dan proselytism succeeds in India because it leaves its converts Asiatics still; Christian proselytism fails in India because it strives to make of its converts English middle-class men. That is the truth in a nutshell, whether we choose to accept it or not.-Contemporary Review.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON.

To some Englishmen the name of Emerson suggests little more than a curious chapter in the history of modern mysticism. To a large section of cultivated Americans, on the other hand, the philosopher of Concord appears the most representative figure in their republic of letters, their most imaginative poet, their greatest teacher, their most vigorous and daring thinker, their most original writer. And their verdict is substantially correct. The estimate may appear excessive; but the exaggeration, if such there be, is prompted by true instincts of national gratitude. A glance at the movement which revolutionized the intellectual and literary condition of America in 1830-1840, and the unrivaled influence which Emerson exercised in promoting and directing that movement, will explain, if it does not justify the verdict of his fellow-countrymen.

In 1830 the United States were a crowded mart, a busy workshop, a bustling 'Change. The general standard of life was low. Several years later, thoughtful, spiritual-minded men, like Sylvester Judd, still protested against the political, social, and religious vices which had corrupted the New England spirit, and seemed inextricably interwoven with public institutions. The brains of the country were attracted into channels of activity which were hostile to literature, philosophy, and art. Practical men, absorbed in business pursuits, hemmed in by objects of sense, regarding only immediate and obvious utility, had lost faith, if not consciousness, in the higher faculties of their moral and mental natures. They were more eager to get a living than to live. Those who had leisure or capacity for thought were, like Irving, swept away by the tide of imitation, or, like Dana, crippled by dissatisfaction with their surroundings. Fashions, philosophy, literary tone, were borrowed from the Old World. Miss Edgeworth and Mrs. Trimmer fed the rising generation upon English conventional. ities; literature displayed the mediocrity of imitation rather than the natural charm of invention; Americans wrote from their memories; they rebuilt the sepulchres of their fathers, not tenements for living men. They had no native standards. Washington Irving caught the graces of Addison, and national vanity satisfied itself with comparing

Cooper to Walter Scott, or claiming for Bryant a rival with Wordsworth. An Allston might attempt the highest range of pictorial art; but both in painting and poetry American talent was attracted towards inanimate Nature, and in neither field attained the most perfect form of expression. Neither painters nor poets penetrated from the form to the substance. A Bryant or a Doughty might render into verse or upon canvas something of the rare fascination which is exercised by the stillness and solitude of forest life. But, as a rule, both landscape painting and descriptive verse displayed little more than accurate memory, patient observation, sensitiveness to beauty, selection of striking effects. In neither the one nor the other was there revealed that imaginative faculty which expresses ideal truth through the forms of Nature, that high poetic vein which submits the shows of things to the desires of the mind.

Industrialism and imitation were not more uncompromising in their hostility to independent culture than was Puritanism. In former generations religion had raised and elevated New England settlers, given strength to character, and fibre to morality. But the grim austerity of Calvinism had never smiled on art; it was iron in its discipline, stern and implacable in its doctrine; it favored neither freedom nor variety of thought. Puritans, who were unclogged by formalism and unfettered by logic, might still soar upwards into the celestial regions of ecstatic faith; but as the lives of the emigrants had settled down into prose, so the poetry of their religion had fled. Old ideas, passionate piety, and philosophical penetration, met in conflict. Men became sceptics unawares; they doubted the basis of the faith to whose symbois they clung with desperate tenacity. Religion's claim to inspiration was opposed to the dominant philosophy of Locke; Puritan asceticism revolted against the habits of a wealthy democracy. The Scarlet Letter reveals the possibilities, if not the actualities, of the gloomy despotism, which frowned down amusement, carried its espionage into private life, and darkened society with the grim shadow of ministerial tyranny. The inevitable reaction came. Formal, hard, external, it fell an easy prey to Unitarianism. But its successful rival was too dry and material to satisfy the higher needs of human nature. With all its clearness of thought, mental activity, and sincerity of intention, it had, in 1830, lost its spring. In ceasing to be aggressive, it ceased to be enthusiastic. It rose or fell to a dull level of respectability, on which a sense of propriety replaced religious fervor. Thus the society of the country was industrial, utilitarian, fettered by conventionalities; its religion formal or rationalizing; its art unimaginative; its literature imitative and pusillanimous.

To change these unfavorable conditions was the object of Emerson's teaching. Few men initiated a new departure with more conscious

purpose. The text of his first sermon was "What is a man profited if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" The great end of every man's life is the preservation of his individual mind and character. This lesson of private freedom is the essence of all his later utterances. Nature, his first published composition, was a challenge to the Old World. In his thoughts on modern Literature (Dial, October, 1840), the same note is struck; even Goethe fails to satisfy him, not only because of his artistic indifferentism, but because, in Emerson's opinion, he never rose above the sphere of artistic conventionality. The addresses before the Phi-Beta-Kappa Society, and before the Divinity class at Cambridge, produced a profound impression. The first took his audience by storm. It was It was "an event," says Lowell," without any former parallel in our literary annals, a scene to be always treasured in the memory for its picturesqueness and its inspiration." "It has," wrote Theodore Parker, who also heard it, "made a great noise;" and he calls it "the noblest, most inspiring strain I ever listened to." In after life he used "to thank God for the sun, the moon, and Ralph Waldo Emerson." Many Americans of the present day have testified to the electric shock which these two addresses gave to society. They were everywhere discussed; they provoked numerous replies, created a species of panic among professors like Andrews Norton, and became the occasion of a heated controversy. Emerson alone took no part in this "storm in a wash-bowl."

