in the perfect uncontamination and solitariness of individuality may the
spirituality of religion positively come forth at all. Only here, and on
such terms, the meditation, the devout ecstasy, the soaring flight.
Only here, communion with the mysteries, the eternal problems, whence?
whither? Alone, and identity, and the mood--and the soul emerges, and
all statements, churches, sermons, melt away like vapors. Alone,
and silent thought and awe, and aspiration--and then the interior
consciousness, like a hitherto unseen inscription, in magic ink, beams
out its wondrous lines to the sense. Bibles may convey, and priests
expound, but it is exclusively for the noiseless operation of one's
isolated Self, to enter the pure ether of veneration, reach the divine
levels, and commune with the unutterable.
To practically enter into politics is an important part of American
personalism. To every young man, north and south, earnestly studying
these things, I should here, as an offset to what I have said in former
pages, now also say, that may be to views of very largest scope, after
all, perhaps the political, (perhaps the literary and sociological,)
America goes best about its development its own way--sometimes, to
temporary sight, appaling enough. It is the fashion among dillettants
and fops (perhaps I myself am not guiltless,) to decry the whole
formulation of the active politics of America, as beyond redemption, and
to be carefully kept away from. See you that you do not fall into
this error. America, it may be, is doing very well upon the whole,
notwithstanding these antics of the parties and their leaders, these
half-brain'd nominees, the many ignorant ballots, and many elected
failures and blatherers. It is the dillettants, and all who shirk their
duty, who are not doing well. As for you, I advise you to enter more
strongly yet into politics. I advise every young man to do so. Always
inform yourself; always do the best you can; always vote. Disengage
yourself from parties. They have been useful, and to some extent remain
so; but the floating, uncommitted electors, farmers, clerks, mechanics,
the masters of parties--watching aloof, inclining victory this side
or that side--such are the ones most needed, present and future. For
America, if eligible at all to downfall and ruin, is eligible within
herself, not without; for I see clearly that the combined foreign world
could not beat her down. But these savage, wolfish parties alarm me.
Owning no law but their own will, more and more combative, less and less
tolerant of the idea of ensemble and of equal brotherhood, the perfect
equality of the States, the ever-overarching American ideas, it behooves
you to convey yourself implicitly to no party, nor submit blindly to
their dictators, but steadily hold yourself judge and master over all of
them.
So much, (hastily toss'd together, and leaving far more unsaid,) for
an ideal, or intimations of an ideal, toward American manhood. But the
other sex, in our land, requires at least a basis of suggestion.
I have seen a young American woman, one of a large family of daughters,
who, some years since, migrated from her meagre country home to one of
the northern cities, to gain her own support. She soon became an expert
seamstress, but finding the employment too confining for health and
comfort, she went boldly to work for others, to house-keep, cook, clean,
&c. After trying several places, she fell upon one where she was suited.
She has told me that she finds nothing degrading in her position; it is
not inconsistent with personal dignity, self-respect, and the respect of
others. She confers benefits and receives them. She has good health; her
presence itself is healthy and bracing; her character is unstain'd; she
has made herself understood, and preserves her independence, and has
been able to help her parents, and educate and get places for her
sisters; and her course of life is not without opportunities for mental
improvement, and of much quiet, uncosting happiness and love.
I have seen another woman who, from taste and necessity conjoin'd, has
gone into practical affairs, carries on a mechanical business, partly
works at it herself, dashes out more and more into real hardy life, is
not abash'd by the coarseness of the contact, knows how to be firm
and silent at the same time, holds her own with unvarying coolness and
decorum, and will compare, any day, with superior carpenters, farmers,
and even boatmen and drivers. For all that, she has not lost the charm
of the womanly nature, but preserves and bears it fully, though through
such rugged presentation.
Then there is the wife of a mechanic, mother of two children, a woman of
merely passable English education, but of fine wit, with all her
sex's grace and intuitions, who exhibits, indeed, such a noble female
personality, that I am fain to record it here. Never abnegating her own
proper independence, but always genially preserving it, and what
belongs to it--cooking, washing, child-nursing, house-tending--she
beams sunshine out of all these duties, and makes them illustrious.
