. He became known in England, a few years ago, as the writer of Essays"-his second volume under that title being introduced by commendatory observations from Mr. Carlyle. We remember reading the Essays, and also some Orations, and a volume of Poems, by the same author. We have had but one opportunity of seeing and hearing him. It was the year before last, when he was delivering, in England, the lectures which are printed in the volume before us. He is too remarkable a man to be altogether forgotten, or remembered without interest. He has not attained the kind of celebrity he enjoys without labor; and we have inquired, not unnaturally, who he is, and what sort of work he has been doing in this world. All that we know of his outward life is soon said; he was educated, at (New) Cambridge, for the church among the Unitarians, and was, we cannot say for how long a time, the minister of a congregation at Boston. His preaching was not in any way remarkable. His reputation was that of a worthy and exemplary citizen. Some private opinions, affecting one of the sacraments, induced him to abandon the clerical profession, and employ himself in farming. His Orations and Addresses indicate a respectable, if not an official, connection would warrant us in taking such a liberty with with Divinity College, Cambridge, with Dartmouth College, and with Waterville College, Maine. We infer from his writings that he knows, by experience, the relations of brother, husband, and father.

The lectures here published, attracted some attention in England, as well as in the chief cities in Scotland. Most of his other writings we have met with in several cheap forms, and we believe they are read somewhat extensively, especially by young men, who are great admirers of that freshness of mind which breathes, as they think, through his compositions, and who can hardly fail to be taken by the beautiful thoughts and the rich words which they often present. We may say of these lectures, they are worthy of the author-that is, they are as good as anything he has written, better in some respects, though less elaborate and less brilliant. As we wish to pronounce a judgment on the writer, as a whole, and, indeed, on the entire class of writers to whom we conceive that he belongs, we may have an opportunity of gathering illustrations of our meaning from several of his productions as well as from the last. Our principal concern, however, is with the last. Here are seven lectures-On the Uses CCCXX. VOL. XXVI. 1

LIVING AGE.

We are tempted at the outset to say to this brother in letters-how came you not to have seen, with the first glance, that one use of great men is to teach little men to be modest and unaffected, and particularly to talk, or write, or act, in a way which shows what they mean? The great men of the past, or of the day which now is, strike us greatly by the simplicity, the oneness, the perspicuity, and the earnestness of their character. Their greatness is not darkness; not the multiplication of pieces of Mosaic put together with infinite labor; nor a monstrous exaggeration of some nat ural thought or propensity; and so, worthy friend, if you wish to teach us the “ uses of great men," do not mislead us in the act of looking at them, by making us think of the painter and his palette, instead of the grand original he professes to present. But the wide Atlantic rolls between us, and we are, moreover, not on those terms which

Mr. Emerson, who, we suppose, would not be more surprised than other men of genius at finding his own name enrolled among the great; therefore we resist the temptation, which we confess is not weak, to hold an imaginary dialogue with him concerning these Representative Men, and we pass on to the less lively duty of putting down the thoughts which we have had within ourselves, while we have been reading what he has written. Stripped of the mannerism and the embellishments, of which we say nothing at present, the first lecture amounts to thus much: Mankind are ever in pursuit of great men. Religions, Christianity included, are the deifications of great men. Every man seeks a great man who is as different as possible from himself. Great men mind their own business, find their proper place, and each occupies the rank to which he belongs. Their service to other men is not direct, but indirect; and they represent, first, things; and, secondly, ideas. Great men represent things by having a secret liking for them, and by being, in fact, identified with them. Huber was a great bee; Euclid a great line; Newton a great fluxion; Gilbert a great magnet; Sir Humphry Davy a great gas. Then, we sympathize with these great men; and,

