Better a
hundred-fold than his praise of fine manners is the delicacy and
courtesy and the grace of generous breeding displayed on every
page. Why does one grow impatient and vicious when Emerson writes
of fine manners and the punctilios of conventional life, and feel
like kicking into the street every divinity enshrined in the
drawing-room? It is a kind of insult to a man to speak the word in
his presence. Purify the parlors indeed by keeping out the
Choctaws, the laughers! Let us go and hold high carnival for a
week, and split the ears of the groundlings with our "contemptible
squeals of joy." And when he makes a dead set at praising
eloquence, I find myself instantly on the side of the old clergyman
he tells of who prayed that he might never be eloquent; or when he
makes the test of a man an intellectual one, as his skill at
repartee, and praises the literary crack shot, and defines
manliness to be readiness, as he does in this last volume and in
the preceding one, I am filled with a perverse envy of all the
confused and stammering heroes of history. Is Washington faltering
out a few broken and ungrammatical sentences, in reply to the vote
of thanks of the Virginia legislature, less manly than the glib
tongue in the court-room or in the club that can hit the mark every
time? The test of a wit or of a scholar is one thing; the test of a
man, I take it, is quite another. In this and some other respects
Emerson is well antidoted by Carlyle, who lays the stress on the
opposite qualities, and charges his hero to hold his tongue.
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