… The sombre one whose brow Is seared by all the fires and ne’er will bow Shall come forth, both his hands upon the hilt. Whatever its future, the I. W. W. has accomplished one tremendously big thing—a thing that sweeps away all twaddle over red flags and violence and sabotage. And that is the individual awakening of “illiterates” and “scum” to an original, personal conception of society and the realization of the dignity and the rights of their part in it. They have learned more than class-consciousness; they have learned consciousness of self. The I. W. W. is making the “wop” into a thinker. And that is what Giovannitti wrote in his _Proem_ when he said of his own verses: They are the blows of my own sledge Against the walls of my own jail. [1] _Arrows in the Gale._ By Arturo Giovannitti. The Hillacre Book House. EMERSON _A Mystic Who Lives Again in His Journals_[2] WARREN BARTON BLAKE Emerson has been “discovered” again—this time in the France that he tried hard and vainly to understand. It all began with the publication of a critical biography by Madame Dugard in 1907. I was in Paris then, and read it, and was most of all struck by the comically dressy effect, in translation, of the simple lines beginning: Good-bye, proud world, I’m going home. In French, they correspond to an Emerson dressed in eighteenth century style, with wig and sword: Adieu, monde orgueilleux, je retourne au foyer; Tu n’es pas mon ami, je ne suis pas le tien… Yet the book is a good introduction to Emerson, and, since 1907, Madame Dugard and others have translated several volumes of essays for the French public. I wonder if they have won a reading—outside the university and professionally literary groups; I wonder if Frenchmen see far beyond what Robert G. Ingersoll called the “baked-bean side of his genius”? As the late Perpetual Secretary of the Immortals said, when the French Academy “crowned” the Dugard book: “Emerson’s influence in America, like Ruskin’s in England, is a curious illustration of the need for an ideal which, at certain moments, the man of action, the Anglo-Saxon, feels. Such was the empire of contemplative monks over barbarian chiefs and of mystics over feudal armies. It was Emerson’s fortune to launch his ideas at a time when America was largely without them…. Emerson, knowing that the great danger of democracy is atrophy of the individual conscience, set himself to preaching individualism—the necessity of a high culture, the search for an ideal.” II