[Footnote 1: This essay, to which I have given the above title, forms
the greater part of a review of poems by John James Piatt. The brief,
concluding portion of the review is of little value and is omitted here.
Piatt died several years ago. He was a great friend of William Dean
Howells, and once published a volume of poems in collaboration with him.
A.M.]
One of the dreams of our earlier horoscope-mongers was, that a poet
should come out of the West, fashioned on a scale somewhat proportioned
to our geographical pretensions. Our rivers, forests, mountains,
cataracts, prairies, and inland seas were to find in him their antitype
and voice. Shaggy he was to be, brown-fisted, careless of proprieties,
unhampered by tradition, his Pegasus of the half-horse, half-alligator
breed. By him at last the epos of the New World was to be fitly sung,
the great tragi-comedy of democracy put upon the stage for all time. It
was a cheap vision, for it cost no thought; and, like all judicious
prophecy, it muffled itself from criticism in the loose drapery of its
terms. Till the advent of this splendid apparition, who should dare
affirm positively that he would never come? that, indeed, he was
impossible? And yet his impossibility was demonstrable, nevertheless.
Supposing a great poet to be born in the West, though he would naturally
levy upon what had always been familiar to his eyes for his images and
illustrations, he would almost as certainly look for his ideal somewhere
outside of the life that lay immediately about him. Life in its large
sense, and not as it is temporarily modified by manners or politics, is
the only subject of the poet; and though its elements lie always close
at hand, yet in its unity it seems always infinitely distant, and the
difference of angle at which it is seen in India and in Minnesota is
almost inappreciable. Moreover, a rooted discontent seems always to
underlie all great poetry, if it be not even the motive of it. The Iliad
and the Odyssey paint manners that are only here and there incidentally
true to the actual, but which in their larger truth had either never
existed or had long since passed away. Had Dante's scope been narrowed
to contemporary Italy, the "Divina Commedia" would have been a
picture-book merely. But his theme was Man, and the vision that inspired
him was of an Italy that never was nor could be, his political theories
as abstract as those of Plato or Spinoza. Shakespeare shows us less of
the England that then was than any other considerable poet of his time.
The struggle of Goethe's whole life was to emancipate himself from
Germany, and fill his lungs for once with a more universal air.
Yet there is always a flavor of the climate in these rare fruits, some
gift of the sun peculiar to the region that ripened them. If we are ever
to have a national poet, let us hope that his nationality will be of
this subtile essence, something that shall make him unspeakably nearer
to us, while it does not provincialize him for the rest of mankind. The
popular recipe for compounding him would give us, perhaps, the most
sublimely furnished bore in human annals. The novel aspects of life
under our novel conditions may give some freshness of color to our
literature; but democracy itself, which many seem to regard as the
necessary Lucina of some new poetic birth, is altogether too abstract an
influence to serve for any such purpose. If any American author may be
looked on as in some sort the result of our social and political ideal,
it is Emerson, who, in his emancipation from the traditional, in the
irresponsible freedom of his speculation, and his faith in the absolute
value of his own individuality, is certainly, to some extent, typical;
but if ever author was inspired by the past, it is he, and he is as far
as possible from the shaggy hero of prophecy. Of the sham-shaggy, who
have tried the trick of Jacob upon us, we have had quite enough, and may
safely doubt whether this satyr of masquerade is to be our
representative singer.[1] Were it so, it would not be greatly to the
credit of democracy as an element of aesthetics. But we may safely hope
for better things.
[Footnote 1: This is undoubtedly an allusion to Walt Whitman, who is
mentioned by name, also derogatorily, in the next essay on Howells. The
Howells essay appeared two years before the above. A.M.]
The themes of poetry have been pretty much the same from the first; and
if a man should ever be born among us with a great imagination, and the
gift of the right word,--for it is these, and not sublime spaces, that
make a poet,--he will be original rather in spite of democracy than in
consequence of it, and will owe his inspiration quite as much to the
accumulations of the Old World as to the promises of the New. But for a
long while yet the proper conditions will be wanting, not, perhaps, for
the birth of such a man, but for his development and culture. At
present, with the largest reading population in the world, perhaps no
country ever offered less encouragement to the higher forms of art or
the more thorough achievements of scholarship. Even were it not so, it
would be idle to expect us to produce any literature so peculiarly our
own as was the natural growth of ages less communicative, less open to
every breath of foreign influence. Literature tends more and more to
become a vast commonwealth, with no dividing lines of nationality. Any
more Cids, or Songs of Roland, or Nibelungens, or Kalewalas are out of
the question,--nay, anything at all like them; for the necessary
insulation of race, of country, of religion, is impossible, even were it
desirable. Journalism, translation, criticism, and facility of
intercourse tend continually more and more to make the thought and turn
of expression in cultivated men identical all over the world. Whether we
like it or not, the costume of mind and body is gradually becoming of
one cut.