The Last Harvest
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THE LAST HARVEST
BY
JOHN BURROUGHS
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1922
COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
* * * * *
_But who is he with modest looks
And clad in homely russet brown?
He murmurs near the running brooks
A music sweeter than their own.
He is retired as noontide dew,
Or fountain in a noon-day grove;
And you must love him, ere to you
He will seem worthy of your love.
The outward shows of sky and earth,
Of hill and valley, he has viewed;
And impulses of deeper birth
Have come to him in solitude.
In common things that round us lie
Some random truths he can impart--
The harvest of a quiet eye
That broods and sleeps on his own heart._
WORDSWORTH
PREFACE
Most of the papers garnered here were written after fourscore
years--after the heat and urge of the day--and are the fruit of a long
life of observation and meditation.
The author's abiding interest in Emerson is shown in his close and
eager study of the Journals during these later years. He hungered for
everything that concerned the Concord Sage, who had been one of the
most potent influences in his life. Although he could discern flies in
the Emersonian amber, he could not brook slight or indifference toward
Emerson in the youth of to-day. Whatever flaws he himself detected, he
well knew that Emerson would always rest secure on the pedestal where
long ago he placed him. Likewise with Thoreau: If shortcomings were to
be pointed out in this favorite, he wished to be the one to do it. And
so, before taking Thoreau to task for certain inaccuracies, he takes
Lowell to task for criticizing Thoreau. He then proceeds, not without
evident satisfaction, to call attention to Thoreau's "slips" as an
observer and reporter of nature; yet in no carping spirit, but, as he
himself has said: "Not that I love Thoreau less, but that I love truth
more."
The "Short Studies in Contrasts," the "Day by Day" notes,
"Gleanings," and the "Sundown Papers" which comprise the latter part
of this, the last, posthumous volume by John Burroughs, were written
during the closing months of his life. Contrary to his custom, he
wrote these usually in the evening, or, less frequently, in the early
morning hours, when, homesick and far from well, with the ceaseless
pounding of the Pacific in his ears, and though incapable of the
sustained attention necessary for his best work, he was nevertheless
impelled by an unwonted mental activity to seek expression.
If the reader misses here some of the charm and power of his usual
writing, still may he welcome this glimpse into what John Burroughs
was doing and thinking during those last weeks before the illness came
which forced him to lay aside his pen.
CLARA BARRUS
WOODCHUCK LODGE
ROXBURY-IN-THE-CATSKILLS
CONTENTS
I. EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS
II. FLIES IN AMBER
III. ANOTHER WORD ON THOREAU
IV. A CRITICAL GLANCE INTO DARWIN
V. WHAT MAKES A POEM?
VI. SHORT STUDIES IN CONTRASTS:
The Transient and the Permanent
Positive and Negative
Palm and Fist
Praise and Flattery
Genius and Talent
Invention and Discovery
Town and Country
VII. DAY BY DAY
VIII. GLEANINGS
IX. SUNDOWN PAPERS:
Re-reading Bergson
Revisions
Bergson and Telepathy
Meteoric Men and Planetary Men
The Daily Papers
The Alphabet
The Reds of Literature
The Evolution of Evolution
Following One's Bent
Notes on the Psychology of Old Age
Facing the Mystery
INDEX
The frontispiece portrait is from a photograph by Miss Mabel
Watson taken at Pasadena, California, shortly before Mr.
Burroughs's death.
THE LAST HARVEST
I
EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS
I
Emerson's fame as a writer and thinker was firmly established during
his lifetime by the books he gave to the world. His Journals,
published over a quarter of a century after his death, nearly or quite
double the bulk of his writing, and while they do not rank in literary
worth with his earlier works, they yet throw much light upon his life
and character and it is a pleasure to me, in these dark and
troublesome 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, are of secondary importance. You
could not make another "Walden" out of Thoreau's Journals, nor build
up another chapter on "Self-Reliance," or on "Character," or on the
"Over-Soul," from Emerson's, though there are fragments here and there
in both that are on a level with their best work.
Emerson records in 1835 that his brother Charles wondered that he did
not become sick at the stomach over his poor Journal: "Yet is obdurate
habit callous even to contempt. I must scribble on...." Charles
evidently was not a born scribbler like his brother. He was clearly
more fond of real life and of the society of his fellows. He was an
orator and could not do himself justice with the pen. Men who write
Journals, as I have said, are usually men of solitary habits, and
their Journal largely takes the place of social converse. Amiel,
Emerson, and Thoreau were lonely souls, lacking in social gifts, and
seeking relief in the society of their own thoughts. Such men go to
their Journals as other men go to their clubs. They love to be alone
with themselves, and dread to be benumbed or drained of their mental
force by uncongenial persons. To such a man his Journal becomes his
duplicate self and he says to it what he could not say to his nearest
friend. It becomes both an altar and a confessional. Especially is
this true of deeply religious souls such as the men I have named. They
commune, through their Journals, with the demons that attend them.
