always
at THAT height--no higher--a confusion, mistaking a latent exultation
for an ascetic reserve. The rules of Thorough Bass can be applied to
his scale of flight no more than they can to the planetary system.
Jadassohn, if Emerson were literally a composer, could no more analyze
his harmony than a guide-to-Boston could. A microscope might show that
he uses chords of the 9th, 11th, or the 99th, but a lens far different
tells us they are used with different aims from those of Debussy.
Emerson is definite in that his art is based on something stronger than
the amusing or at its best the beguiling of a few mortals. If he uses a
sensuous chord, it is not for sensual ears. His harmonies may float, if
the wind blows in that direction, through a voluptuous atmosphere, but
he has not Debussy's fondness for trying to blow a sensuous atmosphere
from his own voluptuous cheeks. And so he is an ascetic! There is a
distance between jowl and soul--and it is not measured by the fraction
of an inch between Concord and Paris. On the other hand, if one thinks
that his harmony contains no dramatic chords, because no theatrical
sound is heard, let him listen to the finale of "Success," or of
"Spiritual Laws," or to some of the poems, "Brahma" or "Sursum Corda,"
for example. Of a truth his Codas often seem to crystallize in a
dramatic, though serene and sustained way, the truths of his
subject--they become more active and intense, but quieter and deeper.

Then there comes along another set of cataloguers. They put him down as
a "classicist," or a romanticist, or an eclectic. Because a prophet is
a child of romanticism--because revelation is classic, because
eclecticism quotes from eclectic Hindu Philosophy, a more sympathetic
cataloguer may say, that Emerson inspires courage of the quieter kind
and delight of the higher kind.

The same well-bound school teacher who told the boys that Thoreau was a
naturalist because he didn't like to work, puts down Emerson as a
"classic," and Hawthorne as a "romantic." A loud voice made this doubly
TRUE and SURE to be on the examination paper. But this teacher of
"truth AND dogma" apparently forgot that there is no such thing as
"classicism or romanticism." One has but to go to the various
definitions of these to know that. If you go to a classic definition
you know what a true classic is, and similarly a "true romantic." But
if you go to both, you have an algebraic formula, x = x, a
cancellation, an a