probably the last great writer who will fling about classic anecdotes as
if they were club gossip. In the discussion of morals, this assumption
does little harm. The stories and proverbs which illustrate the thought
of the moralist generally concern only those simple relations of life
which are common to all ages. There is charm in this familiar dealing
with antiquity. The classics are thus domesticated and made real to us.
What matter if Æsop appear a little too much like an American citizen,
so long as his points tell?

It is in Emerson's treatment of the fine arts that we begin to notice
his want of historic sense. Art endeavors to express subtle and ever
changing feelings by means of conventions which are as protean as the
forms of a cloud; and the man who in speaking on the plastic arts makes
the assumption that all men are alike will reveal before he has uttered
three sentences that he does not know what art is, that he has never
experienced any form of sensation from it. Emerson lived in a time and
clime where there was no plastic art, and he was obliged to arrive at
his ideas about art by means of a highly complex process of reasoning.
He dwelt constantly in a spiritual place which was the very focus of
high moral fervor. This was his enthusiasm, this was his revelation, and
from it he reasoned out the probable meaning of the fine arts. "This,"
thought Emerson, his eye rolling in a fine frenzy of moral feeling,
"this must be what Apelles experienced, this fervor is the passion of
Bramante. I understand the Parthenon." And so he projected his feelings
about morality into the field of the plastic arts. He deals very freely
and rather indiscriminately with the names of artists,--Phidias,
Raphael, Salvator Rosa,--and he speaks always in such a way that it is
impossible to connect what he says with any impression we have ever
received from the works of those masters.