America does not repel the past, or what the past has produced under its
forms, or amid other politics, or the idea of castes, or the old
religions--accepts the lesson with calmness--is not impatient because
the slough still sticks to opinions and manners in literature, while the
life which served its requirements has passed into the new life of the
new forms--perceives that the corpse is slowly borne from the eating and
sleeping rooms of the house--perceives that it waits a little while in
the door--that it was fittest for its days--that its action has
descended to the stalwart and well-shaped heir who approaches--and that
he shall be fittest for his days.
The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth, have probably
the fullest poetical nature. The United States themselves are
essentially the greatest poem. In the history of the earth hitherto, the
largest and most stirring appear tame and orderly to their ampler
largeness and stir. Here at last is something in the doings of man that
corresponds with the broadcast doings of the day and night. Here is
action untied from strings, necessarily blind to particulars and
details, magnificently moving in masses. Here is the hospitality which
for ever indicates heroes. Here the performance, disdaining the trivial,
unapproach'd in the tremendous audacity of its crowds and groupings, and
the push of its perspective, spreads with crampless and flowing
breadth, and showers its prolific and splendid extravagance. One sees it
must indeed own the riches of the summer and winter, and need never be
bankrupt while corn grows from the ground, or the orchards drop apples,
or the bays contain fish, or men beget children upon women.
Other states indicate themselves in their deputies--but the genius of
the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures,
nor in its ambassadors or authors, or colleges or churches or parlors,
nor even in its newspapers or inventors--but always most in the common
people, south, north, west, east, in all its States, through all its
mighty amplitude. The largeness of the nation, however, were monstrous
without a corresponding largeness and generosity of the spirit of the
citizen. Not swarming states, nor streets and steamships, nor prosperous
business, nor farms, nor capital, nor learning, may suffice for the
ideal of man--nor suffice the poet. No reminiscences may suffice either.
A live nation can always cut a deep mark, and can have the best
authority the cheapest--namely, from its own soul. This is the sum of
the profitable uses of individuals or states, and of present action and
grandeur, and of the subjects of poets. (As if it were necessary to trot
back generation after generation to the eastern records! As if the
beauty and sacredness of the demonstrable must fall behind that of the
mythical! As if men do not make their mark out of any times! As if the
opening of the western continent by discovery, and what has transpired
in North and South America, were less than the small theater of the
antique, or the aimless sleep-walking of the middle ages!) The pride of
the United States leaves the wealth and finesse of the cities, and all
returns of commerce and agriculture, and all the magnitude of geography
or shows of exterior victory, to enjoy the sight and realization of
full-sized men, or one full-sized man unconquerable and simple.
The American poets are to inclose old and new, for America is the race
of races. The expression of the American poet is to be transcendent and
new. It is to be indirect, and not direct or descriptive or epic. Its
quality goes through these to much more. Let the age and wars of other
nations be chanted, and their eras and characters be illustrated, and
that finish the verse. Not so the great psalm of the republic. Here the
theme is creative, and has vista. Whatever stagnates in the flat of
custom or obedience or legislation, the great poet never stagnates.
Obedience does not master him, he masters it. High up out of reach he
stands, turning a concentrated light--he turns the pivot with his
finger--he baffles the swiftest runners as he stands, and easily
overtakes and envelopes them. The time straying toward infidelity and
confections and persiflage he withholds by steady faith. Faith is the
antiseptic of the soul--it pervades the common people and preserves
them--they never give up believing and expecting and trusting. There is
that indescribable freshness and unconsciousness about an illiterate
person, that humbles and mocks the power of the noblest expressive
genius. The poet sees for a certainty how one not a great artist may be
just as sacred and perfect as the greatest artist.
