Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882). The Complete Works. 1904.
Vol. I. Nature, Addresses and Lectures
VI. The Superlative
T
There is a superlative temperament which has no medium range, but swiftly oscillates from the freezing to the boiling point, and which affects the manners of those who share it with a certain desperation. Their aspect is grimace. They go tearing, convulsed through life,—wailing, praying, exclaiming, swearing. We talk, sometimes, with people whose conversation would lead you to suppose that they had lived in a museum, where all the objects were monsters and extremes. Their good people are phœnixes; their naughty are like the prophet’s figs. They use the superlative of grammar: “most perfect,” “most exquisite,” “most horrible.” Like the French, they are enchanted, they are desolate, because you have got or have not got a shoe-string or a wafer you happen to want,—not perceiving that superlatives are diminutives, and weaken; that the positive is the sinew of speech, the superlative the fat. If the talker lose a tooth, he thinks the universal thaw and dissolution of things has come. Controvert his opinion and he cries “Persecution!” and reckons himself with Saint Barnabas, who was sawn in two.
Especially we note this tendency to extremes in the pleasant excitement of horror-mongers. Is there something so delicious in disasters and pain? Bad news is always exaggerated, and we may challenge Providence to send a fact so tragical that we cannot contrive to make it a little worse in our gossip.
All this comes of poverty. We are unskilful definers. From want of skill to convey quality, we hope to move admiration by quantity. Language should aim to describe the fact. It is not enough to suggest it and magnify it. Sharper sight would indicate the true line. ’T is very wearisome, this straining talk, these experiences all exquisite, intense and tremendous,—“The best I ever saw;” “I never in my life!” One wishes these terms gazetted and forbidden. Every favorite is not a cherub, nor every cat a griffin, nor each unpleasing person a dark, diabolical intriguer; nor agonies, excruciations nor ecstasies our daily bread.
Horace Walpole relates that in the expectation, current in London a century ago, of a great earthquake, some people provided themselves with dresses for the occasion. But one would not wear earthquake dresses or resurrection robes for a working jacket, nor make a codicil to his will whenever he goes out to ride; and the secrets of death, judgment and eternity are tedious when recurring as minute-guns. Thousands of people live and die who were never, on a single occasion, hungry or thirsty, or furious or terrified. The books say, “It made my hair stand on end!” Who, in our municipal life, ever had such an experience? Indeed, I believe that much of the rhetoric of terror,—“It froze my blood,” “It made my knees knock,” etc.—most men have realized only in dreams and nightmares.
Then there is an inverted superlative, or superlative contrary, which shivers, like Demophoön, in the sun: wants fan and parasol on the cold Friday; is tired by sleep; feeds on drugs and poisons; finds the rainbow a discoloration; hates birds and flowers.
The exaggeration of which I complain makes plain fact the more welcome and refreshing. It is curious that a face magnified in a concave mirror loses its expression. All this overstatement is needless. A little fact is worth a whole limbo of dreams, and I can well spare the exaggerations which appear to me screens to conceal ignorance. Among these glorifiers, the coldest stickler for names and dates and measures cannot lament his criticism and coldness of fancy. Think how much pains astronomers and opticians have taken to procure an achromatic lens. Discovery in the heavens has waited for it; discovery on the face of the earth not less. I hear without sympathy the complaint of young and ardent persons that they find life no region of romance, with no enchanter, no giant, no fairies, nor even muses. I am very much indebted to my eyes, and am content that they should see the real world, always geometrically finished without blur or halo. The more I am engaged with it, the more it suffices.
How impatient we are, in these northern latitudes, of looseness and intemperance in speech! Our measure of success is the moderation and low level of an individual’s judgment. Doctor Channing’s piety and wisdom had such weight that, in Boston, the popular idea of religion was whatever this eminent divine held. But I remember that his best friend, a man of guarded lips, speaking of him in a circle of his admirers, said: “I have known him long, I have studied his character, and I believe him capable of virtue.” An eminent French journalist paid a high compliment to the Duke of Wellington, when his documents were published: “Here are twelve volumes of military dispatches, and the word glory is not found in them.”