Amiel begins his Journal with the sentence, "There is but one thing
needful--to possess God," and Emerson's Journal in its most
characteristic pages is always a search after God, or the highest
truth.
"After a day of humiliation and stripes," he writes, "if I can write
it down, I am straightway relieved and can sleep well. After a day of
joy, the beating heart is calmed again by the diary. If grace is given
me by all angels and I pray, if then I can catch one ejaculation of
humility or hope and set it down in syllables, devotion is at an end."
"I write my journal, I deliver my lecture with joy," but "at the name
of society all my repulsions play, all my quills rise and sharpen."
He clearly had no genius for social intercourse. At the age of thirty
he said he had "no skill to live with men; that is, such men as the
world is made of; and such as I delight in I seldom find." Again he
says, aged thirty-two, "I study the art of solitude; I yield me as
gracefully as I can to destiny," and adds that it is "from eternity a
settled thing" that he and society shall be "nothing to each other."
He takes to his Journal instead. It is his house of refuge.
Yet he constantly laments how isolated he is, mainly by reason of the
poverty of his nature, his want of social talent, of animal heat, and
of sympathy with the commonplace and the humdrum. "I have no animal
spirits, therefore when surprised by company and kept in a chair for
many hours, my heart sinks, my brow is clouded, and I think I will run
for Acton woods and live with the squirrels henceforth." But he does
not run away; he often takes it out in hoeing in his garden: "My good
hoe as it bites the ground revenges my wrongs, and I have less lust to
bite my enemies." "In smoothing the rough hillocks I smooth my temper.
In a short time I can hear the bobolinks sing and see the blessed
deluge of light and color that rolls around me." Somewhere he has said
that the writer should not dig, and yet again and again we find him
resorting to hoe or spade to help him sleep, as well as to smooth his
temper: "Yesterday afternoon, I stirred the earth about my shrubs and
trees and quarrelled with the pipergrass, and now I have slept, and no
longer am morose nor feel twitchings in the muscles of my face when a
visitor is by." We welcome these and many another bit of
self-analysis: "I was born with a seeing eye and not a helping hand. I
can only comfort my friends by thought, and not by love or aid." "I
was made a hermit and am content with my lot. I pluck golden fruit
from rare meetings with wise men." Margaret Fuller told him he seemed
always on stilts: "It is even so. Most of the persons whom I see in my
own house I see across a gulf. I cannot go to them nor they come to
me. Nothing can exceed the frigidity and labor of my speech with
such. You might turn a yoke of oxen between every pair of words; and
the behavior is as awkward and proud."
* * * * *
"I would have my book read as I have read my favorite books, not with
explosion and astonishment, a marvel and a rocket, but a friendly and
agreeable influence stealing like a scent of a flower, or the sight of
a new landscape on a traveller. I neither wish to be hated and defied
by such as I startle, nor to be kissed and hugged by the young whose
thoughts I stimulate."
Here Emerson did center in himself and never apologized. His gospel of
self-reliance came natural to him. He was emphatically self, without a
trace of selfishness. He went abroad to study himself more than other
people--to note the effect of Europe on himself. He says, "I believe
it's sound philosophy that wherever we go, whatever we do, self is the
sole object we study and learn. Montaigne said himself was all he
knew. Myself is much more than I know, and yet I know nothing else."
In Paris he wrote to his brother William, "A lecture at the Sorbonne
is far less useful to me than a lecture that I write myself"; and as
for the literary society in Paris, though he thought longingly of it,
yet he said, "Probably in years it would avail me nothing."
The Journals are mainly a record of his thoughts and not of his days,
except so far as the days brought him ideas. Here and there the
personal element creeps in--some journey, some bit of experience, some
visitor, or walks with Channing, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Jones Very, and
others; some lecturing experience, his class meetings, his travels
abroad and chance meetings with distinguished men. But all the more
purely personal element makes up but a small portion of the ten thick
volumes of his Journal. Most readers, I fancy, will wish that the
proportion of these things were greater. We all have thoughts and
speculations of our own, but we can never hear too much about a man's
real life.