The power to destroy or remould is freely used by the greatest poet, but
seldom the power of attack. What is past is past. If he does not expose
superior models, and prove himself by every step he takes, he is not
what is wanted. The presence of the great poet conquers--not parleying,
or struggling, or any prepared attempts. Now he has passed that way, see
after him! There is not left any vestige of despair, or misanthropy, or
cunning, or exclusiveness, or the ignominy of a nativity or color, or
delusion of hell or the necessity of hell--and no man thenceforward
shall be degraded for ignorance or weakness or sin. The greatest poet
hardly knows pettiness or triviality. If he breathes into anything that
was before thought small, it dilates with the grandeur and life of the
universe. He is a seer--he is individual--he is complete in himself--the
others are as good as he, only he sees it, and they do not. He is not
one of the chorus--he does not stop for any regulation--he is the
president of regulation. What the eyesight does to the rest, he does to
the rest. Who knows the curious mystery of the eyesight? The other
senses corroborate themselves, but this is removed from any proof but
its own, and foreruns the identities of the spiritual world. A single
glance of it mocks all the investigations of man, and all the
instruments and books of the earth, and all reasoning. What is
marvelous? what is unlikely? what is impossible or baseless or
vague--after you have once just open'd the space of a peach-pit, and
given audience to far and near, and to the sunset, and had all things
enter with electric swiftness, softly and duly, without confusion or
jostling or jam?
The land and sea, the animals, fishes and birds, the sky of heaven and
the orbs, the forests, mountains and rivers, are not small themes--but
folks expect of the poet to indicate more than the beauty and dignity
which always attach to dumb real objects--they expect him to indicate
the path between reality and their souls. Men and women perceive the
beauty well enough--probably as well as he. The passionate tenacity of
hunters, woodmen, early risers, cultivators of gardens and orchards and
fields, the love of healthy women for the manly form, seafaring persons,
drivers of horses, the passion for light and the open air, all is an old
varied sign of the unfailing perception of beauty, and of a residence of
the poetic in out-door people. They can never be assisted by poets to
perceive--some may, but they never can. The poetic quality is not
marshal'd in rhyme or uniformity, or abstract addresses to things, nor
in melancholy complaints or good precepts, but is the life of these and
much else, and is in the soul. The profit of rhyme is that it drops
seeds of a sweeter and more luxuriant rhyme, and of uniformity that it
conveys itself into its own roots in the ground out of sight. The rhyme
and uniformity of perfect poems show the free growth of metrical laws,
and bud from them as unerringly and loosely as lilacs and roses on a
bush, and take shapes as compact as the shapes of chestnuts and oranges,
and melons and pears, and shed the perfume impalpable to form. The
fluency and ornaments of the finest poems or music or orations or
recitations, are not independent but dependent. All beauty comes from
beautiful blood and a beautiful brain. If the greatnesses are in
conjunction in a man or woman, it is enough--the fact will prevail
through the universe; but the gaggery and gilt of a million years will
not prevail. Who troubles himself about his ornaments or fluency is
lost. This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals,
despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid
and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue
not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take
off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of
men--go freely with powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and
with the mothers of families--re-examine all you have been told in
school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own
soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest
fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and
face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint
of your body. The poet shall not spend his time in unneeded work. He
shall know that the ground is already plow'd and manured; others may not
know it, but he shall. He shall go directly to the creation. His trust
shall master the trust of everything he touches--and shall master all
attachment.
The known universe has one complete lover, and that is the greatest
poet. He consumes an eternal passion, and is indifferent which chance
happens, and which possible contingency of fortune or misfortune, and
persuades daily and hourly his delicious pay. What balks or breaks
others is fuel for his burning progress to contact and amorous joy.
Other proportions of the reception of pleasure dwindle to nothing to his
proportions. All expected from heaven or from the highest, he is rapport
with in the sight of the daybreak, or the scenes of the winter woods, or
the presence of children playing, or with his arm round the neck of a
man or woman. His love above all love has leisure and expanse--he leaves
room ahead of himself. He is no irresolute or suspicious lover--he is
sure--he scorns intervals. His experience and the showers and thrills
are not for nothing. Nothing can jar him--suffering and darkness
cannot--death and fear cannot. To him complaint and jealousy and envy
are corpses buried and rotten in the earth--he saw them buried. The sea
is not surer of the shore, or the shore of the sea, than he is of the
fruition of his love, and of all perfection and beauty.