In these early productions Emerson sketched the teaching which he afterwards expanded, developed, and illustrated in all his subsequent lectures and essays. He is moved by the spirit of a new people. He is determined to see in the individual man of to-day the elements of all the greatness, the germ of all the strength, that the noblest historical figures have displayed. Each individual is the lord of circumstance, the maker of his character, the master of his fate. What Plato has thought, every one may think; what a saint has felt, every one may feel. Names of power do not overawe Emerson; he is not oppressed by the ruins of the Capitol. "My giant goes with me wherever I go." He regards the world with a new vision; he gives the living present precedence over the dead past; the vital spark within his nation outweighs the most splendid dust of antiquity. He breathes the free air of the Western prairies. He eschews all alien or artificial inspirations, and studies the material which lies to his right hand and his left. He urges his countrymen to turn from the literature of salons to their own modes and customs of life, to contemplate the nature that is before their eyes directly, and not through foreign spectacles. "Here, on this rugged soil of Massachusetts, I take my stand, baring my brow in the breeze of my own country, and invoke the genius of my own woods." Not only is he national and the representative of a

new people, he is also democratic in his mental attitude. The Puritans had preached the natural depravity of man. Emerson asserted his inherent worth. He taught that man was capable of self-government, that, if he were but true to himself, his future was serene and glorious. He insisted that every individual human being might be, and ought to be, law, prophet, church, to himself. He endeavored to build up character by individual culture, to develop each man's internal resources so that they should require no external aid, social or religious. He claimed for the individual mind a sovereign freedom of thought, a direct communion with the Infinite mind. "The foregoing generations," he writes, "beheld God face to face; we, through their eyes; why should not we enjoy also an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us and not the history of theirs?" It is this doctrine of self-reliance, illustrated by fresh examples, enforced under new aspects, presented in different shapes, that forms the essence of his aspects, and was repeated on every platform and reiterated in every essay. His teaching emphatically protested against utilitarian ethics, against material philosophy, against formal religion, against carefully cultured exotics which choked plants of native growth.

Ecclesiastically and politically free, America was still intellectually dependent. Emerson enlarged and illuminated his countrymen's conception of national life, and gave to it an impulse and direction which it never lost. His words stirred the blood of his contemporaries like a bugle-call; the movement he promoted had its excesses and extravagances, but it was fresh, indigenous, national. In 1830 America was intellectually a colony of England. Emerson's writings and addresses from 1836 to 1840 were the "Declaration of Intellectual Independence."

It would be absurd to say, that Emerson created an intellectual revival which had commenced in 1820; but he stimulated its progress, and, although he stood aloof from some of its phases, he guided and steadied its course. Other influences were already at work to produce what may be called, without fear of provoking comparisons, the Elizabethan Age of American Literature. It was the springtime of national independence, and a stir was in the air. The long frost of custom was breaking up; society was preparing to bud and blossom with promise of varied fruit; men were learning to think for themselves. Bryant, Irving, Cooper, the profound mind of Channing, the richly flowered eloquence of Everett had not created an American literature, but they had created an American audience for the discussion of every sort of topic from poetry to criticism. As broader fields of action opened out, as novel controversies occupied the press, as criticism analysed the bases of classical or theological literature, as

science destroyed accepted fictions, fresh interests and theories collided with ancient creeds and institutions. The shock of new and old struck the spark of literary life. The revolution began with a change in metaphysics. Thinkers have been for centuries divided into Idealists and Sensationalists, Transcendentalists and Materialists. The one insists upon thought, will, and inspiration, the other on facts, history, circumstances; the one starts from consciousness, the other from experience; the one treats the external world as the product of man's thought; the other regards man as the product of the external world; the one exalts, the other decries mental abstractions; the one depreciates, the other exaggerates matter; the one emphasizes the unity of reason, the other the variety of sense. From what has been already said of Emerson, it is obvious that he would throw all the weight of his genius into the scale of Idealism. Stripped of its metaphysics, Transcendentalism represents the value of ideals in thought, morals, politics, and reform. Emerson traced the decadence of the human mind to the supremacy of the system of Locke. He deplored the loss of native force, of width of grasp, of depth of feeling, which had achieved great things in literature, art, and statesmanship. Men could not think grandly so long as they consumed their energies in thinking clearly.

Home and foreign influences encouraged the spread of Transcendentalism. The Old World, with its leisured, cultured classes, scarcely appreciates the difficulty of reconciling social conditions with high aspirations that is experienced in New Worlds, where no shades soften the hard line which severs thought from action. Men are compelled to be either in the world or out of it; their sole claim to honor is their power to do the tangible work before them. Hence refined and culti vated Americans were predisposed in favor of a theory which made thinkers kings, and reduced the tumult of a life, which the nation accepted as the sole reality, into the unreal, shifting product of thought. Nor is it perhaps wholly fanciful to imagine, that the peculiar relations of man and nature influenced the desire to merge in unity that which could not be reconciled. In the New World the nineteenth century stood vividly and sharply contrasted with antiquity; the primitive savage was confronted by the printing press, the silence of the primæval forest was broken by the whirr of the last mechanical invention. The two elements could not be harmonized, but they might be blended in that Absolute which Transcendentalists adored. Moreover, the nation had not lost the sentiment of religion. But the dominant philosophy had undermined the foundations of theology: the axiom, nihil est in intellectu nisi prius in sensu, supplied no basis for faith, no assurance of the attributes or existence of God. The Transcendentalist met unbelief with new weapons. He insisted upon man's communion