PART II, ARTICLE V: THE WRITINGS OF G. K. CHESTERTON DISMISSED, SECTION III

Chesterton is not only wrong about Stevenson’s character and our right and duty to judge it, he is wrong about Stevenson’s craft. It is not true that Stevenson’s method can ‘easily be mistaken’ for ‘mere finnicking polish.’ What makes his stories endure is that they cannot be easily mistaken for that. His stories are still read because they are not mistaken for ‘mere finnicking polish.’ Or, his stories continue to rivet because their finnicking polish is undergirded by fundamentally interesting ideas. It is for this reason that his style is not in danger of ‘being mistaken,’ as Chesterton worries, for ‘literary juggling.’ These thoughts of Chesterton on the craft of Stevenson read like that of a man who is thinking more of his own style than of saying something true. Not to say that ‘literary juggling’ is an original turn of phrase; it was, probably, nothing but a cliché even by the time Chesterton wrote it down. Indeed, this being a much later draft of my original article, I decided to look the phrase up on a search engine. I found it written on page 601 in something called The New Ireland Review, Volume 2, 1895. As near as I can tell, Chesterton published nothing until the year 1900.      

As ‘faddling’ as I found this first essay; that is, as trifling, petty, and piddling, I continued to read four more before I quit the book—and before, hopefully, quitting the whole of what G. K. Chesterton ever produced. Based on the first essay, I knew that the other book of his that I had bought would have to be left unread. What was that book? It was a biography of R. L. Stevenson. How could a biography be tolerated from as dishonest a writer as this essay proves Chesterton to have been? Moreover, in the essay on Stevenson, we are assured by Chesterton that biographies are illegitimate. “The only biography that is really possible is autobiography,” he says. All this gun-slinging to defend his subject, but in the process Chesterton shoots his own biography in the head. He’s not as deadly with his words as he has been made out to be, except when inadvertently aiming at himself. Chesterton was a hapless bumbler. His Handful of Authors reminds me of what Elmer Fudd looks and sounds like.         

Before reading this distrustful essay on R. L. Stevenson, my suspicion, based on what I had heard of Chesterton, was that he had a low view of Scripture, and therefore, of God. That suspicion was on the mark. This is why there cannot be found, in this essay, any indignation at Stevenson for his atheism. This is why Chesterton could have, but did not, single Stevenson out for having written something like this: “It was really pathetic to hear my father praying pointedly for me today at family worship, and to think the poor man’s supplications were addressed to nothing better able to hear and answer than the chandelier” (Iain H. Murray, The Undercover Revolution, p. 13.) I further thought that Literature, not the word of God, was Chesterton’s Bible. After reading that first essay, however, I was forced to conclude that it was not. The Holy Bible was not his Bible; neither was Literature. If his Bible had been Literature, he would have shown more respect for it. 

I learned nothing worth knowing about anyone or anything from the first five essays of A Handful of Authors. All I learned in essay the second is that Chesterton could have been dismissed after essay number one. Nothing is told us about Mark Twain except that he had wit. No word is even quoted from his works to show us this wit. “Wit requires an intellectual athleticism, because it is akin to logic.” I don’t doubt that wit is akin to logic. But how about supplying an example of this from something that Mark Twain wrote? And then how about placing that quote beside a logical proposition so that we may catch a sight of this logical wit?

PART II, ARTICLE V: THE WRITINGS OF G. K. CHESTERTON DISMISSED, SECTION II

While thumbing through the pages of my copy of The Scarlet Letter, I came across this prejudiced passage that I had put in brackets. It occurs about thirty pages before the end of the book: “Their immediate posterity, the generation next to the early emigrants, wore the blackest shade of Puritanism, and so darkened the national visage with it, that all the subsequent years have not sufficed to clear it up. We have yet to learn again the forgotten art of gayety.” This is Hawthorne supplying a concocted background for his narrative. Isn’t it interesting that he uses the same word as Chesterton later did—gayety—to tell us what character trait Puritanism, at its best, embodied? Haters of authentic Christianity think alike; and they typically redefine what they love and hate, sometimes in the same words. Hawthorne and Chesterton would like us to believe that being gay is what the best of Puritanism was about and what Christianity should always be about, not holiness, not faith, not grace, not redemption, and not even Jesus Christ. The nearest trait to what Chesterton means by ‘gaiety’ is what the Bible calls ‘merry.’ Did R. L. Stevenson’s ‘gaiety’ resemble this?—: “Is any merry? let him sing Psalms” (James 5.13.) Or did it, rather, resemble this?—“And Nabal’s heart was merry within him, for he was very drunken” (1 Samuel 25.36.) After a doctor warned him to give up drinking, Stevenson described himself like so: ‘that lean, feverish, voluble and whiskyfied young Scot’ (Iain H. Murray, The Undercover Revolution, p. 19.) He was habitually ‘gay,’ alright; but a candid critic would define this ‘gaiety’ as ‘whiskyfied.’     