The fruition of beauty is no chance of miss or hit--it is as inevitable
as life--it is exact and plumb as gravitation. From the eyesight
proceeds another eyesight, and from the hearing proceeds another
hearing, and from the voice proceeds another voice, eternally curious of
the harmony of things with man. These understand the law of perfection
in masses and floods--that it is profuse and impartial--that there is
not a minute of the light or dark, nor an acre of the earth and sea,
without it--nor any direction of the sky, nor any trade or employment,
nor any turn of events. This is the reason that about the proper
expression of beauty there is precision and balance. One part does not
need to be thrust above another. The best singer is not the one who has
the most lithe and powerful organ. The pleasure of poems is not in them
that take the handsomest measure and sound.
Without effort, and without exposing in the least how it is done, the
greatest poet brings the spirit of any or all events and passions and
scenes and persons, some more and some less, to bear on your individual
character as you hear or read. To do this well is to compete with the
laws that pursue and follow Time. What is the purpose must surely be
there, and the clew of it must be there--and the faintest indication is
the indication of the best, and then becomes the clearest indication.
Past and present and future are not disjoin'd but join'd. The greatest
poet forms the consistence of what is to be, from what has been and is.
He drags the dead out of their coffins and stands them again on their
feet. He says to the past, Rise and walk before me that I may realize
you. He learns the lesson--he places himself where the future becomes
present. The greatest poet does not only dazzle his rays over character
and scenes and passions--he finally ascends, and finishes all--he
exhibits the pinnacles that no man can tell what they are for, or what
is beyond--he glows a moment on the extremest verge. He is most
wonderful in his last half-hidden smile or frown; by that flash of the
moment of parting the one that sees it shall be encouraged or terrified
afterward for many years. The greatest poet does not moralize or make
applications of morals--he knows the soul. The soul has that measureless
pride which consists in never acknowledging any lessons or deductions
but its own. But it has sympathy as measureless as its pride, and the
one balances the other, and neither can stretch too far while it
stretches in company with the other. The inmost secrets of art sleep
with the twain. The greatest poet has lain close betwixt both, and they
are vital in his style and thoughts.
The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of
letters, is simplicity. Nothing is better than simplicity--nothing can
make up for excess, or for the lack of definiteness. To carry on the
heave of impulse and pierce intellectual depths and give all subjects
their articulations, are powers neither common nor very uncommon. But to
speak in literature with the perfect rectitude and insouciance of the
movements of animals, and the unimpeachableness of the sentiment of
trees in the woods and grass by the roadside, is the flawless triumph of
art. If you have look'd on him who has achiev'd it you have look'd on
one of the masters of the artists of all nations and times. You shall
not contemplate the flight of the gray gull over the bay, or the
mettlesome action of the blood horse, or the tall leaning of sunflowers
on their stalk, or the appearance of the sun journeying through heaven,
or the appearance of the moon afterward, with any more satisfaction than
you shall contemplate him. The great poet has less a mark'd style, and
is more the channel of thoughts and things without increase or
diminution, and is the free channel of himself. He swears to his art, I
will not be meddlesome, I will not have in my writing any elegance, or
effect, or originality, to hang in the way between me and the rest like
curtains. I will have nothing hang in the way, not the richest curtains.
What I tell I tell for precisely what it is. Let who may exalt or
startle or fascinate or soothe, I will have purposes as health or heat
or snow has, and be as regardless of observation. What I experience or
portray shall go from my composition without a shred of my composition.
You shall stand by my side and look in the mirror with me.
