Professor Everett's Essays

THE literary decadence of New England is such a fascinating theme that all sorts of reasons have been given for it. The subject is so fruitful in suggestion that the New Englander may find comfort in the reflection that if he is no longer literary himself, he is the cause of literature in others.

Now and then, however, a doubt comes as to the facts of the case. The wealth of a great city is best illustrated by the number of modest millionaires whose names never get into the newspapers. The publication of a volume of essays ¹ by the late Charles Carroll Everett leads one to ask whether New England in its palmy days produced a mind with a finer combination of wit and wisdom. Yet Dr. Everett had no popular reputation as a man of letters. He was recognized during his lifetime, by those interested in the subject, as one of the wisest of American theologians. As Dean of the Harvard Divinity School he was loved and honored. But if in a miscellaneous company it had been asked if there were any minds left like that of Oliver Wendell Holmes, it is not likely that any one would have thought of the quiet professor in Cambridge. Yet it is doubtful whether the humor of Dr. Holmes had a finer flavor than that of Dr. Everett. As for the ability to give to great thoughts a worthy literary expression, when Emerson is excepted, it would be difficult to find his equal among the men of the transcendental period.

Of Dr. Everett it could be said, as of Lessing, that “ his mind was always in solution.” Elements the most refractory were readily combined. A number of years ago he published a little book called Poetry, Comedy and Duty. The title was characteristic.”Comedy had for him a moral value. Even on the countenance of The Stern Daughter of the Voice of God he could detect an elusive smile.

The title of the present volume, Essays Theological and Literary, is not likely to attract the general reader, who fears the theologian bearing literary gifts. These fears would be allayed by a knowledge of the author and his point of view. “ Religion,” said Dr. Everett, “ is poetry believed in.” One must not, then, expect a sharp line of demarcation between the theological and literary essays. The charm of personality is felt even in the discussion of Kant’s Influence in Theology. One gets the impression that Kant was a human being, an idea that does not occur to the ordinary student of philosophy, but which the general reader must regard as important if true. Dr. Everett had the rare faculty of seizing upon the points of real human interest.

On almost every page there is some illuminating sentence, with a flash of insight which has the effect of wit. Even a metaphysical idea is more apt to be described as one might describe the peculiarities of an interesting person, than defined as if it were a word. Here is a description of a logical process, which reminds us of the Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table.

“ In an argumentum ad hominem we sound a man’s mind just as we try a wall when we mean to drive a staple. We tap it till we reach a spot where it sounds solid, and we think that our staple will stick. The mind of another might be different.”

Sometimes a whole argument is summed up in a swift descriptive phrase, as when he speaks of the effect of compulsory attendance on college prayers where “ the service is adapted to the slender patience of the attendants.

In the essay on Instinct and Reason he says : “ It is possible that at first what is called generalization is simply a failure accurately to notice differences. If in a farmer’s yard you were introduced to a sheep named Bo-Peep, the next sheep you saw in the yard you would probably speak of as Bo-Peep. This would not be because you had great power of generalization, but because of a lack of the power of discrimination.”

There is a thought here that the adepts in the grandiose philosophies which are now in vogue might ponder to their own profit — though of course they will do nothing of the kind.

As for Dr. Everett, his peculiar charm lay in his keen discriminations. This gave value to his essays in literary criticism.

The four critical essays in this volume give estimates of Emerson, Goethe, Tennyson, and Browning. It is difficult here to say anything that has not been said many times before. Dr. Everett’s judgments, however, are always the result of personal insight.

In regard to Emerson we find our complacent generalizations quietly set aside. There is nothing that we are more likely to take for granted than that Emerson was primarily a moralist. Was not his great theme the Conduct of Life ? Was he not always preaching courage, self-reliance, and all that belongs to welldeveloped character. His subject matter was the same as that of “ moral Seneca.” Dr. Everett tells us that “ primarily Emerson was a lover of the beautiful. This is not to imply that he would sacrifice morality to beauty, but that morality with him was a means rather than an end.”

This is criticism that goes beneath literary form, and beneath all acquired characteristics, and has to do with temperament and motive. It is only after we get the point of view that we recognize the validity of the judgment.