Those persons who understand Stevenson best are not, as Chesterton opines, the ones ‘who take him most lightly.’ This is not a true test for anyone; this is not how any person should be judged. To know someone, we need to plumb his depths, not merely skim the surface of his ‘gaiety.’ They who understand R. L. Stevenson best are those who take account of the facts—facts that must be gleaned from sources outside this distorting essay on his life. It is not ‘hazardous’ to ‘dogmatize about a man like Stevenson.’ I don’t feel hazarded from doing so. It does not mean that we are ‘rooted in open and systematic morbidities’ and ‘human prejudices’ if we choose to dogmatize about the subject. It’s almost like Chesterton is the ancestor of 21st century leftists who call others racist merely for wanting to judge a man by the facts. He is so determined to whitewash Stevenson’s tomb that he says that the notion that ‘a thing cannot at the same time be black and white’ is an ‘idle fiction.’ This is like saying that a man can be a woman or that a woman can be a man or that a determined sinner can be, at the same time, a devoted saint. What he’s really saying is that we should never mind the facts and just believe Chesterton instead. We should take it on faith—Chesterton’s faith, which is obviously willfully blind. Speaking of faith, Chesterton is even willing to redefine that in the interest of making his befouled subject look pristine. The ‘best definition of faith,’ he says, is the ‘divine frivolity’ that Stevenson personified. But the author of Hebrews teaches that faith is ‘the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.’ That doesn’t sound like the ‘divine frivolity’ of Stevenson, which ‘divine frivolity’ was nothing else but the prodigal behavior from which he needed to be saved by faith. Life is not ‘a continual heaven of reconciliation,’ as Chesterton says. If God is ‘angry with the wicked every day,’ as the Psalmist tells us—angry each day with wicked sinners such as R. L. Stevenson was—life must be, rather, more like something of a continual rebellion against God. It is not, as Chesterton avers, ‘hazardous’ to ‘dogmatize about a man like Stevenson.’ It is, however, hazardous to bear false witness about a man to the readers who read your rubbish to pass time on the tram on their way to work. It is just as sinful to bear false witness by making a bad man appear virtuous as it is by making a good man appear vicious. It is just as sinful to whitewash as it is to slander. If it was wrong to try to make a Pharisee appear holy in Jesus’ day, it is wrong in our day to try to make a wretch look blameless. If Stevenson was such a mystic, why didn’t he make an effort to live like one? A mystic does not live in sin while getting drunk on his father’s income, does he? Why didn’t Chesterton mention something like this about R. L. Stevenson?—: “The fact that she [Fanny Osbourne] was already married did not hinder their intimacy, and after she returned to California and to her husband, he followed her” (Iain H. Murray, The Undercover Revolution, p. 18.) That doesn’t sound like a ‘faddling hedonist’ or a ‘gay mystic,’ but a bold adulterer. Iain Murray is a dependable source. But just to make sure, I went beyond him to check what he said about Stevenson’s affair with Fanny Osbourne. In a book that is sympathetic to Stevenson, called, Last Witness of Robert Louis Stevenson, the illicit liaison is confirmed.

PART II, ARTICLE V: THE WRITINGS OF G. K. CHESTERTON DISMISSED, SECTION I

G. K. Chesterton is so often quoted, and sometimes helpfully, that these quotes will make a reader wonder what reading the books from which the quotes are culled must be like. Because Chesterton is so copiously complimented for his contributions, he finally got my attention.

Once in awhile I am reminded that the writings of G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) are so incalculably valuable that every serious reader must imbibe at least some of his books. Since the latest reminder came across urgently from an articulate young man who said that he was of the Reformed faith, I durst not shake the admonition off. Not wanting to remain a dunce for having never drunk deeply from at least a couple of Chesterton’s wells, I procured two of his books. These I acquired in handsome secondhand form.  