The old red blood and stainless gentility of great poets will be proved
by their unconstraint. A heroic person walks at his ease through and out
of that custom or precedent or authority that suits him not. Of the
traits of the brotherhood of first-class writers, savans, musicians,
inventors and artists, nothing is finer than silent defiance advancing
from new free forms. In the need of poems, philosophy, politics,
mechanism, science, behavior, the craft of art, an appropriate native
grand opera, shipcraft, or any craft, he is greatest for ever and ever
who contributes the greatest original practical example. The cleanest
expression is that which finds no sphere worthy of itself, and makes
one.
The messages of great poems to each man and woman are, Come to us on
equal terms, only then can you understand us. We are no better than you,
what we inclose you inclose, what we enjoy you may enjoy. Did you
suppose there could be only one Supreme? We affirm there can be
unnumber'd Supremes, and that one does not countervail another any more
than one eyesight countervails another--and that men can be good or
grand only of the consciousness of their supremacy within them. What do
you think is the grandeur of storms and dismemberments, and the
deadliest battles and wrecks, and the wildest fury of the elements, and
the power of the sea, and the motion of Nature, and the throes of human
desires, and dignity and hate and love? It is that something in the soul
which says, Rage on, whirl on, I tread master here and everywhere--Master
of the spasms of the sky and of the shatter of the sea, Master of nature
and passion and death, and of all terror and all pain.
The American bards shall be mark'd for generosity and affection, and for
encouraging competitors. They shall be Kosmos, without monopoly or
secrecy, glad to pass anything to anyone--hungry for equals night and
day. They shall not be careful of riches and privilege--they shall be
riches and privilege--they shall perceive who the most affluent man is.
The most affluent man is he that confronts all the shows he sees by
equivalents out of the stronger wealth of himself. The American bard
shall delineate no class of persons, nor one or two out of the strata of
interests, nor love most nor truth most, nor the soul most, nor the body
most--and not be for the Eastern States more than the Western, or the
Northern States more than the Southern.
Exact science and its practical movements are no checks on the greatest
poet, but always his encouragement and support. The outset and
remembrance are there--there the arms that lifted him first, and braced
him best--there he returns after all his goings and comings. The sailor
and traveler--the anatomist, chemist, astronomer, geologist,
phrenologist, spiritualist, mathematician, historian, and lexicographer,
are not poets, but they are the lawgivers of poets, and their
construction underlies the structure of every perfect poem. No matter
what rises or is utter'd, they sent the seed of the conception of it--of
them and by them stand the visible proofs of souls. If there shall be
love and content between the father and the son, and if the greatness of
the son is the exuding of the greatness of the father, there shall be
love between the poet and the man of demonstrable science. In the beauty
of poems are henceforth the tuft and final applause of science.
Great is the faith of the flush of knowledge, and of the investigation
of the depths of qualities and things. Cleaving and circling here swells
the soul of the poet, yet is president of itself always. The depths are
fathomless, and therefore calm. The innocence and nakedness are
resumed--they are neither modest nor immodest. The whole theory of the
supernatural, and all that was twined with it or educed out of it,
departs as a dream. What has ever happen'd--what happens, and whatever
may or shall happen, the vital laws inclose all. They are sufficient for
any case and for all cases--none to be hurried or retarded--any special
miracle of affairs or persons inadmissible in the vast clear scheme
where every motion and every spear of grass, and the frames and spirits
of men and women and all that concerns them, are unspeakably perfect
miracles, all referring to all, and each distinct and in its place. It
is also not consistent with the reality of the soul to admit that there
is anything in the known universe more divine than men and women.
Men and women, and the earth and all upon it, are to be taken as they
are, and the investigation of their past and present and future shall be
unintermitted, and shall be done with perfect candor. Upon this basis
philosophy speculates, ever looking towards the poet, ever regarding the
eternal tendencies of all toward happiness, never inconsistent with what
is clear to the senses and to the soul. For the eternal tendencies of
all toward happiness make the only point of sane philosophy. Whatever
comprehends less than that--whatever is less than the laws of light and
of astronomical motion--or less than the laws that follow the thief, the
liar, the glutton and the drunkard, through this life and doubtless
afterward--or less than vast stretches of time, or the slow formation of
density, or the patient upheaving of strata--is of no account. Whatever
would put God in a poem or system of philosophy as contending against
some being or influence, is also of no account. Sanity and ensemble
characterize the great master--spoilt in one principle, all is spoilt.