We have only to compare Emerson with Ruskin to see how the deeper currents differ from the superficial. Ruskin’s chosen field was art, therefore we jump at the conclusion that he was moved primarily by the love of beauty. But was he ? Before his life was finished men saw his true place. His real function was that of a preacher of righteousness. His inspiration was ethical. Beauty was to him a means to an end. He took a picture or a cathedral as a text for a moving sermon.

With Emerson the process was reversed. He began as a sermonizer, but he had no genius for exhortation. He had no desire to convert any one to his opinion. Manly virtue was beautiful, therefore he praised it and loved it; but, as Dr. Everett reminds us, he seemed “ to feel that our moral nature is vitiated by any interference of our will.”

Equally provocative of thought is the explanation of the obscurity of some of Emerson’s poems. It is because they are abstract, we say. Not at all, says Dr. Everett; it is because they are so unusually concrete, and so vividly imaginative. And then he compares Emerson’s Ode to Beauty with Tennyson’s Flower in the Crannied Wall, which expresses a similar thought. “ If the lines of Emerson are obscure to some to whom those of Tennyson are clear, the reason is that they appeal directly to the imagination. It is not merely that Emerson uses a metaphor, which the lines of Tennyson lack. Behind and in the metaphor is felt the presence of the thing itself, while the other poem deals merely with the knowing about the thing.”

Such remarks, which are opposed to all our preconceptions, are not to be accepted without question, nor were they so intended. They do something better for us ; they send us back to search the Emersonian scriptures to find whether these things are so.

The essay on Faust contains a characteristic utterance in regard to Mephistopheles. After describing him as “ an embodied negation,” the essayist says that “ instead of being harsh and fierce he is almost genial.” Genial is not the first epithet that would occur to us in speaking of one of the diabolical hosts, but, as Dr. Everett says in his essay on The Devil, “ In speaking of the class of beings under consideration, all our terms and thoughts must be inverted. The worse the personality may be, the better is the demon as such.” Such charity is not common among professors of systematic theology. As for Mephistopheles : “ What gives him a personality, and a personality that fascinates, is his wit. The wit of Mephistopheles is absolute. It is free from any other element. It is never humor. It is never in the strict sense of the word bitter. Humor on the one side and bitterness on the other imply a certain real or possible substance to the world. They imply on the one side a certain kindliness, or on the other a certain disappointment. The wit of Mephistopheles is a simple play as of a lambent flame.”

The essay on Tennyson and Browning brings us to this unexpected conclusion: “ In comparing Tennyson and Browning we have found that Tennyson represents the realistic and human aspects of ethics and religion, while Browning represents rather their ideal aspects.”

To one who has not read the essay the first thought is likely to be that, through a printer’s error, the names of the poets have been transposed. Do we not all think of Browning as sturdily realistic, while Tennyson represents all that is idealistic ?

It is because we are thinking of literary form and the choice of subjects. Dr. Everett calls our attention to substance of thought. He finds Browning, with all his interest in the varied aspects of life and character, to be the man of simpler and more unsophisticated faith. He dwells amid undisturbed ideals, and can afford to look tolerantly and curiously at the conflicts of the outward world.

Tennyson’s doubts go deeper. He is fighting for his very life. His art is more serene, but his soul is more troubled. “ The confidence of Tennyson was burdened by the sense of human suffering, that of Browning resembled the clear insight of his religious faith.”

Very illuminating is the remark in regard to the difference between the doubt expressed by Tennyson and that which finds place in Browning’s soul: “ Here, as elsewhere, the doubt which with Tennyson speaks from within speaks from without.”

The argument of the last essay, on the Philosophy of Browning, is relieved by a delicious humor. Speaking of some too strenuous students of the poet, he says : “ It cannot be denied that students of Browning have sometimes drawn from his works meanings that they have put into them.” He cautiously adds, “ Some readers can go through all this without harm.” Under favorable circumstances they “ may take their author all to pieces, and then can put him together again, or rather can see him stand forth in his original freshness and beauty, as Pelias was expected to arise in renewed youth after having been cut to pieces and boiled. The daughters of Pelias were disappointed, however.”

One cannot close this stimulating book without an expression of regret that Dr. Everett in his full and useful life had not more time for contributions to “ mere literature.”

S. M. Crothers.