Literary criticism being one of my cherished pursuits, the Chesterton book that seemed the most approachable and interesting to me, is called, A Handful of Authors. I was made even happier when I saw that the first essay in this book was on a writer about whom I had some knowledge, Robert Louis Stevenson, the genius author of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. My knowledge of the subject would make judging the essay an easy thing, I thought, and might help me to judge the merits of the author of said essay.  

The first paragraph of the first essay is, I’m pretty sure, the first paragraph by Chesterton that I have ever read. It is not long; but my concern about it is enormous. After telling an anecdote from the childhood of his subject, Chesterton remarks that the Scottish religion of Stevenson’s day was so ‘over-formalised’ that the soul of a man was thought of as a kind of ‘younger brother’ who had to be saved ‘at all costs.’ It makes no difference that this composite essay was written in 1901 and 1907, over a decade before Chesterton converted to Roman Catholicism in 1922. It doesn’t matter because the Church of England that he converted from calls itself Christian too, albeit not as zealously as does the Roman Catholic Church. Both churches maintain the biblical fact that sinners need salvation. Is it over-formulaic to think of a soul as needing to be saved? No Christian would belittle the important matter of the salvation of souls, especially in writing. It is plain that Chesterton did not believe that souls need saving; he was not a Christian when he wrote this essay. This is the first thing that I learned from A Handful of Authors. And he certainly became no Christian in 1922. A sinner does not become saved by converting to Roman Catholicism, but by converting from it. Roman Catholicism does not draw sinners to faith in Jesus Christ and his sacrifice on the cross, but to works, the Mass, prayers to Mary, and superstition.   

In paragraph two the absurd claim is made that ‘no one can know what Stevenson’s life was’ but that Stevenson must have had ‘glimmerings’ of what it was. I suspected by this remark that I was being set up to receive a rewriting of Stevenson’s life. I didn’t expect the rewrite to be so noticeable, though. To note down some of Stevenson’s ‘actions’ would be like ‘zoology,’ says Chesterton. It would be akin to treating the subject like an animal. Who says this but a critic who wants to conceal the sins of the man he is writing about? He gives us permission to be angry for Stevenson’s honor if Stevenson were to be referred to as a ‘faddling hedonist,’ as if that is the worst thing he should be called. Why should we be rallied to Stevenson’s defense in the first place? Chesterton prefers to call Stevenson’s lifestyle ‘gaiety,’ which he stupidly terms ‘the most difficult of all virtues.’ Is ‘gaiety’ included in the list of virtues marked down in Galatians 5? No, but ‘temperance’ is. The only time ‘gay’ is mentioned in the Bible, it has to do with clothing (James 2.3.) ‘Gaiety’ is not a virtue; or if it is, it is not a biblical one. Here are some biblical virtues to consider—four of them: humility, faithfulness, generosity, and temperance. So it is more difficult to be gay, by which Chesterton means ‘merry,’ than to be humble, faithful, generous, or temperate? Are drunkards not commonly gay? Which is the harder thing to do? Is it harder to drink too many rounds of rum with your buddies and to be made gay in the process? Or is it harder to abstain from drinking too many rounds of rum with your buddies and to be humbled by the abstinence, not to mention the scorn? It is more difficult to be humble in your actions, faithful to your wife, generous with your money, and temperate with the bottle than getting gay with the boys in a bar, where humility is not exhibited, where generosity is practiced to induce drunkenness, and where faithfulness is likely to fail and fall more than anywhere else. Chesterton warns that only the ‘sevenfold critical spirit’ might not see that ‘gaiety’ is the most difficult of all virtues. If the reader does not go along with Chesterton’s praise of Stevenson’s ‘gaiety,’ then, which really means, in plain, honest words, Stevenson’s lifestyle of ‘sin,’—if he does not want to go along with calling evil good and good evil—he must be a hyper-critical fellow! Styling Stevenson a ‘faddling hedonist’ or a man who exhibited ‘gaiety,’ moreover, is to slap Stevenson with the velvet glove that his sins do not deserve. Stevenson was not ‘a Puritan in fancy dress,’ like we are told. He wore gay clothing; but he was not a Puritan in any sense. Notwithstanding the high moral value of some of his stories, especially his Misadventures of John Nicholson, he was an unprincipled, contemptible fellow who was as far from being a Puritan as a cow pie is from a piece of cake. His was not the ‘gaiety of the mystic.’ Calling his gaiety the ‘gaiety of a mystic’ is not merely misleading; it is a lie. Stevenson was a rebellious son who, as an adult, took advantage of his enabling father. He was still taking an allowance in his mid-thirties. And it was a lavish one—enough for a person to drink to excess and to whoop it up on, which Stevenson lazily did year after miserable year.

