194 LITERARY TALUES 



men ! " He liked ideas, but not things. He dwelt 

 in the abstract, not in the concrete. " In the high- 

 est friendship," he says, " we form a league with 

 the Idea of the man who stands to us in that re- 

 lation — not with the actual person." And his 

 letters, fine and eloquent as most of them are, do not 

 read like a message from one person to another 

 person, but from one Idea to another Idea. 



Yet Emerson's leading trait is eminently Ameri- 

 can ; I mean his hospitality toward the new, — 

 the eagerness with which he sought and welcomed 

 the new idea and the new man. Perhaps we might 

 call it his inborn radicalism. No writer ever made 

 such rash, such extreme statements, in the hope 

 that some new truth might be compassed. Any- 

 thing new and daring instantly challenged his atten- 

 tion. His face was wholly set toward the future, 

 — the new. The past was discredited the moment 

 it became the past. " The coming only is sacred," 

 he said ; " no truth so sublime but it may be trivial 

 to-morrow in the light of new thoughts." 



As a writer, he sought to make all the old thoughts 

 appear trivial in the light of his audacious affirma- 

 tions. He stood ready at all times to strike his 

 colors to the man who could bring a larger generali- 

 zation than his own. All his knowledge, all his 

 opinions, were at the mercy of the new idea. He 

 did not tread the beaten paths, or seek truth in the 

 logical way ; he sought for it by spurts and sallies of 

 the mind. He called himself an " experimenter," and 

 said he did not pretend to settle anything as true 