by the excitement of our intellect and of our affec-| Swedenborg, or Oersted, before the general mind tions, by the biographies of the dead, and by the can come to entertain its powers! The gases example of the living, we are benefited by them. gather to the solid firmament; the chemic lump The tendency to overrate great men is checked by ruped, and waiks; arrives at man, and thinks. arrives at the plant, and grows; arrives at the quadthe individualisms of genius, by a species of rota- But also the constituency determines the vote of the tion in the laws of nature, but, most of all, by the representative. He is not merely representative, power of the idea itself, which the great have but participant. Like can only be known by like. obeyed as well as represented. Mr. Emerson The reason why he knows about them is, that he is of sees in the power of great men something which them; he has just come out of nature from being a wears the appearance of injustice to the many. part of that thing. Animated chlorine knows of The compensation for this inequality he finds in chlorine, and incarnate zinc knows of zinc. Their quality makes his career, and he can variously pubthe belief that every man's turn will come-some-lish their virtues because they compose him. where, in the notion that each shares in the great- made of the dust of the world does not forget his ness of the greatest, and especially in what he origin, and all that is yet inanimate will one day calls "the central identity of all the individuals," speak and reason. Unpublished nature will have who 66 are made of the substance which ordaineth its whole secret told. Shall we say that quartz and doeth," whatever that may mean. It seems mountains will pulverize into innumerable Werners, Von Buchs, and Beaumonts, and the labyrinth of to mean a good deal; for it is the key to all the the atmosphere hold in solution I know not what enigmas both in the prose and the poetry of this Berzeliuses and Davys? author; it is the "genius of humanity"—the exponent of a vaster mind and will"—"the qualities which abide, when the men who have

66

expressed them have now, more or less, passed away"-the "destiny of organized nature"-the over soul."

66

It can

In the expression of opinions about great men, we have not discovered any comprehensive views of human nature-any depth of insight, subtle analysis, or force of thought; on the contrary, everything is common-place, except the want of that clear method, and that distinct enunciation, which we have been accustomed to regard as qualities of some value in the instructions given by a public teacher. The chief peculiarities we observe in Mr. Emerson's manner are, we must say, open to various objections; some of them are worthy of grave rebuke, and they will be severely condemned by moral and religious minds. scarcely be without some significance that he speaks of " Christianity" and "Judaism," along with "Buddhism" and "Mahomedanism," as the necessary structural action of the human mind. If he does not intend us to understand that Christianity is merely the effect of this "structural action," it is a pity that he should have said so; if he does intend us to understand it thus, he must know that this is untrue—that it is impossible; and that to hint so monstrous a misrepresentation is to tamper with the highest interests of humanity-ay, with interests which are too sacred to be approached by any man without trembling reverence. When he classes " prophecy" with magical power" as "agreeable to the early belief of men," the unworthy insinuation is too gross and palpable to escape the most superficial reader. Of the same character is the misrepresentation implied in the gratuitous innuendo-"Churches believe in imputed merit."

66

We are not disposed to yield our understanding, or our judgment, to a writer whose complacency is gratified by putting into print such sentences as the following :

In the history of discovery, the ripe and latent Truth seems to have fashioned a brain for itself. A magnet must be made man, in some Gilbert or

Man

importance to this jargon than we really do, we Were we not afraid of appearing to attach more might make a pretty business here by a little analysis and a little analogy, and by asking this lecturer and his admirers one or two plain questions. But, at present, we forbear. The lecture on "Plato, or the Philosopher," is disfigured by pretension, exaggeration, and bad taste; it is, also, the famous Greek in his own language, will gather extremely shallow. Those who have never studied but a feeble and inaccurate impression of either his excellences or his defects from this New Cambridge expounder. His representation may be expressed in a few sentences. Plato, according to Mr. Emerson, is the original from which all other books are drawn, and contains them all. He absorded the learning of his own times, and blended the elements of Asia with those of Europe. Unity The conception of the fundamental unity abounds and variety are the cardinal facts of philosophy. in the religious writings of the East; this he calls "the gravitation of mind." But activity of mind, which is the power of nature," leads backwards the West its culture, freedom, and trade; Plato to diversity. The East has its fate and its caste, was "the balanced soul" that united those opposite poles of humanity by his perfect synthesis. This power air," with earnestness, piety, probity, reverence of synthesis he used with a palatial for justice, and a tender humanity, with a vast sweep of imagination, and always with the fit word, with wit of every kind, with wondrous moderation, all other sciences is taught by Dialectics. Plato and with "a great common sense." The use of delighted in intellectual culture, yet relied on Nature and adored the Divine. He reduced all the operations of the soul to conjecture, faith, understanding, reason. wisdom is more beautiful than beauty. God alone Beauty is most lovely, but can teach wisdom; and virtue is not a lesson, but an inspiration. "the

