Emerson’s essay Plutarch is very much a critical book review and Emerson is the kind of generous, thoughtful critic and reader every author wishes to have. The occasion for the essay is a new Plutarch translation. Emerson doesn’t mention this until the very end, and he doesn’t even mention who the translation is by, perhaps because this was a lecture first and he had the book at hand. At any rate, he spends most of the essay talking about Plutarch’s life and work and the influence he has had over the course of centuries.

I don’t know anything about Plutarch except that he wrote Lives so I can’t vouch for the veracity of Emerson’s information. According to him Plutarch was not very popular in his day. Plutarch’s name is not mentioned by any of his famous contemporaries like Persius, Juvenal, Lucan and Seneca, of Quintiliau, Martial, Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny the Elder and the Younger, but then Plutarch doesn’t mention any of them either. But the neglect by his contemporaries has more than been made up in time. Plutarch has had multiple translations into several different languages, and has been read and quoted by such luminaries as Henry IV, Rabelais, Montaigne, Saint Evermond, Votaire, Rousseau, Sir Thomas North, Shakespeare, Bacon, Dryden, Saint-Beuve, and others.

Emerson claims a unique place for Plutarch in literature as an “encyclopaedia of Greek and Roman antiquity” and even suggests that “he is, among prose writers, what Chaucer is among English poets.” Emerson does not believe that Plutarch had any “supreme intellectual gifts,” but asserts that his popularity is due to his humanity.

One of the wonderful things about this essay is Emerson’s evident enthusiasm and delight in his subject. He admires his “rapid and crowded style, as if he had such store of anecdotes of his heroes that he is forced to suppress more than he recounts, in order to keep up with the hasting history.”
Plutarch gossips and prattles and takes pleasure in writing about the best things he has read. He is “true to his centre,” has not lost his wonder and is a “pronounced idealist.” Emerson says that Plutarch

is no courtier, and no Boswell…I find him a better teacher of rhetoric than any modern….But his own cheerfulness and rude health are also magnetic….he is read to the neglect of more careful historians. Yet he inspires a curiosity, sometimes makes a necessity, to read them. He disowns any attempt to rival Thucydides ; but I suppose he has a hundred readers where Thucydides finds one, and Thucydides must often thank Plutarch for that one. He has preserved for us a multitude of precious sentences, in prose or verse, of authors whose books are lost ; and these embalmed fragments, through his loving selection alone, have come to be proverbs of later mankind.

Emerson is not all praise though, but he mentions Plutarch’s shortcomings in such a nice way, as though they were just charming little quirks, that I can’t help but like Plutarch the better for them. There is apparently much in Plutarch that seems unfinished that Emerson describes as notes or sketches. A piece on Herodotus Emerson generously gives Plutarch the benefit of the doubt by saying

His poor indignation against Herodotus was perhaps a youthful prize essay : it appeared to me captious and labored ; or perhaps, at a rhetorician’s school, the subject of Herodotus being the lesson of the day, Plutarch was appointed by lot to take the adverse side.

Emerson compares Plutarch to Seneca and decides in favor of Plutarch. He credits Seneca with being a “writer of sentences” and for keeping to a sublime path, but finds Plutarch more genial and sympathetic. Plutarch is so sympathetic that “his excessive and fanciful humanity reminds one of Charles Lamb, whilst it much exceeds him.” Plutarch gets a little comparison to Montaigne too who, according to Emerson, was his best reader.

The best proof of Plutarch’s skill is that he translates so well. And now we get Emerson’s opinion of the new translation. While the recent book might be more correct and better presented, Emerson prefers the old version “for its vigorous English style.” And that’s it, no more mention of the translations. He goes immediately back to Plutarch saying that even if his popularity goes through cycles he will never be forgotten:

his sterling values will presently recall the eye and thought of the best minds, and his books will be reprinted and read anew by coming generations. And thus Plutarch will be perpetually rediscovered from time to time as long as books last.

If all this doesn’t make you want to read Plutarch then I haven’t done Emerson justice. Go read Emerson’s essay for yourself and see if you don’t want to rush to the library or bookstore to get a copy of Plutarch’s books. You also might find yourself wishing there were more critics these days who wrote reviews like Emerson.

Next week’s Emerson: Life and Letters in New England