The Last Harvest | Page 2

times,[1] and
near the sun-down of my life, to go over them and point out in some
detail their value and significance.
[Footnote 1: Written during the World War.--C.B.]
Emerson was such an important figure in our literary history, and in the
moral and religious development of our people, that attention cannot be
directed to him too often. He could be entirely reconstructed from the
unpublished matter which he left. Moreover, just to come in contact
with him in times like ours is stimulating and refreshing. The younger
generation will find that he can do them good if they will pause long
enough in their mad skirting over the surface of things to study him.
For my own part, a lover of Emerson from early manhood, I come back
to him in my old age with a sad but genuine interest. I do not hope to
find the Emerson of my youth--the man of daring and inspiring
affirmation, the great solvent of a world of encrusted forms and
traditions, which is so welcome to a young man--because I am no
longer a young man. Emerson is the spokesman and prophet of youth
and of a formative, idealistic age. His is a voice from the heights which
are ever bathed in the sunshine of the spirit. I find that something one
gets from Emerson in early life does not leave him when he grows old.
It is a habit of mind, a test of values, a strengthening of one's faith in
the essential soundness and goodness of creation. He helps to make you
feel at home in nature, and in your own land and generation. He
permanently exalts your idea of the mission of the poet, of the spiritual
value of the external world, of the universality of the moral law, and of
our kinship with the whole of nature.
There is never any despondency or infirmity of faith in Emerson. He is
always hopeful and courageous, and is an antidote to the pessimism and
materialism which existing times tend to foster. Open anywhere in the
Journals or in the Essays and we find the manly and heroic note. He is
an unconquerable optimist, and says boldly, "Nothing but God can root
out God," and he thinks that in time our culture will absorb the hells
also. He counts "the dear old Devil" among the good things which the
dear old world holds for him. He saw so clearly how good comes out of

evil and is in the end always triumphant. Were he living in our day, he
would doubtless find something helpful and encouraging to say about
the terrific outburst of scientific barbarism in Europe.
It is always stimulating to hear a man ask such a question as this, even
though he essay no answer to it: "Is the world (according to the old
doubt) to be criticized otherwise than as the best possible in the existing
system, and the population of the world the best that soils, climate, and
animals permit?"
I note that in 1837 Emerson wrote this about the Germans; "I do not
draw from them great influence. The heroic, the holy, I lack. They are
contemptuous. They fail in sympathy with humanity. The voice of
nature they bring me to hear is not divine, but ghastly, hard, and
ironical. They do not illuminate me: they do not edify me." Is not this
the German of to-day? If Emerson were with us now he would see, as
we all see, how the age of idealism and spiritual power in Germany that
gave the world the great composers and the great poets and
philosophers--Bach, Beethoven, Wagner, Goethe, Schiller, Lessing,
Kant, Hegel, and others--has passed and been succeeded by the hard,
cruel, and sterile age of materialism, and the domination of an
aggressive and conscienceless military spirit. Emerson was the poet and
prophet of man's moral nature, and it is this nature--our finest and
highest human sensibilities and aspirations toward justice and
truth--that has been so raided and trampled upon by the chief
malefactor and world outlaw in the present war.
II
Men who write Journals are usually men of certain marked traits--they
are idealists, they love solitude rather than society, they are
self-conscious, and they love to write. At least this seems to be true of
the men of the past century who left Journals of permanent literary
worth--Amiel, Emerson, and Thoreau. Amiel's Journal has more the
character of a diary than has Emerson's or Thoreau's, though it is also a
record of thoughts as well as of days. Emerson left more unprinted
matter than he chose to publish during his lifetime.

The Journals of Emerson and Thoreau are largely made up of left-overs
from their published works, and hence as literary material, when
compared with their other volumes,