Society and Solitude (1870)

Summary

Makebelieve, in one form or another, seems inseparable from American literature: either a writer sinks his nationality like Irving and G. P. R. James, and tries to pass for an European man of letters, which is comparatively an innocent delusion which sometimes approaches a reality, or he tries to pass off the actual circumstances of America as a substitute for all the ideal stimulants of the historic past. Emerson can scarcely be accused of neglecting history, but he is certainly the hierophant of the second and more mischievous school of American makebelieve. In every one of his writings he has inculcated with unwavering energy the dogma, which is the one thing needed to make our generation utterly joyless, that our present life of every day is divine and ideal if we could but think so. At first this unreasoning optimism was associated with other and more interesting elements. There was something certainly fresh and stimulating in Mr. Emerson's combination of a dreamy transcendentalism and a hardy personality, cynicism and neoplatonism, and though neither element was new, each had the effect of novelty on both sides of the Atlantic. But a man who is sure of his own life gets tired of asserting it, and Mr. Emerson seems to have little else to assert.