PART II, ARTICLE IV: EMERSON AS UNREQUIRED READING, SECTION IV

The Emersonian intelligentsia would smile to discover such remarks made by a man so hardly acquainted with Emerson and what he wrote. But who can draw inferences too extreme from an author who wishes history would dissolve and who doesn’t care that his verdicts about it might be taken advantage of by future disciples who would then treat history as a ball of clay to be molded into the story that they wish history revealed? It is writers like Emerson who are to blame for that deceitful genre called ‘historical fiction.’ It is writers like Emerson who are responsible for the rewriting of history in our universities. It is because of writers like Emerson that the past is looked at through self-centered microscopes like ‘black history’ or ‘gender studies.’ When a literary pundit wants to put a writer on a pedestal, he has only to speak of him as being ‘Emersonian.’ By that single move, the writer who is likened to Emerson is elevated to the pretentious status that Emerson accords to the legendary gods that he praises so embarrassingly often. Then, some ignorant listener or other, upon hearing the word ‘Emersonian,’ marches like a drone to the bookstore to acquire the latest book that was written by the newly minted genius. After reading just one essay by Emerson, however, a reader may conclude, and should conclude, that both Emerson and his disciples do not transcend anything except knowledge, wisdom, and understanding. As empty as their writings are, they cause a lot of trouble by mistreating history, which they commonly do from the windows of their ivory towers or the turrets of their visionary castles. Besides the Bible, itself largely historical, there is nothing that we need to understand more than history. The past may or may not be about what our present grievance is; and the past can never be about what we wish it to have been.   

Having said all of that, the style of Emerson’s essay is attractive. It appears at a glance that the same could be said about his essays generally. The structure, though not the content, always tends toward clarity. The sentences feel short even when they are long because words follow words in proper order. And because places, characters, and even groups like Magian, Brahmin, Druid, and Inca (p. 20) occur with such frequency, the reader is kept in a sort of breathless expectation of what he might encounter next. But alas! one soon begins to feel disappointed after fancy word after fancy word comes up empty of content. You get to big, shiny presents only to discover that they are as empty as the Christmas boxes the department stores put out in December just for show. Incidentally, it is my opinion that Emerson might have borrowed his listing technique from Robert Burton’s once popular Anatomy of Melancholy, which is partly why Burton’s oeuvre is so often arresting. (Burton probably borrowed the technique from the Bible, as in Romans 1.29-31.)  

I agree somewhat with Andrew George in his Biographical Note that in these writings there is ‘diction at once so rich and so homely’ (p. xxiv.) But what are rich and homely words worth unless they’re packed with meaning? The following caused me to have an existential, ontological quiver: “Who knows himself before he has been thrilled with indignation at an outrage, or has heard an eloquent tongue, or has shared the throb of thousands in a national exultation or alarm?” (p. 28.) One time I gleaned a moral: “We may all shoot a wild bull that would toss the good and beautiful, by fighting down the unjust and sensual” (p. 26.) This is a decent, articulate thought as long as it’s not informed by all that Emerson defined as good, beautiful, unjust, and sensual. And once, though in a passage that is mystical in the bad sense, I got a shiver of excitement from being reminded of what it feels like to come upon a scene that was waiting to work something extraordinary into my experience: “A lady with whom I was riding in the forest said to me that the woods always seemed to her to wait, as if the genii who inhabited them suspended their deeds until the wayfarer had passed onward” (p. 13.) But these attractions are too occasional to commit the picky reader to these essays when better books may be bought for just a few dollars. Sainte-Beuve includes among his criteria for defining a true classic—that which has caused the human mind ‘to advance a step’ (p. xxv.) This is what Emerson’s History failed to do for me. And I have no faith, and no reason to believe, that his other essays or writings will do it. In his day most readers were ‘those who would not give themselves the trouble of comprehending him’ (p. xxii.) Not much has changed, I think. If we hear anything of Emerson, it is because of the voices of the overly tolerant few or because certain persons want to be regarded by their peers as well-read. In light of all that we have from the 19th century that is wholesome and worthwhile to read, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) is not worth the time; his writings are wholly unnecessary. Except for the princely style of his prose, he is, in fact, the epitome of Unrequired Reading.

