" Mine be the ungracious task (for reasons) of
leaving unmention'd both sunny expanses and sky-reaching heights, to
dwell on the bare spots and darknesses. I have a theory that no artist
or work of the very first class may be or can be without them.
First, then, these pages are perhaps too perfect, too concentrated.
(How good, for instance, is good butter, good sugar. But to be eating
nothing but sugar and butter all the time! even if ever so good.)
And though the author has much to say of freedom and wildness and
simplicity and spontaneity, no performance was ever more based on
artificial scholarships and decorums at third or fourth removes, (he
calls it culture,) and built up from them. It is always a _make_,
never an unconscious _growth_. It is the porcelain figure or statuette
of lion, or stag, or Indian hunter--and a very choice statuette
too--appropriate for the rosewood or marble bracket of parlor or
library; never the animal itself, or the hunter himself. Indeed, who
wants the real animal or hunter? What would that do amid astral and
bric-a-brac and tapestry, and ladies and gentlemen talking in subdued
tones of Browning and Longfellow and art? The least suspicion of such
actual bull, or Indian, or of Nature carrying out itself, would put
all those good people to instant terror and flight.
Emerson, in my opinion, is not most eminent as poet or artist or
teacher, though valuable in all those. He is best as critic, or
diagnoser. Not passion or imagination or warp or weakness, or any
pronounced cause or specialty, dominates him.
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