One feels that this will not do, and that health, and wholeness,
and the well-being of man are more in the keeping of Shakespeare
than in the hands of Zoroaster or any of the saints. I doubt if
that rarefied air will make good red blood and plenty of it.
But Emerson makes his point plain, and is not indebted to any of
his teachers for it. It is the burden of all he writes upon the
subject. The long discourse that opens his last volume [footnote:
_Letters and Social Aims_] has numerous subheadings, as "Poetry,"
"Imagination," "Creation," "Morals," and "Transcendency;" but it!s
all a plea for transcendency. I am reminded of the story of an old
Indian chief who was invited to some great dinner where the first
course was "succotash." When the second course was ready the old
Indian said he would have a little more succotash, and when the
third was ready he called for more succotash and so with the fourth
and fifth, and on to the end. In like manner Emerson will have
nothing but the "spiritual law" in poetry, and he has an enormous
appetite for that. Let him have it, but why should
he be so sure that mankind all want succotash? Mankind finally
comes to care little for what any poet has to _say,_ but only for
what he has to _sing._ We want the pearl of thought dissolved in
the wine of life. How much better are sound bones and a good
digestion in poetry than all the philosophy and transcendentalism
in the world!
What one comes at last to want is power, mastery; and, whether it
be mastery over the subtleties of the intellect, as in Emerson
himself, or over the passions and the springs of action, as in
Shakespeare, or over our terrors and the awful hobgoblins of hell
and Satan, as in Dante, or over vast masses and spaces of nature
and the abysms of aboriginal man, as in Walt Whitman, what matters
it? Are we not refreshed by all? There is one mastery in Burns,
another in Byron, another in Rabelais, and in Victor Hugo, and in
Tennyson; and though the critic has his preferences, though he
affect one more than another, yet who shall say this one is a poet
and that one is not? "There may be any number of supremes," says
the master, and "one by no means contravenes another.
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