PART II, ARTICLE IV: EMERSON AS UNREQUIRED READING, SECTION III

Emerson would make the hourglass of history disappear if he could because the grains that have fallen through that hourglass have not fallen into the kind of heap that he likes to look at. He fears that the next heap of grains will look the same as the last heap, and so his solution is to make that first heap disappear so that what happens has nothing in history to reprove it. That’s my theory. His paradise is a world in which whatever one does will not effectuate its natural results; or if it does, recourse to history for the purpose of admonishment will not be adverted to. But he cannot entirely believe in his wish. Who can be fully convinced that a worldview can prevent facts from causing logical, inexorable effects? Or that history can be so effaced that no one brings it forward to censure someone? A kind of nirvana is needed to leap into. This is why Emerson tries to transcend. By the style he employs, he tries to infuse power into his words to convince himself and others that transcending is possible to do. Poets like Wordsworth have tried, by the use of sheer style, to transcend. Even contemporary 21st century musicians have admitted trying the same. They try to believe that Art is capable of accomplishing some sort of Redemption from whatever it is they shrink from or tremble to think about, be it present personal unease, or the unhappy future that impenitent sinners suspect might be their lot to one day endure forever. On page x of the Introduction we read, “We are now men and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.” The Emersonian Man is just another breed within the species of Humanistic Man, advancing in his private effort to redeem himself from the upshot of history. Not only by his cryptic communication does Emerson try to transcend. He tries to do it by well placed capital letters on certain words. The same thing may be observed in the fiction of Joseph Conrad. Some Christian writers use capital letters for emphasis and beauty. But that is not the same thing, for their compositions point to an actual redemption for man and an extant transcendent Godhead to make it happen. Emerson eggs himself on in spite of gnawing doubts that God has not and will not give to man the superhuman capabilities that are necessary for self-transcendence. The truth is that man stays inside his little bubble of life and reaps repercussions from history until God calls his soul to eternity to wait and see what the final judgment has in store, which will be based on nothing less than history and man’s reaction to it. In other words, that Jesus died a satisfactory death for the sins of others is a historical fact; whether the sinner has faith in him or not will decide whether the sinner will be judged or not for unbelief and sinful deeds. “History does have meaning; the past brings forth the present and the present influences the future. Something happens in history because of a previous effect…Cause-and-effect does exist, not only in science but in meaningful, significant human events…Just as Joshua stood in judgment against the Amorites when their iniquity was full, Jesus will come in flaming judgment on the world when the iniquity of the era of the Gentiles is full” (Francis Schaeffer, Joshua and the Flow of Biblical History, pp. 148, 151.) This, mainly, is what Emerson tried to believe was ‘alien to the spirit of Christ.’ This is why even the Trinity-denying Unitarian Church was too ‘creed-oriented’ for him. The man did not like the flow of biblical history: how it had flowed from the past into the present, and how it was about to flow from prophecy into the future.   

Emerson’s capitalization convinces me that in his essays he is trying to believe, and trying to make us believe, in his unbelievable postulate concerning the ability of man to be his own and sole solution.  Capital letters to begin key words do not always evince the hubris of an outrageous proposition, though, as I have already alluded to. Take James Killen, for example, Emerson’s contemporary scholar on the other side of the Atlantic, a man who truly deserves to be republished and read: “It may be that the complex mechanism of Jehovah’s Providences can only be rightly appreciated by those Seraphic Spirits who have had long experience of the Almighty’s proceedings” (James Killen, The Inhabitants of Heaven, p. 303.) This much can be said from reading both the immediate context and Killen’s book at large, as compared with Emerson’s History: Killen’s capitals are used to embellish substance; Emerson’s capitals are used in place of or even as substance. The writings of Octavius Winslow and Beilby Porteus could be quoted to shame Emerson some more and to the same purpose.