Physiologically sweet and sound, loving work, practical, she yet knows
that there are intervals, however few, devoted to recreation, music,
leisure, hospitality--and affords such intervals. Whatever she does,
and wherever she is, that charm, that indescribable perfume of genuine
womanhood attends her, goes with her, exhales from her, which belongs of
right to all the sex, and is, or ought to be, the invariable atmosphere
and common aureola of old as well as young.
My dear mother once described to me a resplendent person, down on Long
Island, whom she knew in early days. She was known by the name of the
Peacemaker. She was well toward eighty years old, of happy and sunny
temperament, had always lived on a farm, and was very neighborly,
sensible and discreet, an invariable and welcom'd favorite, especially
with young married women. She had numerous children and grandchildren.
She was uneducated, but possess'd a native dignity. She had come to be a
tacitly agreed upon domestic regulator, judge, settler of difficulties,
shepherdess, and reconciler in the land. She was a sight to draw near
and look upon, with her large figure, her profuse snow-white hair,
(uncoil'd by any head-dress or cap,) dark eyes, clear complexion, sweet
breath, and peculiar personal magnetism.
The foregoing portraits, I admit, are frightfully out of line from these
imported models of womanly personality--the stock feminine characters of
the current novelists, or of the foreign court poems, (Ophelias, Enids,
princesses, or ladies of one thing or another,) which fill the envying
dreams of so many poor girls, and are accepted by our men, too, as
supreme ideals of feminine excellence to be sought after. But I present
mine just for a change.
Then there are mutterings, (we will not now stop to heed them here, but
they must be heeded,) of something more revolutionary. The day is coming
when the deep questions of woman's entrance amid the arenas of practical
life, politics, the suffrage, &c., will not only be argued all around
us, but may be put to decision, and real experiment.
Of course, in these States, for both man and woman, we must entirely
recast the types of highest personality from what the oriental, feudal,
ecclesiastical worlds bequeath us, and which yet possess the imaginative
and esthetic fields of the United States, pictorial and melodramatic,
not without use as studies, but making sad work, and forming a strange
anachronism upon the scenes and exigencies around us. Of course, the old
undying elements remain. The task is, to successfully adjust them to new
combinations, our own days. Nor is this so incredible. I can conceive a
community, to-day and here, in which, on a sufficient scale, the
perfect personalities, without noise meet; say in some pleasant western
settlement or town, where a couple of hundred best men and women, of
ordinary worldly status, have by luck been drawn together, with nothing
extra of genius or wealth, but virtuous, chaste, industrious, cheerful,
resolute, friendly and devout. I can conceive such a community organized
in running order, powers judiciously delegated--farming, building,
trade, courts, mails, schools, elections, all attended to; and then the
rest of life, the main thing, freely branching and blossoming in each
individual, and bearing golden fruit. I can see there, in every young
and old man, after his kind, and in every woman after hers, a true
personality, develop'd, exercised proportionately in body, mind,
and spirit. I can imagine this case as one not necessarily rare or
difficult, but in buoyant accordance with the municipal and general
requirements of our times. And I can realize in it the culmination
of something better than any stereotyped _eclat_ of history or poems.
Perhaps, unsung, undramatized, unput in essays or biographies--perhaps
even some such community already exists, in Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, or
somewhere, practically fulfilling itself, and thus outvying, in cheapest
vulgar life, all that has been hitherto shown in best ideal pictures.
In short, and to sum up, America, betaking herself to formative
action, (as it is about time for more solid achievement, and less
windy promise,) must, for her purposes, cease to recognize a theory of
character grown of feudal aristocracies, or form'd by merely literary
standards, or from any ultramarine, full-dress formulas of culture,
polish, caste, &c., and must sternly promulgate her own new standard,
yet old enough, and accepting the old, the perennial elements, and
combining them into groups, unities, appropriate to the modern, the
democratic, the west, and to the practical occasions and needs of our
own cities, and of the agricultural regions. Ever the most precious in
the common. Ever the fresh breeze of field, or hill, or lake, is
more than any palpitation of fans, though of ivory, and redolent with
perfume; and the air is more than the costliest perfumes.