Emerson stands apart from the other poets and essayists of New
England, and of English literature generally, as of another order. He
is a reversion to an earlier type, the type of the bard, the skald,
the poet-seer. He is the poet and prophet of the moral ideal. His main
significance is religious, though nothing could be farther from him
than creeds and doctrines, and the whole ecclesiastical formalism.
There is an atmosphere of sanctity about him that we do not feel about
any other poet and essayist of his time. His poems are the fruit of
Oriental mysticism and bardic fervor grafted upon the shrewd,
parsimonious, New England puritanic stock. The stress and wild,
uncertain melody of his poetry is like that of the wind-harp. No
writing surpasses his in the extent to which it takes hold of the
concrete, the real, the familiar, and none surpasses his in its
elusive, mystical suggestiveness, and its cryptic character. It is
Yankee wit and shrewdness on one side, and Oriental devoutness,
pantheism, and symbolism on the other. Its cheerful and sunny light of
the common day enhances instead of obscures the light that falls from
the highest heaven of the spirit. Saadi or Hafiz or Omar might have
fathered him, but only a New England mother could have borne him.
Probably more than half his poetry escapes the average reader; his
longer poems, like "Initial, Daemonic, and Celestial Love," "Monadnoc,"
"Merlin," "The Sphinx," "The World-Soul," set the mind groping for the
invisible rays of the spectrum of human thought and knowledge, but
many of the shorter poems, such as "The Problem," "Each and All,"
"Sea-Shore," "The Snow-Storm," "Musketaquid," "Days," "Song of
Nature," "My Garden," "Boston Hymn," "Concord Hymn," and others, are
among the most precious things in our literature.
As Emerson was a bard among poets, a seer among philosophers, a
prophet among essayists, an oracle among ethical teachers, so, as I
have said, was he a solitary among men. He walked alone. He somewhere
refers to his "porcupine impossibility of contact with men." His very
thoughts are not social among themselves, they separate. Each stands
alone; often they hardly have a bowing acquaintance; over and over
their juxtaposition is mechanical and not vital. The redeeming feature
is that they can afford to stand alone, like shafts of marble or
granite.
The force and worth of his page is not in its logical texture, but in
the beauty and truth of its isolated sentences and paragraphs. There
is little inductive or deductive reasoning in his books, but a series
of affirmations whose premises and logical connection the reader does
not always see.
He records that his hearers found his lectures fine and poetical but a
little puzzling. "One thought them as good as a kaleidoscope." The
solid men of business said that they did not understand them but their
daughters did.
The lecture committee in Illinois in 1856 told him that the people
wanted a hearty laugh. "The stout Illinoian," not finding the laugh,
"after a short trial walks out of the hall." I think even his best
Eastern audiences were always a good deal puzzled. The lecturer never
tried to meet them halfway. He says himself of one of his lectures, "I
found when I had finished my new lecture that it was a very good
house, only the architect had unfortunately omitted the stairs." The
absence of the stairs in his house--of an easy entrance into the
heart of the subject, and of a few consecutive and leading
ideas--will, in a measure, account for the bewilderment of his
hearers. When I heard Emerson in 1871 before audiences in Baltimore
and Washington, I could see and feel this uncertainty and bewilderment
in his auditors.
His lectures could not be briefly summarized. They had no central
thought. You could give a sample sentence, but not the one sentence
that commanded all the others. Whatever he called it, his theme, as he
himself confesses, was always fundamentally the same: "In all my
lectures I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the
private man. This the people accept readily enough and even with loud
commendations as long as I call the lecture Art or Politics, or
Literature, or the Household, but the moment I call it Religion they
are shocked, though it be only the application of the same truth which
they receive everywhere else to a new class of facts."
Emerson's supreme test of a man, after all other points had been
considered, was the religious test: Was he truly religious? Was his
pole star the moral law? Was the sense of the Infinite ever with him?
But few contemporary authors met his requirements in this respect.
After his first visit abroad, when he saw Carlyle, Landor, Coleridge,
Wordsworth, and others, he said they were all second-or third-rate men
because of their want of the religious sense. They all looked
backward to a religion of other ages, and had no faith in a present
revelation.
His conception of the divine will as _the eternal tendency to the good
of the whole, active in every atom, every moment_, is one of the
thoughts in which religion and science meet and join hands.
III
In Emerson's Journal one sees the Emersonian worlds in their
making--the essays, the addresses, the poems. Here are the nebulae and
star-dust out of which most of them came, or in which their suggestion
lies. Now and then there is quite as good stuff as is found in his
printed volumes, pages and paragraphs from the same high heaven of
aesthetic emotion. The poetic fragments and wholes are less promising,
I think, than the prose; they are evidently more experimental, and
show the 'prentice hand more.
