representative of the "kindliness of the highest New England culture." His enthusiastic and rather uncritical support of the Union in the Civil War, together with his endorsement of the antislavery cause, now sanctioned by success, made it possible for the literary establishment to assure itself that he had "always" stood on the "right side of great public questions"—William Dean Howells's obituary verdict in 1882. Commentators now spoke of the "triumphant optimism in his view of human nature." James Russell Lowell, among many others, decided that he was "essentially a poet." Another admirer held that he was something even "better, perhaps, than either a poet or a philosopher—a man,... a personality so pure, so lofty, and so brave that we may unhesitatingly pronounce it great." In the gently "receding light" of transcendentalism, George William Curtis could see Emerson as the "founder" of American literature, "a poet instead of a philosopher." The comparison with Carlyle now worked in Emerson's favor: whereas Carlyle "seems never to have been reconciled with life," as George S. Merriam complained in 1888, Emerson gave off a "sense of serene and radiant joy." Praising Emerson's "optimism," Joel Benton declared his "way of looking at things ... just the opposite of Carlyle's." It was to Emerson's credit that Carlyle failed to make him believe in the devil by showing him London's East End. Emerson's "diagnosis was always made on affirmative lines and justified the highest hopes."

Emerson's deceptively conciliatory manner made it easy to miss the abrasiveness of his ideas. Unlike Brownson or Carlyle, he had little taste for public controversy. "The least people," he once said, "... most entirely demolish me. I always find some quarter, some sorts of respect from the mediocre. But a snipper-snapper eats me whole." Unsure of his ability to hold his own in arguments, he tended to avoid them. ^* Disagreement always seemed to take him by surprise. He did not anticipate the furious denunciation that greeted his Divinity School Address, evidently

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*

It is something of a shock, therefore, to find this man of fabled mildness referring to argument as a form of mortal combat—regicide, at that. When a young man showed him an essay taking issue with Plato, Emerson said "pleasantly," according to Howells, "My boy, when you strike at the king, you must kill him." An awareness that the stakes are high may have contributed to Emerson's own reluctance to enter the lists.

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