PART II, ARTICLE IV: EMERSON AS UNREQUIRED READING, SECTION II

Emerson belittles history into meaning nothing but what suits the reader’s biography, which approach is nothing less than denying that history contains the facts that it does contain. But why does he do this? Ralph Waldo Emerson was of strict Puritan stock. Many of his forefathers were ministers. He too became a minister for a period of time. Will not the facts dogmatically passed down from the Puritans to their successors become the worst thorn in the side of that descendent who has decided against the implications and conclusions of these facts? What better way to deny God his right to rule over the soul than to dismiss the wheel of Providence that rolls through the history that all souls are born into at his own prerogative and for his own purpose and pleasure? Emerson must have been nagged by the history that his eminent Christian ancestors bequeathed. Rebelling against reality, he must have felt the need to throw this history off his conscience. It seems that by the impulse of his temperament and the use of his talent, he dreamed up an esoteric view of history in order to evacuate it of facts, which is a process, I guess, of making history transcendental. Emerson was a transcendentalist and an idealist. Transcendentalists posit that ultimate reality is either not knowable and/or that through self-generating insight man may determine or discover his own higher reality irrespective of evidence that may be gathered through experiment or experience. As for idealists, they believe that only what is mental is knowable; they may go so far as to deny the existence of material bodies; and they attempt to view the world as they think it should have been and should be instead of what it has been and is. These philosophies are, then, nearly synonymous; they are Platonic, or impractical; and they are inimical, or hostile, to a historical view of the world. So Emerson’s method of treating history is to orate whatever he does not like about it into oblivion through an opaque communication. “Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts. No anchor, no cable, no fences avail to keep a fact a fact” (p. 6.) Are these words not full of hope that the future will not be similar to the past that he hates? Did the mores of the times he lived in prevent him living like he would or from pursuing the future that he wanted to indulge? It sounds like it. Apart from how history affected him personally and how history turned out, what could he have had against history being told except that the teaching of it might result in, or at least hint at, a future that he dreaded?

PART II, ARTICLE IV: EMERSON AS UNREQUIRED READING, SECTION I

Ralph Waldo Emerson is widely regarded by secular academics as a sage. For this reason, his name is uttered by them with awe. His writings have a mystical feel. But their sense is as misty as their style is solid. Knowing this already through radio hosts, their guests, and from former attempts to read his material, I nevertheless was, because of the otherworldly, archetypal character of his composition, determined to try reading him again. 

My title is borrowed from Irwin Edmon’s Introduction to a collection of Emerson’s Essays. From reading the first essay alone and from seeing that the others show the same lack of substantive content, I think the title may be taken seriously instead of rhetorically and that the writings of Emerson may be neglected without any material ignorance being sealed to one’s fate. By neglecting Emerson, there would be the prospective loss of some commentary that we might add, in some conversation that we might have, about an influential writer. We could humbly leave such commentaries to others, however, and then recommend instead, by the occasional remark, authors who provide more substance in their matter, and who are, therefore, more deserving of time and notice. 

The essay that I chose to read among the twenty in the collection is the first one, called, History.  

What was Ralph Waldo Emerson like? He did not like doing math or geometry; he found his Unitarian church too creed-oriented for his taste; and, most informingly, he regarded any adherence to form as ‘alien to the spirit of Christ’ (p. xviii, Biographical Note.) He was an Idealist and, weirdly but compatibly, a Transcendentalist. Knowing even this much—which is a lot—about his nonobjective propensities could never prepare the reader for an essay on history that is a polemical exercise against its existence. He is subtle about it; but that is his thesis. He wants history entirely out of mind. A thesis such as that is nothing less, almost, than stupor mundi (the marvel of the world.) This ‘historical’ essay is no more about history than fables are actual accounts. He names many places where pivotal events of the first rank took place. On just one page he mentions Babylon, Troy, Tyre, Rome, Gibeon, London, Paris, New York, Egypt, Gaul, England, Greece, Palestine, Italy, Spain, the Islands, and even the Garden of Eden. But all we are told about these places is that they ‘are passing already into fiction’ and that history is a subjective matter that is in ‘our private experience…only Biography’ (p. 6.) What he means by history becoming biography is impossible to fully tell. But the statement is a disdainful remark against the facts of history as they stand—facts that tend to make an individual uncomfortable. He says that the student of history should “esteem his own life in the text…not suffer himself to be bullied by kings and empires…He must attain and maintain that lofty sight where facts yield their secret sense” (pp. 5, 6.) Emerson wants all students to read history with a selfish eye—to read history as if the only thing that should be learned from it is something about the reader. 

