Over-Souled

THE LIFE or EMERSON--Van Wyck Brooks--Button ($3).

Like the cart before the horse, U. S. civilization seems to trundle awkwardly ahead of civilized Americans. Critic Brooks, who hopes and works for a different mode of progress, has shown in The Ordeal of Mark Twain and The Pilgrimage of Henry James, what happened to two horses who got in front of the cart. In his biography of Emerson he shows how a most inspirational civilizer hitched his own wagon, tried to hitch the U. S. juggernaut, to a transcendental star.

Civilizer Emerson's life was not so rich in incident as it was in fellowship with Nature and acquaintances with men. His biographer is hard pressed to wring a story out of his life. "Born to be educated," as his family said, Ralph Waldo Emerson had his lessons well under way by the time he was 8 (1811) when his father William was called from his pastorate at the First Church of Boston into the grave, consoled on his death bed by Dr. Frothingham's assurance that "at least he had not outlived his teeth." Ralph and his four brothers did their poor mother's chores, pastured the cows on Boston Common. But it was during summer visits in Concord, at Step-Grandfather Ripley's manse, that New England Nature smiled on him. By the responsive leaping of his heart, he felt that his own human nature was designed for glorious affairs.

At 14 he entered Harvard; at 18 he was graduated; at 30 he had lost his first wife, his faith in his clerical calling, everything but his faith in himself and Nature's Neo-Platonic Over-Soul. To prove himself, to share his thought with others, he went to Europe, saw its civilized sights, met its civilizing men. Landor, Coleridge, Wordsworth and especially Carlyle delighted him. After a year he returned to Concord knowing what to do.

He married again, began to lecture at the popular lyceums of his day. In 1837 he delivered the annual oration of the Phi Beta Kappa Society in Cambridge. "The American Scholar" was his theme. "The older faces grew grimmer with every word, while the younger lighted up with eager approval. This speaker had come to bring not peace but a sword, and the words he uttered today were to mark the birth of another generation." His somewhat startling fame soon attracted disciples, friends. Margaret Fuller came, then Thoreau; between them The Dial was published. For four years it printed their works, gave the U. S. its first taste of Oriental literature, the Chaldean Oracles. Confucius' Analects.

From then on Emerson picked a careful way between the life of culture and the culture of life. The cranks besieged him. but he was impregnable. He continued to lecture far & wide. Far & wide he circulated, like a cultured bacillus, trying to infect the U. S. with some symptoms of a native civilization. He organized literary clubs, the Transcendental Club; with Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes. Agassiz, Dana he joined the Boston Saturday Club. He tried to introduce Whitman to his Boston friends but Lowell demurred--"a New York tough, a frequenter of low places." Finally his energies ran low; his memory began to fail, his raven hair fell out. A trip to Egypt brought him a new crop of snowy hair, but only a short span of life. At Longfellow's funeral he looked long at his friend's face in the coffin. "I cannot remember his name," he said, "but he was man." Soon after, Good Man Emerson himself was dead.

The Author. Critic Van Wyck Brooks, born in Plainfield, N. J. in 1886, since his graduation from Harvard has been associated with the Doubleday, Page and Century publishing houses; has associate-edited The Freeman and the first American Caravan. Ill health forced him to desert the Caravan. He lives with his wife and two sons in Westport, Conn. Generally conceded one of America's few serious critics, Critic Brooks takes as the theme of all his work the peculiar opportunities and disabilities of U. S. literati. Of his study of Emerson, he says: "What I wished to convey was a convincing and joyously infectious image of genius . . . meeting and solving . . . the problems that had appeared insoluble in my other cases." His contagiously enthusiastic case history of Emerson is the April selection of the Literary Guild.

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