-
More Practical Hints
- University of Iowa Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Nature 33 “A Plotinus-Montaigne” was what James Russell Lowell called Emerson, and the description has stuck, suggesting that there are two Emersons—one transcendental and idealistic , the other pragmatic and practical. The Plotinus side, the side that is sure that mind alone is real, and sure of both Primal and Eventual Unity, is limited, as Emerson said Plotinus himself was limited, by being interested only in philosophy. The Montaigne side is seemingly interested in everything but sure of nothing. “Over his name,” Emerson tells us, “he drew an emblematic pair of scales and wrote ‘Que scais-je?’ [what do I know] under it.” But it is Montaigne’s writing as much as his knowing that interests Emerson. “The sincerity and marrow of the man reaches to his sentences. I know not anywhere the book that seems less written. It is the language of conversation transferred to a book. Cut these words and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive.” Emerson liked Francis Bacon for similar qualities. Some of the similarities are because Emerson’s Montaigne is the lateseventeenth -century Charles Cotton translation, done not long after the time of Bacon. “All rising to great place is by a More Practical Hints 34 Nature winding stair,” says Bacon. “Men of age,” he says in another essay, “object too much, consult too long, adventure too little , and repent too soon.” Like Emerson, Bacon was drawn to youth. “Young men,” he says, “are fitter to invent than judge, fitter for execution than counsel, and fitter for new projects than for settled business.” In his Bacon-Montaigne mood, Emerson is darkly eloquent, holding out just enough optimism to avoid complete despair. His essay on Montaigne concludes: “Things seem to tend downward, to justify despondency , to promote rogues, to defeat the just; and by knaves as by martyrs, the just cause is carried forward. Although knaves win in every political struggle, although society seems to be delivered over from the hands of one set of criminals into the hands of another set of criminals, as fast as the government is changed, and the march of civilization is a train of felonies, yet”—and here he finally turns—“yet, general ends are somehow answered.” Each of these sides of Emerson—the Plotinus and the Montaigne-Bacon—requires the other side. The highest goals or ambitions are inevitably judged by whether or not one can take concrete, measurable steps to reach them, while the practical , workaday side of things is most interesting to Emerson when it serves or leads to something great. Emerson is always interested both in what his sentences are aiming for and in the mechanics of the sentences themselves. The words of even the best advice are lifeless unless they have some yeast, some energy in them to get up off the page into the mind. The positive degree is the sinew of speech, the superlative is the fat. . . . When at a trattoria in Florence I asked the waiter if the cream was good, the man replied, “Si Signor, stupendo.” 34 More Practical Hints [18.206.12.31] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 22:02 GMT) Nature 35 Avoid adjectives. Let the noun do the work. It is the best part of each writer which has nothing private in it. Language should aim to describe the fact, and not merely suggest it. Art lies not in making your object prominent, but in choosing objects that are prominent. When he read, Emerson was always on the lookout for what it could teach him about writing. He noted a useful definition for a good style one day: “Nothing can be added to it, neither can anything be taken from it.” He then gave as an example an epitaph of a “criminal who was killed by a fall from his horse” which he found in Boswell’s Johnson. Between the stirrup and the ground I mercy asked, I mercy found. Emerson’s comment is “which word can you spare? What word can you add?” Though Emerson may seem learned and bookish—we only come upon him in books—he is always looking for a way to break free and do something fresh. Listening one day to the local minister in Concord, Emerson observed how he “grinds and grinds in the mill of a truism and nothing comes out but what was put in. But the moment he or I desert the tradition and speak a spontaneous thought, instantly poetry, wit, hope, virtue, learning and anecdote...