The great master has nothing to do with miracles. He sees health for
himself in being one of the mass--he sees the hiatus in singular
eminence. To the perfect shape comes common ground. To be under the
general law is great, for that is to correspond with it. The master
knows that he is unspeakably great, and that all are unspeakably
great--that nothing, for instance, is greater than to conceive children,
and bring them up well--that to be is just as great as to perceive or
tell.
In the make of the great masters the idea of political liberty is
indispensable. Liberty takes the adherence of heroes wherever man and
woman exist--but never takes any adherence or welcome from the rest more
than from poets. They are the voice and exposition of liberty. They out
of ages are worthy the grand idea--to them it is confided, and they must
sustain it. Nothing has precedence of it, and nothing can warp or
degrade it.
As the attributes of the poets of the kosmos concenter in the real body,
and in the pleasure of things, they possess the superiority of
genuineness over all fiction and romance. As they emit themselves, facts
are shower'd over with light--the daylight is lit with more volatile
light--the deep between the setting and rising sun goes deeper many
fold. Each precise object or condition or combination or process
exhibits a beauty--the multiplication table its--old age its--the
carpenter's trade its--the grand opera its--the huge-hull'd clean-shap'd
New York clipper at sea under steam or full sail gleams with unmatch'd
beauty--the American circles and large harmonies of government gleam
with theirs--and the commonest definite intentions and actions with
theirs. The poets of the kosmos advance through all interpositions and
coverings and turmoils and stratagems to first principles. They are of
use--they dissolve poverty from its need, and riches from its conceit.
You large proprietor, they say, shall not realize or perceive more than
anyone else. The owner of the library is not he who holds a legal title
to it, having bought and paid for it. Anyone and everyone is owner of
the library, (indeed he or she alone is owner,) who can read the same
through all the varieties of tongues and subjects and styles, and in
whom they enter with ease, and make supple and powerful and rich and
large.
These American States, strong and healthy and accomplish'd, shall
receive no pleasure from violations of natural models, and must not
permit them. In paintings or mouldings or carvings in mineral or wood,
or in the illustrations of books or newspapers, or in the patterns of
woven stuffs, or anything to beautify rooms or furniture or costumes, or
to put upon cornices or monuments, or on the prows or sterns of ships,
or to put anywhere before the human eye indoors or out, that which
distorts honest shapes, or which creates unearthly beings or places or
contingencies, is a nuisance and revolt. Of the human form especially,
it is so great it must never be made ridiculous. Of ornaments to a work
nothing outre can be allow'd--but those ornaments can be allow'd that
conform to the perfect facts of the open air, and that flow out of the
nature of the work, and come irrepressibly from it, and are necessary to
the completion of the work. Most works are most beautiful without
ornament. Exaggerations will be revenged in human physiology. Clean and
vigorous children are jetted and conceiv'd only in those communities
where the models of natural forms are public every day. Great genius and
the people of these States must never be demean'd to romances. As soon
as histories are properly told, no more need of romances.
The great poets are to be known by the absence in them of tricks, and by
the justification of perfect personal candor. All faults may be forgiven
of him who has perfect candor. Henceforth let no man of us lie, for we
have seen that openness wins the inner and outer world, and that there
is no single exception, and that never since our earth gather'd itself
in a mass have deceit or subterfuge or prevarication attracted its
smallest particle or the faintest tinge of a shade--and that through the
enveloping wealth and rank of a state, or the whole republic of states,
a sneak or sly person shall be discover'd and despised--and that the
soul has never once been fool'd and never can be fool'd--and thrift
without the loving nod of the soul is only a fœtid puff--and there
never grew up in any of the continents of the globe, nor upon any planet
or satellite, nor in that condition which precedes the birth of babes,
nor at any time during the changes of life, nor in any stretch of
abeyance or action of vitality, nor in any process of formation or
reformation anywhere, a being whose instinct hated the truth.