The English mind is arithmetical, values exactness, likes literal statement; stigmatizes any heat or hyperbole as Irish, French, Italian, and infers weakness and inconsequence of character in speakers who use it. It does not love the superlative but the positive degree. Our customary and mechanical existence is not favorable to flights; long nights and frost hold us pretty fast to realities. The people of English stock, in all countries, are a solid people, wearing good hats and shoes, and owners of land whose title-deeds are properly recorded. Their houses are of wood, and brick, and stone, not designed to reel in earthquakes, nor blow about through the air much in hurricanes, nor to be lost under sand-drifts, nor to be made bonfires of by whimsical viziers; but to stand as commodious, rentable tenements for a century or two. All our manner of life is on a secure and moderate pattern, such as can last. Violence and extravagance are, once for all, distasteful; competence, quiet, comfort, are the agreed welfare.
Ever a low style is best. “I judge by every man’s truth of his degree of understanding,” said Chesterfield. And I do not know any advantage more conspicuous which a man owes to his experience in markets and the Exchange, or politics, than the caution and accuracy he acquires in his report of facts. “Uncle Joel’s news is always true,” said a person to me with obvious satisfaction, and said it justly; for the old head, after deceiving and being deceived many times, thinks, “What’s the use of having to unsay to-day what I said yesterday? I will not be responsible; I will not add an epithet. I will be as moderate as the fact, and will use the same expression, without color, which I received; and rather repeat it several times, word for word, than vary it ever so little.”
The first valuable power in a reasonable mind, one would say, was the power of plain statement, or the power to receive things as they befall, and to transfer the picture of them to another mind unaltered. ’T is a good rule of rhetoric which Schlegel gives,—“In good prose, every word is underscored;” which, I suppose, means, Never italicize.
Spartans, stoics, heroes, saints and gods use a short and positive speech. They are never off their centres. As soon as they swell and paint and find truth not enough for them, softening of the brain has already begun. It seems as if inflation were a disease incident to too much use of words, and the remedy lay in recourse to things. I am daily struck with the forcible understatement of people who have no literary habit. The low expression is strong and agreeable. The citizen dwells in delusions. His dress and draperies, house and stables, occupy him. The poor countryman, having no circumstance of carpets, coaches, dinners, wine and dancing in his head to confuse him, is able to look straight at you, without refraction or prismatic glories, and he sees whether you see straight also, or whether your head is addled by this mixture of wines.
The common people diminish: “a cold snap;” “it rains easy;” “good haying weather.” When a farmer means to tell you that he is doing well with his farm, he says, “I don’t work as hard as I did, and I don’t mean to.” When he wishes to condemn any treatment of soils or of stock, he says, “It won’t do any good.” Under the Catskill Mountains the boy in the steamboat said, “Come up here, Tony; it looks pretty out-of-doors.” The farmers in the region do not call particular summits, as Killington, Camel’s Hump, Saddle-back, etc., mountains, but only “them ’ere rises,” and reserve the word mountains for the range.
I once attended a dinner given to a great state functionary by functionaries,—men of law, state and trade. The guest was a great man in his own country and an honored diplomatist in this. His health was drunk with some acknowledgment of his distinguished services to both countries, and followed by nine cold hurrahs. There was the vicious superlative. Then the great official spoke and beat his breast, and declared that he should remember this honor to the latest moment of his existence. He was answered again by officials. Pity, thought I, they should lie so about their keen sensibility to the nine cold hurrahs and to the commonplace compliment of a dinner. Men of the world value truth, in proportion to their ability; not by its sacredness, but for its convenience. Of such, especially of diplomatists, one has a right to expect wit and ingenuity to avoid the lie if they must comply with the form. Now, I had been present, a little before, in the country at a cattle-show dinner, which followed an agricultural discourse delivered by a farmer: the discourse, to say the truth, was bad; and one of our village fathers gave at the dinner this toast: “The orator of the day: his subject deserves the attention of every farmer.” The caution of the toast did honor to our village father. I wish great lords and diplomatists had as much respect for truth.