66

Socrates is described, not unhappily, as organ through which every considered opinion shall be announced, (enounced,)" and the master and the "robed scholar" are spoken of as "making

each other immortal in their mutual faculty." The | short homily, of which Mr. Emerson shall supply faults which Mr. Emerson finds in Plato are two the text: "Calvinism is in his Phædo, Christiani-his writings have not the vital authority which ty is in it."-p. 28. "the screams of prophets, and the sermons of unlettered Arabs and Jews possess ;" and he has not a system his theory of the universe is not complete, not consistent, and no one can tell what Platonism is notwithstanding, Plato is "truliest seen when seen with most respect."

Under the head of " New Readings," Mr. Emerson enlarges his meditations on Plato, for which he takes occasion from "the excellent translations of Plato" in Mr. Bohn's serial library. Whether the lecturer was now for the first time made familiar with the reading of the Republic or not, we cannot tell, and it is not our business to insinuate suspicions; but how this new translation of a book, which has been familiar to scholars, both in the original and in Latin translations, time out of mind, could have suggested "New Readings," is a matter which our vulgar English scholarship must leave among dark things.

This brief sentence imports that the writer wishes us to consider him as one well acquainted with three things, of one of which he affirms that the other two are in it. We need not go higher in the context than to observe that the author has been making a parade of showing that Plato is philosophy, and that philosophy is Plato, and that the thinkers of all nations are his posterity, and are tinged with his mind; in proof of which he mentions-first, the Alexandrians; secondly, the Elizabethans, including, so we take it, nine worthy Englishmen, of whom one lived before Elizabeth, and all the others flourished in a later period of English letters; thirdly," the illustrious Marcilius Ficinius," and Picus (whom he ought to have called Pico) of Mirandola; and, fourthly, in addition to this catalogue of ill-considered names, he says, in the text, "Calvinism is in his Phædo, Christianity is in it." The writer may suppose, for aught that appears, that his word is enough for this; or that it is so true, and so well known to be true, that he needs only mention it; or, that, whether it be true or not true, it is so smart a thing to say, and hits both Calvin, and another writer, whose name we do not like to repeat in this connection, so hard and so well deserved a blow, that it is better to strike the blow than not to strike it. Well, then, What is Calvinism? What is Christianity? What is Plato's Phædo? This lecturer does not say what either of the three is; but what he does say, it would not become so wise a man to say, if he did not know very well what they all are. Now we can only deal with the text itself, and, to our best understanding, its meaning is that there is nothing in Calvinism which is not in the Phædo, and there is nothing

Our learned brother has met with some other books, which have done him much more service than Carey's translations of Plato, and which, perchance, he may have studied nearly as much as he has studied Plato, though there was no apparent necessity for telling his audience how much he has borrowed from them-we mean, the very superficial, fanciful, and mischievous class of books represented by "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation." By aid of a philosophy which is opposed to the sound principles and acknowledged facts of natural history, especially of paleontology, this profound lecturer on the Greek philosopher thinks he can explain the natural history of Plato in the "fatal and beautiful succession of men, so that he does not" (like the worthies whom minerals, magnets, bees, lichens, pears, atomic forms, lines, and fluxions, chose as their representatives, some-in Christianity which is not in the Phædo; from what out of time, by two or three thousand years, or so) "represent anything less than the intellectual privilege of carrying up every fact to successive platforms." The moral conclusions of Plato are given in a dry, imperfect manner; and his account of Plato's definition of ideas, proves that he has never studied that essential principle of Plato's philosophy, and almost proves that it belongs to a department of study with which he has no sympathy nor familiarity, and in which, to speak plainly, he is altogether out of his element, or beyond his depth. His strongest reprobation of what he cannot approve in Plato, is expressed in words which are given à la Carlyle: "I am sorry to see him, after such superiorities, permitting the lie to governors. Plato plays Providence! a little, with the baser sort, as people allow themselves with their dogs and their cats." How sagacious! How elegant! How moral! How reverential!

