The Last Harvest | Page 9

perfunctory
air of his fellow members on the Board of Visitors contrasted sharply
with his active, expectant interest.
V
He lived absolutely in his own day and generation, and no
contemporary writer of real worth escaped his notice. He is never
lavish in his praise, but is for the most part just and discriminating.
Walt Whitman is mentioned only thrice in the Journals, Lowell only
twice, Longfellow once or twice, Matthew Arnold three times, but
Jones Very is quoted and discussed sixteen times. Very was a poet who
had no fast colors; he has quite faded out in our day.
Of Matthew Arnold Emerson says: "I should like to call attention to the
critical superiority of Arnold, his excellent ear for style, and the
singular poverty of his poetry, that in fact he has written but one poem,
'Thyrsis,' and that on an inspiration borrowed from Milton." Few good
readers, I think, will agree with Emerson about the poverty of Arnold's
poetry. His "Dover Beach" is one of the first-rate poems in English
literature. Emerson has words of praise for Lowell--thinks the
production of such a man "a certificate of good elements in the soil,
climate, and institutions of America," but in 1868 he declares that his
new poems show an advance "in talent rather than in poetic tone"; that
the advance "rather expresses his wish, his ambition, than the
uncontrollable interior impulse which is the authentic mark of a new
poem, and which is unanalysable, and makes the merit of an ode of
Collins, or Gray, or Wordsworth, or Herbert, or Byron." He evidently
thought little of Lowell's severe arraignment of him in a college poem
which he wrote soon after the delivery of the famous "Divinity School
Address." The current of religious feeling in Cambridge set so strongly
against Emerson for several years that Lowell doubtless merely
reflected it. Why did he not try to deflect it, or to check it? And yet,

when Emerson's friends did try to defend him, it was against his will.
He hated to be defended in a newspaper: "As long as all that is said is
against me I feel a certain austere assurance of success, but as soon as
honeyed words of praise are spoken for me I feel as one that lies
unprotected before his enemies."
Next to Thoreau, Emerson devotes to Alcott more space in his Journals
than to any other man. It is all telling interpretation, description, and
criticism. Truly, Alcott must have had some extraordinary power to
have made such a lasting impression upon Emerson. When my friend
Myron Benton and I first met Emerson in 1863 at West Point, Emerson
spoke of Alcott very pointedly, and said we should never miss a chance
to hear his conversation, but that when he put pen to paper all his
inspiration left him. His thoughts faded as soon as he tried to set them
down. There must have been some curious illusion about it all on the
part of Emerson, as no fragment of Alcott's wonderful talk worth
preserving has come down to us. The waters of the sea are blue, but not
in the pailful. There must have been something analogous in Alcott's
conversations, some total effect which the details do not justify, or
something in the atmosphere which he created, that gave certain of his
hearers the conviction that they were voyaging with him through the
celestial depths.
It was a curious fact that Alcott "could not recall one word or part of
his own conversation, or of any one's, let the expression be never so
happy." And he seems to have hypnotized Emerson in the same way.
"He made here some majestic utterances, but so inspired me that even I
forgot the words often." "Olympian dreams," Emerson calls his
talk--moonshine, it appears at this distance.
"His discourse soars to a wonderful height," says Emerson, "so regular,
so lucid, so playful, so new and disdainful of all boundaries of tradition
and experience, that the hearers seem no longer to have bodies or
material gravity, but almost they can mount into the air at pleasure, or
leap at one bound out of this poor solar system. I say this of his speech
exclusively, for when he attempts to write, he loses, in my judgment,
all his power, and I derive more pain than pleasure from the perusal."

Some illusion surely that made the effort to report him like an attempt
to capture the rainbow, only to find it common water.
In 1842 Emerson devotes eight pages in his Journal to an analysis of
Alcott, and very masterly they are. He ends with these sentences: "This
noble genius discredits genius to me. I do not want any more such
persons to exist."
"When Alcott wrote from England that he was bringing