But whilst thus everything recommends simplicity and temperance of action; the utmost directness, the positive degree, we mean thereby that “rightly to be great is not to stir without great argument.” Whenever the true objects of action appear, they are to be heartily sought. Enthusiasm is the height of man; it is the passing from the human to the divine.
The superlative is as good as the positive, if it be alive. If man loves the conditioned, he also loves the unconditioned. We don’t wish to sin on the other side, and to be purists, nor to check the invention of wit or the sally of humor. ’T is very different, this weak and wearisome lie, from the stimulus to the fancy which is given by a romancing talker who does not mean to be exactly taken,—like the gallant skipper who complained to his owners that he had pumped the Atlantic Ocean three times through his ship on the passage, and ’t was common to strike seals and porpoises in the hold. Or what was similarly asserted of the late Lord Jeffrey, at the Scottish bar,—an attentive auditor declaring on one occasion after an argument of three hours, that he had spoken the whole English language three times over in his speech.
The objection to unmeasured speech is its lie. All men like an impressive fact. The astronomer shows you in his telescope the nebula of Orion, that you may look on that which is esteemed the farthest-off land in visible nature. At that Bank of England they put a scrap of paper that is worth a million pounds sterling into the hands of the visitor to touch. Our travelling is a sort of search for the superlatives or summits of art,—much more the real wonders of power in the human form. The arithmetic of Newton, the memory of Magliabecchi or Mirandola, the versatility of Julius Cæsar, the concentration of Bonaparte, the inspiration of Shakspeare, are sure of commanding interest and awe in every company of men.
The superlative is the excess of expression. We are a garrulous, demonstrative kind of creatures, and cannot live without much outlet for all our sense and nonsense. And fit expression is so rare that mankind have a superstitious value for it, and it would seem the whole human race agree to value a man precisely in proportion to his power of expression; and to the most expressive man that has existed, namely, Shakspeare, they have awarded the highest place.
The expressors are the gods of the world, but the men whom these expressors revere are the solid, balanced, undemonstrative citizens, who make the reserved guard, the central sense, of the world. For the luminous object wastes itself by its shining,—is luminous because it is burning up; and if the powers are disposed for display, there is all the less left for use and creation. The talent sucks the substance of the man. Superlatives must be bought by too many positives. Gardens of roses must be stripped to make a few drops of otto. And these raptures of fire and frost, which indeed cleanse pedantry out of conversation and make the speech salt and biting, would cost me the days of well-being which are now so cheap to me, yet so valued. I like no deep stakes. I am a coward at gambling. I will bask in the common sun a while longer.
Children and thoughtless people like exaggerated event and activity; like to run to a house on fire, to a fight, to an execution; like to talk of a marriage, of a bankruptcy, of a debt, of a crime. The wise man shuns all this. I knew a grave man who, being urged to go to a church where a clergyman was newly ordained, said “he liked him very well, but he would go when the interesting Sundays were over.”
All rests at last on the simplicity of nature, or real being. Nothing is for the most part less esteemed. We are fond of dress, of ornament, of accomplishments, of talents, but distrustful of health, of soundness, of pure innocence. Yet Nature measures her greatness by what she can spare, by what remains when all superfluity and accessories are shorn off.