As an example of Mr. Emerson's acquaintance with Plato, if not with other things of which he speaks with the wonted superciliousness of men who set up in these days for great thinkers, we must ask our readers to let us try our hand on a

which we infer that, as Christianity began to be taught more than three hundred years after Plato died, the teachers of Christianity were indebted to the Phædo for their peculiar doctrines—or Christianity; and that Calvin, who began to teach some fifteen hundred years later still, was indebted for whatever he taught, which is not Christianity, to the same source, as well as for the Christianity which he taught, if he taught Christianity at all. Both these things must be true, if the text be true. Assuming that the text is true, we should be glad to have it in our power to tell you, honored reader, by what remarkable process the wise man, who is here teaching us, came to the knowledge of the curious fact that "the unlettered Jews," and "the good Jesus," (of whom the "perhaps not badhearted Voltaire” said—“ I pray you let me never hear that man's name again,")—were students of the Greek philosopher; or that some kind rabbi (like Mr. Carey and his predecessors in Germany, France, and England) had "done into" Aramaic, or into Latin, this fountain of the Gospel, and that it was the theme of lectures on the margin of Gennesareth, on the heights of Tabor, or amid the

and in morals, for which Plato is so highly lauded, thus amply illustrated by a modern admirer; and it does one good to see that the tendency to exaggeration which we Europeans had been so apt to ascribe to our friends over the water is so charmingly corrected by philosophy! Weighty words are these from a prophet who never screams, from a preacher who is neither an unlettered Arab, nor an unlettered Jew, but a civilized and polished descendant of the good old pilgrim fathers:

which we have hitherto assumed to be true-as most of the readers probably will take that for granted, and as, certainly, the lecturer himself expects us all to do.

gardens of Olivet; but that the Nazarene and his well drilled pupils never deemed it prudent to tell the simple men who heard them, whence their wisdom came. Unless something of this kind be supposed, we do not understand in what way it was possible that Christianity should be in the Phædo. It can scarcely be necessary to prove to any student of the Christian writings that there is not the shadow of evidence in the documents themselves, that they are the productions of an artificer so entirely at variance with the simplicity, integrity," Christianity is in the Phædo;" weighty words! and straightforward manliness of the first teachers. Equally unnecessary would it be to prove to the scholar who is conversant with the literature of the Hebrews of that age, that the doctrines of the Phædo-supposing them to be identical with those of Christianity-had in any other way reached the mind of Jesus and his disciples, so as insensibly to mould them. If Christianity be in the Phædo, Christianity must be derived from the Phædo, directly or indirectly; but there is no evidence, either literary or historical, that such was the fact; on the contrary, the evidence of the whole case is in proof that it was not, and that it could not be. The lecturer, however, may mean, not that Christianity is drawn from the Phædo, but that it was anticipated by it; that its doctrines were taught by Socrates and Plato in Athens, three hundred years before they were taught by Jesus in Judea, and by John in Asia Minor. Let us take it so. If this is what is meant, then is it also meant that Christianity was not original, not taught for the first time by Jesus; that it was not a divine revelation, but the fruit of human reasoning; that if Jesus had never lived, or taught, all that is in Christianity would have been known; and, by consequence, that the reader of the Phædo has no occasion for the Gospels. One exception, we presume, even Mr. Emerson would make-or rather, has made namely, that the Christianity of Plato wanted the "vital authority," which he says "the screams of prophets and the sermons of unlettered Arabs and Jews possess." What the value of that authority may be, however, in this gentleman's estimation, our readers may gather if they can from the choice diction with which he has described it—it is the "vital authority," not of wisdom, goodness, or inspiration, but of "screams," or of the illiteracy which was common to Arabs and Jews in their sermons.