His view of history is conditioned by his transcendentalism and idealism. From his towering, condescending perspective, history is both looked down upon and reconceived. And is this not what students are being taught to do in the 21st century by their activist professors? Writers like Emerson are responsible for generating this negative education. His approach comes down to looking at history through the prism of private experience, or scruples and dreams, and thereby dismissing some facts and twisting others in order to make history serve whatever worldview the reader, or the teacher of readers, prefers.  

One gets the impression by all the places mentioned in the essay that Emerson must have been a great traveler. He must have been a great reader too. Just on page 27 are found the names of Napoleon, Talbot, Henry VI, Columbus, Newton, Laplace, Davy, Gay Lussac, Handel, Watt, Fulton, Whittemore, and Arkwright. But all we learn from all of this namedropping is that Columbus must have been an explorer; Newton and Laplace, astronomers; and Handel, a composer. By the little bit of intelligence that is communicated, we suspect that some of the others might have been physicists and builders. But the information that is proffered is made so ambiguous that we cannot know for sure what the remaining persons did unless we look up the facts of history for ourselves. It may be that the essay is a demonstration of Emerson’s transcendental approach to history. There is good reason for the reader to doubt that the author of the essay is in possession of any worthwhile knowledge since he teaches nothing by his namedropping except how worthless his approach to history is. It is likely that Emerson knew next to nothing about the persons mentioned and the events that redounded to make their names memorable. Why believe a theory of how history should be interpreted (supposing we could grasp more than mere slivers of said theory) when we have a reasonable suspicion that the theorist does not know any more than the reader does about the subjects that he applies his theory to? I counted sixty-nine names in the space of thirty pages, but learned virtually nothing about anyone. Because of this vacuous recitation, anyone newly acquainted with Emerson must regard him as a writer who took no time to learn about any of the topics or persons that he subjected to his inscrutable theory. Many of the historical characters that he recites the names of have had nothing at all to do with any outstanding event. Is it perhaps because Emerson too busily consumed the empty additives of Hercules, Phoebus, and Orpheus that we find no speck of riboflavin in his History? No wonder his writing is called ‘mere spirit’ in the Bio (p. xxiv.) It never touches ground and it never materializes into thoughts that may be carried away. Is a philosopher not supposed to be something of a historian when philosophizing about what history is and means? If he gives us no good reason to trust his opinions, no knowledge or insight concerning noteworthy events and the personalities responsible for making them so, should his work be highly esteemed, scarcely regarded, or else brushed aside? Emerson knew just enough about history to make him detest the fact that history contains facts. Because he speaks of facts encumbering, tyrannizing, and dominating (p. 24), it is clear that he detests history. He is not enigmatic enough to be misunderstood on that point. “I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is,” he complains. Then further on, “How many times we must say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople!” (p. 29.) Mr. Emerson must think that the French Revolution, which centered in Paris, is nothing but ‘a shallow village tale.’ How wretched to have to mention it! There can be no doubt that his objections are rants against the existence of facts, for the man who wants history written in such a way that facts may be reduced to symbols (p. 29) must hate what literally happened. “What is history good for?” he seems, with sophisticated scorn, to ask. “I hold it to be the especial office of history, that virtuous actions be not buried in oblivion, and that men feel a dread of being deemed infamous by posterity for their evil words and actions” (Tacitus.) This is what history is good for. But history is good for even more than this: “We have heard with our ears, O God, our fathers have told us, what work thou didst in their days, in the times of old” (Psalm 44.1.) Spurgeon calls this ‘the story of God’s mighty acts.’ That is what history, at its best and highest, is good for. From that sermon: “Turn ye back then, to ancient records, and remember what God hath done. Will ye not remember what he did at the Red Sea, how he smote Egypt and all its chivalry, and covered Pharaoh’s chariot and horse in the Red Sea?” Anyone who undervalues history is a fool; and he who doesn’t read it is ignorant, as well as, in effect, ungrateful. Emerson’s detestation of history makes him dislikeable. Knowledge of history is a necessary pursuit. It is for avoiding past mistakes and for learning what to imitate in order to improve, succeed, and glorify God.