Extreme caution or prudence, the soundest organic health, large hope and
comparison and fondness for women and children, large alimentiveness and
destructiveness and causality, with a perfect sense of the oneness of
nature, and the propriety of the same spirit applied to human affairs,
are called up of the float of the brain of the world to be parts of the
greatest poet from his birth out of his mother's womb, and from her
birth out of her mother's. Caution seldom goes far enough. It has been
thought that the prudent citizen was the citizen who applied himself to
solid gains, and did well for himself and for his family, and completed
a lawful life without debt or crime. The greatest poet sees and admits
these economies as he sees the economies of food and sleep, but has
higher notions of prudence than to think he gives much when he gives a
few slight attentions at the latch of the gate. The premises of the
prudence of life are not the hospitality of it, or the ripeness and
harvest of it. Beyond the independence of a little sum laid aside for
burial-money, and of a few clap-boards around and shingles overhead on a
lot of American soil own'd, and the easy dollars that supply the year's
plain clothing and meals, the melancholy prudence of the abandonment of
such a great being as a man is, to the toss and pallor of years of
money-making, with all their scorching days and icy nights, and all
their stifling deceits and underhand dodgings, or infinitesimals of
parlors, or shameless stuffing while others starve, and all the loss of
the bloom and odor of the earth, and of the flowers and atmosphere, and
of the sea, and of the true taste of the women and men you pass or have
to do with in youth or middle age, and the issuing sickness and
desperate revolt at the close of a life without elevation or naïveté,
(even if you have achiev'd a secure 10,000 a year, or election to
Congress or the Governorship,) and the ghastly chatter of a death
without serenity or majesty, is the great fraud upon modern civilization
and forethought, blotching the surface and system which civilization
undeniably drafts, and moistening with tears the immense features it
spreads and spreads with such velocity before the reach'd kisses of the
soul.
Ever the right explanation remains to be made about prudence. The
prudence of the mere wealth and respectability of the most esteem'd life
appears too faint for the eye to observe at all, when little and large
alike drop quietly aside at the thought of the prudence suitable for
immortality. What is the wisdom that fills the thinness of a year, or
seventy or eighty years--to the wisdom spaced out by ages, and coming
back at a certain time with strong reinforcements and rich presents, and
the clear faces of wedding-guests as far as you can look, in every
direction, running gayly toward you? Only the soul is of itself--all
else has reference to what ensues. All that a person does or thinks is
of consequence. Nor can the push of charity or personal force ever be
anything else than the profoundest reason, whether it brings argument to
hand or no. No specification is necessary--to add or subtract or divide
is in vain. Little or big, learn'd or unlearn'd, white or black, legal
or illegal, sick or well, from the first inspiration down the windpipe
to the last expiration out of it, all that a male or female does that is
vigorous and benevolent and clean is so much sure profit to him or her
in the unshakable order of the universe, and through the whole scope of
it forever. The prudence of the greatest poet answers at last the
craving and glut of the soul, puts off nothing, permits no let-up for
its own case or any case, has no particular sabbath or judgment day,
divides not the living from the dead, or the righteous from the
unrighteous, is satisfied with the present, matches every thought or act
by its correlative, and knows no possible forgiveness or deputed
atonement.
The direct trial of him who would be the greatest poet is to-day. If he
does not flood himself with the immediate age as with vast oceanic
tides--if he be not himself the age transfigur'd, and if to him is not
open'd the eternity which gives similitude to all periods and locations
and processes, and animate and inanimate forms, and which is the bond of
time, and rises up from its inconceivable vagueness and infiniteness in
the swimming shapes of to-day, and is held by the ductile anchors of
life, and makes the present spot the passage from what was to what shall
be, and commits itself to the representation of this wave of an hour,
and this one of the sixty beautiful children of the wave--let him merge
in the general run, and wait his development.
