EMERSON AND OTHER ESSAYS BY JOHN JAY CHAPMAN AMS PRESS NEW YORK _Second Printing 1969_ Reprinted from the edition of 1899, New York First AMS EDITION published 1965 Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 75-108126 SEN: 404-00619-1 CONTENTS EMERSON 3 WALT WHITMAN 111 A STUDY OF ROMEO 131 MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS 153 THE FOURTH CANTO OF THE INFERNO 173 ROBERT BROWNING 185 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 217 EMERSON I "Leave this hypocritical prating about the masses. Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them. The worst of charity is that the lives you are asked to preserve are not worth preserving. Masses! The calamity is the masses. I do not wish any mass at all, but honest men only, lovely, sweet, accomplished women only, and no shovel-handed, narrow-brained, gin-drinking million stockingers or lazzaroni at all. If government knew how, I should like to see it check, not multiply the population. When it reaches its true law of action, every man that is born will be hailed as essential. Away with this hurrah of masses, and let us have the considerate vote of single men spoken on their honor and their conscience." This extract from The Conduct of Life gives fairly enough the leading thought of Emerson's life. The unending warfare between the individual and society shows us in each generation a poet or two, a dramatist or a musician who exalts and deifies the individual, and leads us back again to the only object which is really worthy of enthusiasm or which can permanently excite it,--the character of a man. It is surprising to find this identity of content in all great deliverances. The only thing we really admire is personal liberty. Those who fought for it and those who enjoyed it are our heroes. But the hero may enslave his race by bringing in a system of tyranny; the battle-cry of freedom may become a dogma which crushes the soul; one good custom may corrupt the world. And so the inspiration of one age becomes the damnation of the next. This crystallizing of life into death has occurred so often that it may almost be regarded as one of the laws of progress.