Nor is there in Nature itself any swell, any brag, any strain or shock, but a firm common sense through all her elephants and lions, through all her ducks and geese; a true proportion between her means and her performance. Semper sibi similis. You shall not catch her in any anomalies, nor swaggering into any monsters. In all the years that I have sat in town and forest, I never saw a winged dragon, a flying man, or a talking fish, but ever the strictest regard to rule, and an absence of all surprises. No; Nature encourages no looseness, pardons no errors; freezes punctually at 32°, boils punctually at 212° crystallizes in water at one invariable angle, in diamond at one, in granite at one; and if you omit the smallest condition, the experiment will not succeed. Her communication obeys the gospel rule, yea or nay. She never expatiates, never goes into the reasons. Plant beechmast and it comes up, or it does not come up. Sow grain, and it does not come up: put lime into the soil and try again, and this time she says yea. To every question an abstemious but absolute reply. The like staidness is in her dealings with us. Nature is always serious,—does not jest with us. Where we have begun in folly, we are brought quickly to plain dealing. Life could not be carried on except by fidelity and good earnest; and she brings the most heartless trifler to determined purpose presently. The men whom she admits to her confidence, the simple and great characters, are uniformly marked by absence of pretension and by understatement. The old and the modern sages of clearest insight are plain men, who have held themselves hard to the poverty of Nature.
The firmest and noblest ground on which people can live is truth; the real with the real; a ground on which nothing is assumed, but where they speak and think and do what they must, because they are so and not otherwise.
But whilst the basis of character must be simplicity, the expression of character, it must be remembered, is, in great degree, a matter of climate. In the temperate climates there is a temperate speech, in torrid climates an ardent one. Whilst in Western nations the superlative in conversation is tedious and weak, and in character is a capital defect, Nature delights in showing us that in the East it is animated, it is pertinent, pleasing, poetic. Whilst she appoints us to keep within the sharp boundaries of form as the condition of our strength, she creates in the East the uncontrollable yearning to escape from limitation into the vast and boundless; to use a freedom of fancy which plays with all the works of Nature, great or minute, galaxy or grain of dust, as toys and words of the mind; inculcates the tenet of a beatitude to be found in escape from all organization and all personality, and makes ecstasy an institution.
Religion and poetry are all the civilization of the Arab. “The ground of Paradise,” said Mohammed, “is extensive, and the plants of it are hallelujahs.” Religion and poetry: the religion teaches an inexorable destiny; it distinguishes only two days in each man’s history, the day of his lot, and the day of judgment. The religion runs into asceticism and fate. The costume, the articles in which wealth is displayed, are in the same extremes. Thus the diamond and the pearl, which are only accidental and secondary in their use and value to us, are proper to the Oriental world. The diver dives a beggar, and rises with the price of a kingdom in his hand. A bag of sequins, a jewel, a balsam, a single horse, constitute an estate in countries where insecure institutions make every one desirous of concealable and convertible property. Shall I say, further, that the Orientals excel in costly arts, in the cutting of precious stones, in working in gold, in weaving on hand-looms costly stuffs from silk and wool, in spices, in dyes and drugs, henna, otto and camphor, and in the training of slaves, elephants and camels,—things which are the poetry and superlative of commerce.
On the other hand,—and it is good illustration of the difference of genius,—the European nations, and, in general, all nations in proportion to their civilization, understand the manufacture of iron. One of the meters of the height to which any civility rose is the skill in the fabric of iron. Universally, the better gold, the worse man. The political economist defies us to show any gold-mine country that is traversed by good roads: or a shore where pearls are found on which good schools are erected. The European civility, or that of the positive degree, is established by coal-mines, by ventilation, by irrigation and every skill—in having water cheap and pure, by iron, by agriculture for bread-stuffs, and manufacture of coarse and family cloths. Our modern improvements have been in the invention of friction matches; of india-rubber shoes; of the famous two parallel bars of iron; then of the air-chamber of Watt, and of the judicious tubing of the engine, by Stephenson, in order to the construction of locomotives.
Meantime, Nature, who loves crosses and mixtures, makes these two tendencies necessary each to the other, and delights to reinforce each peculiarity by imparting the other. The Northern genius finds itself singularly refreshed and stimulated by the breadth and luxuriance of Eastern imagery and modes of thinking, which go to check the pedantry of our inventions and the excess of our detail. There is no writing which has more electric power to unbind and animate the torpid intellect than the bold Eastern muse.
If it come back, however, to the question of final superiority, it is too plain that there is no question that the star of empire rolls West: that the warm sons of the Southeast have bent the neck under the yoke of the cold temperament and the exact understanding of the North-Western races.