But we, British Quarterly Reviewers, having some objections against taking any saying for granted that is capable of being tested, are wayward enough to question the text itself, and to ask, is it so? Does the Phædo contain Christianity? Not being acquainted with any other test than the very obvious one, somewhat antique indeed, yet much respected by philosophers, and not less by practical men, of bringing the two things together, we have done this, and behold the upshot of our comparison :—Christianity is NOT in the Phado. The worthy lecturer has either mistaken what Christianity is, or what the Phædo is, orwhich is the judgment to which the examination of the matter has conducted us—he intentionally depreciates the one, for the purpose of unduly exalting the other. Our meaning is, this writerfrom whatever motives-has done that which, had we done ourselves, we should boldly avow as an intended lowering of Christianity in the presence of the great philosopher of Athens. Assuredly, if he or any other man, having clear intellect, and sufficient information, believes that he is serving truth by enunciating such conclusions, it is neither our province nor our wish to impute to him any motive which an honorable mind would disavow; at the same time we cannot serve truth according to our conscience without protesting, as men and as scholars, against the entire method in which conclusions of such far-reaching import are scattered over the pages of such authors as the one with whose words we are now dealing. It is not the open, honest, self-relying method of either a truth-seeker or a truth-holder, to avoid analysis, argument, discussion, the history of systems and This style of referring to prophets-Isaiah, Mi- the collations of writings, and, instead of these cah, and Daniel, for example, and to sermons- acknowledged methods of ascertaining and prothe sermon on the Mount and those at Mecca pounding what is true, resorting to startling paraapparently classed together-is an average sample dox, rash assertion, sly innuendo, ambiguous inof this writer's discrimination and learning, and sinuations, ill-considered analogies, incoherent an equally fair specimen of his reverence for scraps from contradictory theories, juggling feats the true, the good, and the divine. It is very of blending things and persons as similar which satisfactory, truly, to be told that "an oak is are "wide as the poles asunder," quietly stinging not an orange." Indeed! of course this explains the vital powers of humanity, and distilling what the difference between Plato and the screaming may be poison, through the ear, into the very soul prophets and unlettered Jews; and of course it of the unsuspecting. Such a method is not masexplains how it came to pass that the orange is in culine. It is not the method of the "great" masthe oak-Christianity in the Phædo! It is really ters in any art, in any science, or in any walk of pleasant to find the discipline in logic, in taste, learning. It is a method which has a closer

natural affinity with the false than with the true. I as to obscure its very existence, and rendered necIt is admirably fitted to the grasp of the feeble, to essary a long series of periodical efforts towards the cunning of the timid, or to the heedlessness of the restoration of her primal form, which have not the rash the strong, the true-hearted, and the yet ceased, and of which we see no prospect of an wise, have no occasion for it; and it is their early close, firm as is our belief, and high our familiar habit to loathe it, or to despise it. It hope, that it will one day prevail, when Christianmay gain the suffrages of the ill-informed, of the ity-as Jesus meant it, as the apostles taught it, generous though impatient youths, who fancy that and as the New Testament embodies it shall thinking is somewhat beyond the range of intel-stand out by itself, borrowing nothing from human lectual discipline, and nowise dependent in the philosophy, but extinguishing all lesser lights, as drudgery of knowing, and of all those persons who are fondly dreaming of some progress which the human race is to make in spite of the ascertained laws of our mental nature, and the tried capacities of our moral constitution; but unless Christianity be something less than the ancient gospel, or the Phædo something more than the philosophy of Plato, we maintain the direct negation of what the lecturer affirms; and we mean not to assert merely, as he has done, but to prove, (a kind of trouble which he spares both his hearers and himself,) that Christianity is not in the Phædo.

