Emerson’s prose-style. What are its merits and demerits
Emerson’s
prose-style is noted for its aphoristic quality and its epigrammatic terseness.
The essay is with him, as with Bacon, a series of short, quotable assertions
without the logical unity of the discourse, but all bound together by the
intellectual atmosphere of the source from whence they proceed. Very many of
the sentences are remarkable for their force, subtlety, and impressiveness, and
some for their poetical beauty. The imagery is of great range, from the sun and
stars and down to the meanest weed or insect, and the diction is quaint and
original but not in the lest affected. With Emerson prose is the other harmony,
i.e. poetry. He is one of the greatest writers of poetic-prose. His sentences
have the rhythm and cadence of poetry.
He has used a
number of stylistic devices such as figures of speech, analogy, antithetically
balanced sentences, epigrams, rhetorical etc. The use of these various devices
can easily be illustrated from any of his essays – For example take the
following: “It is one central fire, which, flaming now out of the lips of Etna,
lightens the capes of Sicily, and now out of the throat of Vesuvius,
illuminates the towers and vineyards of Naples. It is one light which beams out
of thousand stars. It is one soul which animates all men” Here there is the
fine cooperative contact achieved between the phrases, “the lips of Etna” and
“the throat of Vesuvius” and between the verbs lightens and illuminates,
enabling Emerson to repeat himself without repetition.
The perception
of analogy takes also the less direct and more forceful form of metaphor.
Literary fashions are seen as “the mere remains of foreign harvests.” He
expects confidently a time, “when the intellect of this continent will look out
from its iron lids.” The young scholar is, “a school boy under the bending dome
of day.” Books are lamps to guide our steps to the East again, where the dawn
is.
To the poet’s
privilege of metaphor, Emerson adds the idealist’s prerogative of paradox,
which is at once a way of seeing things as well as a way of saying them. It is
a philosopher’s game, played with appearance and reality. Diversity and even contrariness
are to him only a dramatic presentation of some great designs. “The drop is a
small ocean,” “The near explains the far,” “One design unites and animates the
farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench”, and, of course, the most basic
paradox of all is the one in which, “Everything that tends to insulate the
individual ……tends to true union as well as greatness.”
Emerson reminds
us often of Milton , specially in The American Scholar, by his eloquence, by the
amplitude and sweep of his sentences, the rhythm and the poetry of his
descriptions. He reminds us just as often of Bacon with his confident
aphorisms. The fullness of the longer sentences is balanced by the sharpness of
epigram and the greatness of antithesis. He has a whole series of antithetically
balanced sentences, where he describes how experience becomes truth and art in
the crucible of the scholar’s mind. Readily noticeable also is the skilful use
of rhetorical devices, like inversion, repetition or interrogation. “Emerson
has the poet’s ear for the music of words, and something even of the more
obvious phonetic and musical satisfaction of verse may be found in Emerson’s
prose. Apart from the usual balancing of sound with the sense, characteristic
of the antithetical construction, we notice also the devices of rhythm, the
balancing of sound through repetition and contrast in passages like this one:
“Every day, the
sun; and after sunset. Night and her stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass
grows. Every day, men and women cover sing and beholding.”
According to a
noted critic, it is idle to analyse Emerson’s style, if we think of style as
meaning order and arrangement: for his method of writing—by stringing together
selections from his note-books—made it impossible that his works should have any
continuity of thought or unity of expression. But if we think of style simply
as manner, as the reflection of personality, and then consider Emerson’s most
characteristic paragraphs which suggest stars, flowers and glimmering crystals,
then there is no style to compare with his in our literature.
There can be no
denying the fact that Emerson is one of the greatest of prose-stylist in the
English language, but he has also glaring faults and short-comings. He lacked
the gift of sustained construction. His style is best illustrated in selected
passages. The sentences are terse, vital, epigrammatic; yet they are always
poetic rather than practical, and always hint at much more than they express.
Because he lives much out of doors and is intimate with earth, air and water,
Emerson’s figures have an elemental quality unlike those of any other writer.
The dew and fragrance of the morning are in all his works. Because he has read
widely he gives an air of culture to the most homely matters by associating
them with the great characters and the great books of the world. He has a large
vocabulary at perfect command, but his instinct leads him to the simplest and
most picturesque words. He chooses his expressions from the most unexpected
places, here from the nursery, there from the Apocalypse or from the mystic
books of the East; and not even Lowell approaches him in the ability to clothe
his thought in a new dress, making its appeal as fresh and original as if it
had been spoken in Eden at the spring time of the world.
Emerson is
always striving after eloquence of expression, not to convince his hearers—such
a personal motive would never occur to him—but simply because it is in his
blood, because eloquence seems to hi Man’s natural expression, his unconscious
reflection of his harmony with the universe.
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