The Fact-Lovers
American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson saw the demand for hard evidence as a peculiarly English trait.
1856
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson saw the demand for hard evidence as a peculiarly English trait.
1856
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) believed that there was no people in Europe so committed to hard, scientific facts than the Victorian English, so unwilling to act until all the evidence is in – a ‘Victorian value’ worth rediscovering today.
THEY kiss the dust before a fact. Is it a machine, is it a charter, is it a boxer in the ring, is it a candidate on the hustings – the universe of Englishmen will suspend their judgment until the trial can be had.
They are not to be led by a phrase, they want a working plan, a working machine, a working constitution, and will sit out the trial and abide by the issue and reject all preconceived theories. In politics they put blunt questions, which must be answered; Who is to pay the taxes? What will you do for trade? What for corn? What for the spinner?
This singular fairness and its results strike the French with surprise. Philip de Commines says, “Among all the sovereignties I know in the world, that in which the public good is best attended to, and the least violence exercised on the people, is that of England.”* Life is safe, and personal rights; and what is freedom without security?
Philip de Commines (1447-1511), a diplomat in the court of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy and of King Louis IX of France. The passage occurs in his ‘Memoires’ Volume I, Book V, Chap. 19 (p. 444): “In my opinion, of all the countries in the world with which I was ever acquainted, the one where the government is best managed, where the rule is least violent on the people, where buildings are least likely to be destroyed and demolished by war, is England; and that fate and misfortune falls only upon those who make the war”. De Commines was being generous: England was at that time (1477) in the middle of The Wars of the Roses, and Edward IV had six years earlier snatched the throne back from Henry VI.
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.