We are not at all disposed to yield to any reader, in loving admiration of the genius of Plato his comprehensive philosophy; his exquisite skill; the easy force with which he unites the precision of the geometer and the freedom of the poet in his inexorable logic, and his inimitable rhetoric; the sagacity, the delicate yet withering irony, the vast compass, the compressed energy, the comic playfulness, the tragical earnestness, with which he demolishes the sophistries of mankind; and the high tone of manhood with which he lashes the artificial, the conventional, the empirical, of every land, in every age;—we sympathize, if it be not too presumptuous to say it, with the moral Laocoon, whose happier struggles with the terrible reality which men call death are depicted in a form more durable than the marble of the Rhodian sculptors, with a grace which the most elegant of poets has not improved,

Ille simul manibus tendit divellere nodos ; and our reason shares the tranquillity with which the great Athenian martyr meets the enemy with the fearlessness of hope, speaking of his soul departing to a place like itself, noble, pure, invisible, to be with God, the good, and the wise. We lay up in the garner of our hearts the human soul's persuasion of her immortality; we trace with joy and thankfulness the influence of this persuasion on the thoughts of men in after times, so that the conclusions, if not the reasonings, of the Phædo did not a little to draw them from the grossness of sensuality, and the vassalage of superstition, thus preparing them for the clearer light and the stronger proofs which attended the immeasurably larger discoveries of the gospel-but there is no gospel in the Phado.

At an early period in the history of Christianity, the attempts to mingle the revealed truths of the gospel with the philosophy of Plato, or to confound the two together, combined with other causes, brought so many clouds over Christianity

well as pervading every region of darkness, by its own pure, divine, and ever-shining lustre.

At the beginning of Christianity as a complete system of thought and action, having reference to the divine and the human, and to the harmony of both, it is well known that one of the most subtle hostilities it had to encounter was the Platonic philosophy, modified by the speculations of the great school of Alexandria. It was contended then, that whatever is true in Christianity was in Platonism, and consequently, all in Christianity that was not there, was false or worthless.

It is certainly worth while to recollect some of the many evidences of this species of Platonic hostility to the gospel which abound in the remains of early Christian literature. Flavius Justinus, of Grecian descent, in Flavia Nicopolis, a Roman colohy of Palestine, in Syria, sought to quench his thirst for religious truth in the most famous schools of Grecian philosophy. Having tried in vain the doctrines of the Stoics, of the Peripatetics, and of the Pythagoreans, he believed that he had attained the object of his pursuit in the doctrines of Plato. Captivated with the theory of ideas, and hoping soon to reach the sublime heights from which he might gaze directly upon God, he gave himself up to lonely contemplation by the sea-shore-whether at Alexandria or at Ephesus, it is unimportant to decide. One day his solitude was interrupted by the appearance of a venerable stranger, to whom he explained the nature of the studies which absorbed him. The stranger then said to him:-"Art thou a lover of words, but not of action or of truth, attempting to be a sophist, rather than a practical man?" Justin replied that, according to his judgment, there could be no worthier employment than that of philosophy, by which the true is discovered, and the false refuted, and from which alone happiness could flow. The stranger then showed him that philosophy, being limited to the pure reasonings of the intellect, might evolve the principles of numbers, of astronomy, of music, and of many arts, and by these means might arrive at the conviction that there must be a God, and that there are essential moral distinctions; but it could offer no foundation for the notion that the human soul has an intuitive power of immediately beholding God. Such a knowledge of God, he maintained, must be specially imparted by God himself, and learned from the instructions of those whom he has thus singularly favored. He also exposed the Platonic doctrine of the preexistence and transmigration of souls as fanciful and use