The themes around which his mind revolved all his life--nature, God,
the soul--and their endless variations and implications, recur again
and again in each of the ten printed volumes of the Journals. He has
new thoughts on Character, Self-Reliance, Heroism, Manners,
Experience, Nature, Immortality, and scores of other related subjects
every day, and he presents them in new connections and with new
images. His mind had marked centrality, and fundamental problems were
always near at hand with him. He could not get away from them. He
renounced the pulpit and the creeds, not because religion meant less
to him, but because it meant more. The religious sentiment, the
feeling of the Infinite, was as the sky over his head, and the earth
under his feet.
The whole stream of Emerson's mental life apparently flowed through
his Journals. They were the repository of all his thoughts, all his
speculations, all his mental and spiritual experiences. What a
_melange_ they are! Wise sayings from his wide reading, from
intercourse with men, private and public, sayings from his farmer
neighbors, anecdotes, accounts of his travels, or his walks, solitary
or in the company of Channing, Hawthorne, or Thoreau, his gropings
after spiritual truths, and a hundred other things, are always marked
by what he says that Macaulay did not possess--elevation of mind--and
an abiding love for the real values in life and letters.
Here is the prose origin of "Days": "The days come and go like muffled
and veiled figures sent from a distant friendly party, but they say
nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as
silently away." In this brief May entry we probably see the inception
of the "Humble-Bee" poem: "Yesterday in the woods I followed the fine
humble bee with rhymes and fancies free."
Now and then we come upon the germ of other poems in his prose. Here
is a hint of "Each and All" in a page written at the age of
thirty-one: "The shepherd or the beggar in his red cloak little knows
what a charm he gives to the wide landscape that charms you on the
mountain-top and whereof he makes the most agreeable feature, and I no
more the part my individuality plays in the All." The poem, his reader
will remember, begins in this wise:
"Little thinks, in the field, yon red-cloaked clown
Of thee from the hilltop looking down."
In a prose sentence written in 1835 he says: "Nothing is beautiful
alone. Nothing but is beautiful in the whole." In the poem above
referred to this becomes:
"All are needed by each one;
Nothing is fair or good alone."
In 1856 we find the first stanza of his 'beautiful "Two Rivers,"
written in prose form: "Thy voice is sweet, Musketaquid; repeats the
music of the rain; but sweeter rivers silent flit through thee as
those through Concord plain." The substance of the next four stanzas
is in prose form also: "Thou art shut in thy banks; but the stream I
love, flows in thy water, and flows through rocks and through the air,
and through darkness, and through men, and women. I hear and see the
inundation and eternal spending of the stream, in winter and in
summer, in men and animals, in passion and thought. Happy are they who
can hear it"; and so on. In the poem these sentences become:
"Thou in thy narrow banks are pent:
The stream I love unbounded goes
Through flood and sea and firmament;
Through light, through life, it forward flows.
"I see the inundation sweet,
I hear the spending of the stream
Through years, through men, through Nature fleet,
Through love and thought, through power and dream."
It is evident that Emerson was a severe critic of his own work. He
knew when he had struck fire, and he knew when he had failed. He was
as exacting with himself as with others. His conception of the
character and function of the poet was so high that he found the
greatest poets wanting. The poet is one of his three or four
ever-recurring themes. He is the divine man. He is bard and prophet,
seer and savior. He is the acme of human attainment. Verse devoid of
insight into the method of nature, and devoid of religious emotion,
was to him but as sounding brass and tinkling cymbal. He called Poe
"the jingle man" because he was a mere conjurer with words. The
intellectual content of Poe's works _was_ negligible. He was a wizard
with words and measures, but a pauper in ideas. He did not add to our
knowledge, he did not add to our love of anything in nature or in
life, he did not contribute to our contentment in the world--the
bread of life was not in him. What was in him was mastery over the
architectonics of verse. Emerson saw little in Shelley for the same
reason, but much in Herbert and Donne. Religion, in his sense of the
term,--the deep sea into which the streams of all human thought
empty,--was his final test of any man. Unless there was something
fundamental about him, something that savored of the primordial deep
of the universal spirit, he remained unmoved. The elemental azure of
the great bodies of water is suggestive of the tone and hue Emerson
demanded in great poetry. He found but little of it in the men of his
time: practically none in the contemporary poets of New England. It
was probably something of this pristine quality that arrested
Emerson's attention in Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass." He saw in it
"the Appalachian enlargement of outline and treatment for service to
American literature."