ON EMERSON AND SO ON

Press, Volume LXXV, Issue 22906, 30 December 1939, Page 12

ON EMERSON AND SO ON

: • • % ' . - . ♦ , ■ TO TOT EDITOR O* TOT PRESS Sir, —Perhaps the following stray thoughts about Emerson may serve as a pendant to the interesting article of Saturday, December 17. In the first place, was it not Thoreau ■who was responsible for early peas in Concord? Emerson,' it always seemed to me, had something very definite to say in isolated phrases, though it might be difficult to follow the drift of a complete essay. Take the'folic wing from the essay which is given pride of place in the Harrap collection:—• ' “Man is explicable by nothing less than' all his history,” . . “Every, revolution was first a thought in one man’s mind, and when. the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era.”

“Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again it will solve the problem of the age.” “All that Shakespeare says of the king, yonder slip of a boy that reads in a comer feels to be true of himself” And so on. ’

Was it first suggested in this es-say-that architects* first conceived the idea of the stained glass window and the clustered pillars after walking through a forest at the time of winter sunset? Somewhere Emerson says, “Man is a golden impossibility,” and we do not quarrel with the statement. The trouble with Emerson in the mind of a G. K. Chesterton is akin to the trouble with Walter Pater: there is too mudh cackle and a dearth of bosses. Nevertheless, we would be poorer without them. It is surely a testimony to the pontifical nature of Emerson that Bret Harte was shocked to find him smoking a cigar. If lie does not elicit from us the appraisal; he. himself bestowed upon Carlyle, “Ah, that’s my man!” the fault, maybe, is in ourselves.- — Yours, etc., ic A. ALLEN. Dunedin, Decemb«;- 20 1939. ,