The Liberty-Lovers
American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson praises the English public for still loving freedom, despite their politicians.
1856
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson praises the English public for still loving freedom, despite their politicians.
1856
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) saw the English as a people much less biased and belligerent than their political masters. Liberty was safe, Emerson believed, while Englishmen still craved not influence abroad, but independence at home.
THE English stand for liberty. The conservative, money-loving, lord-loving English are yet liberty-loving; and so freedom is safe: for they have more personal force than any other people. The nation always resist the immoral action of their government. They think humanely on the affairs of France, of Turkey, of Poland, of Hungary, of Schleswig Holstein, though overborne by the statecraft of the rulers at last.*
They wish neither to command nor obey, but to be kings in their own houses. They are intellectual and deeply enjoy literature; they like well to have the world served up to them in books, maps, models, and every mode of exact information, and, though not creators in art, they value its refinement. But the history of the nation discloses, at every turn, this original predilection for private independence, and however this inclination may have been disturbed by the bribes with which their vast colonial power has warped men out of orbit, the inclination endures, and forms and reforms the laws, letters, manners and occupations.
In the 1850s, Britain sided with Turkey and France against Russia in the Crimean War, but Turkey’s oppressive occupation of the Balkans was exciting hostile public opinion. In the 1860s, Russia formally annexed Poland after a revolt; Hungary was torn between by Austria and Russia; and Britain failed to help Denmark when Prussia and Austria, amid rising German nationalism, annexed Schleswig, Holstein and Lauenberg. The latter event brought a scathing response from Lord Salisbury.
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.