Still the final test of poems, or any character or work, remains. The
prescient poet projects himself centuries ahead, and judges performer or
performance after the changes of time. Does it live through them? Does
it still hold on untired? Will the same style, and the direction of
genius to similar points, be satisfactory now? Have the marches of tens
and hundreds and thousands of years made willing detours to the right
hand and the left hand for his sake? Is he beloved long and long after
he is buried? Does the young man think often of him? and the young woman
think often of him? and do the middle-aged and the old think of him?
A great poem is for ages and ages in common, and for all degrees and
complexions, and all departments and sects, and for a woman as much as a
man, and a man as much as a woman. A great poem is no finish to a man or
woman, but rather a beginning. Has anyone fancied he could sit at last
under some due authority, and rest satisfied with explanations, and
realize, and be content and full? To no such terminus does the greatest
poet bring--he brings neither cessation nor shelter'd fatness and ease.
The touch of him, like Nature, tells in action. Whom he takes he takes
with firm sure grasp into live regions previously unattain'd--thenceforward
is no rest--they see the space and ineffable sheen that turn the old
spots and lights into dead vacuums. Now there shall be a man cohered out
of tumult and chaos--the elder encourages the younger and shows him
how--they two shall launch off fearlessly together till the new world
fits an orbit for itself, and looks unabash'd on the lesser orbits of
the stars, and sweeps through the ceaseless rings, and shall never be
quiet again.
There will soon be no more priests. Their work is done. A new order
shall arise, and they shall be the priests of man, and every man shall
be his own priest. They shall find their inspiration in real objects
to-day, symptoms of the past and future. They shall not deign to defend
immortality or God, or the perfection of things, or liberty, or the
exquisite beauty and reality of the soul. They shall arise in America,
and be responded to from the remainder of the earth.
The English language befriends the grand American expression--it is
brawny enough, and limber and full enough. On the tough stock of a race
who through all change of circumstance was never without the idea of
political liberty, which is the animus of all liberty, it has attracted
the terms of daintier and gayer and subtler and more elegant tongues. It
is the powerful language of resistance--it is the dialect of common
sense. It is the speech of the proud and melancholy races, and of all
who aspire. It is the chosen tongue to express growth, faith,
self-esteem, freedom, justice, equality, friendliness, amplitude,
prudence, decision, and courage. It is the medium that shall wellnigh
express the inexpressible.
No great literature nor any like style of behavior or oratory, or social
intercourse or household arrangements, or public institutions, or the
treatment by bosses of employ'd people, nor executive detail, or detail
of the army and navy, nor spirit of legislation or courts, or police or
tuition or architecture, or songs or amusements, can long elude the
jealous and passionate instinct of American standards. Whether or no the
sign appears from the mouths of the people, it throbs a live
interrogation in every freeman's and freewoman's heart, after that which
passes by, or this built to remain. Is it uniform with my country? Are
its disposals without ignominious distinctions? Is it for the
ever-growing communes of brothers and lovers, large, well united, proud,
beyond the old models, generous beyond all models? Is it something grown
fresh out of the fields, or drawn from the sea for use to me to-day
here? I know that what answers for me, an American, in Texas, Ohio,
Canada, must answer for any individual or nation that serves for a part
of my materials. Does this answer? Is it for the nursing of the young of
the republic? Does it solve readily with the sweet milk of the nipples
of the breasts of the Mother of Many Children?
America prepares with composure and good-will for the visitors that have
sent word. It is not intellect that is to be their warrant and welcome.
The talented, the artist, the ingenious, the editor, the statesman, the
erudite, are not unappreciated--they fall in their place and do their
work. The soul of the nation also does its work. It rejects none, it
permits all. Only toward the like of itself will it advance half-way. An
individual is as superb as a nation when he has the qualities which make
a superb nation. The soul of the largest and wealthiest and proudest
nation may well go half-way to meet that of its poets.