Whitman, the Lover*

            I was in Concord for the first time last week and went through Emerson’s house.  His bust upon the stairs was covered with flowers and I learned that, by a curious coincidence, it was his birthday.  I have been reading his Representative Men lately, and, while admiring his wonderful insight, thinking also of his limitations. The types which he selects are Plato, the Philosopher, Swedenborg, the Mystic, Montaigne, the Sceptic, Shakespeare, the Poet, Napoleon, the man of the World, and Goethe, the Writer, and with these he believes that he has boxed the compass of humanity, but he has really been boxing the compass of himself.  No man gets far beyond himself, and it was Emerson, the philosopher, the mystic, the sceptic, the poet, the man of the world and the writer, who bounded his own horizon. It is only as a man of the world that we may have difficulty in recognizing him, but he doubtless took himself for one and to a certain extent he was right. Emerson was no artificer or artist, and hence Michael Angelo and Rembrandt are omitted.   He was no militant reformer, and consequently he gives us no Mohammed or Luther.  But there is one greater omission—one fatal gap—in the list.  Where is the great lover?   Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Napoleon, Goethe—here we have six colors of the spectrum, but the warmest of all, the richest of all, the red ray, is absent.

For a time I thought that Emerson had altogether forgotten the lover of mankind, but at last, in the essay on Napoleon, I came across some trace of him.  Napoleon, he says, stands for the “party of property. . . .The counter-party still waits for its organ and representative in a lover an d a man of truly public and universal aims.”  Emerson left the lover out because he had never seen or heard of one!  Apparently he was ignorant of Buddha, and of Jesus and John, of Francis of Assisi, of Howard and Clarkson and Wilberforce.  He often met Garrison and Phillips on the street and he had yet to wait for lovers of their kind!  What monstrous blindness!  Emerson knew all about love; he had a marvelously clear intellectual conception of it; he could weigh it and measure it and classify it and write essays about it; he could do everything with love but feel it.  And failing to feel it himself  he failed to recognize those who felt it.