And now, for fear of mistake, we may not intermit to beg our absolution
from all that genuinely is, or goes along with, even Culture. Pardon us,
venerable shade! if we have seem'd to speak lightly of your office. The
whole civilization of the earth, we know, is yours, with all the glory
and the light thereof. It is, indeed, in your own spirit, and seeking to
tally the loftiest teachings of it, that we aim these poor utterances.
For you, too, mighty minister! know that there is something greater than
you, namely, the fresh, eternal qualities of Being. From them, and by
them, as you, at your best, we too evoke the last, the needed help, to
vitalize our country and our days. Thus we pronounce not so much against
the principle of culture; we only supervise it, and promulge along with
it, as deep, perhaps a deeper, principle. As we have shown the New World
including in itself the all-leveling aggregate of democracy, we show
it also including the all-varied, all-permitting, all-free theorem of
individuality, and erecting therefor a lofty and hitherto unoccupied
framework or platform, broad enough for all, eligible to every farmer
and mechanic--to the female equally with the male--a towering selfhood,
not physically perfect only--not satisfied with the mere mind's and
learning's stores, but religious, possessing the idea of the infinite,
(rudder and compass sure amid this troublous voyage, o'er darkest,
wildest wave, through stormiest wind, of man's or nation's
progress)--realizing, above the rest, that known humanity, in deepest
sense, is fair adhesion to itself, for purposes beyond--and that,
finally, the personality of mortal life is most important with reference
to the immortal, the unknown, the spiritual, the only permanently real,
which as the ocean waits for and receives the rivers, waits for us each
and all.
Much is there, yet, demanding line and outline in our Vistas, not only
on these topics, but others quite unwritten. Indeed, we could talk the
matter, and expand it, through lifetime. But it is necessary to return
to our original premises. In view of them, we have again pointedly
to confess that all the objective grandeurs of the world, for highest
purposes, yield themselves up, and depend on mentality alone. Here, and
here only, all balances, all rests. For the mind, which alone builds
the permanent edifice, haughtily builds it to itself. By it, with
what follows it, are convey'd to mortal sense the culminations of
the materialistic, the known, and a prophecy of the unknown. To
take expression, to incarnate, to endow a literature with grand and
archetypal models--to fill with pride and love the utmost capacity, and
to achieve spiritual meanings, and suggest the future--these, and these
only, satisfy the soul. We must not say one word against real materials;
but the wise know that they do not become real till touched by emotions,
the mind. Did we call the latter imponderable? Ah, let us rather
proclaim that the slightest song-tune, the countless ephemera of
passions arous'd by orators and tale-tellers, are more dense, more
weighty than the engines there in the great factories, or the granite
blocks in their foundations.
Approaching thus the momentous spaces, and considering with reference to
a new and greater personalism, the needs and possibilities of American
imaginative literature, through the medium-light of what we have already
broach'd, it will at once be appreciated that a vast gulf of difference
separates the present accepted condition of these spaces, inclusive of
what is floating in them, from any condition adjusted to, or fit for,
the world, the America, there sought to be indicated, and the copious
races of complete men and women, along these Vistas crudely outlined.
It is, in some sort, no less a difference than lies between that
long-continued nebular state and vagueness of the astronomical worlds,
compared with the subsequent state, the definitely-form'd worlds
themselves, duly compacted, clustering in systems, hung up there,
chandeliers of the universe, beholding and mutually lit by each other's
lights, serving for ground of all substantial foothold, all vulgar
uses--yet serving still more as an undying chain and echelon of
spiritual proofs and shows. A boundless field to fill! A new creation,
with needed orbic works launch'd forth, to revolve in free and lawful
circuits--to move, self-poised, through the ether, and shine like
heaven's own suns! With such, and nothing less, we suggest that New
World literature, fit to rise upon, cohere, and signalize in time, these
States.
What, however, do we more definitely mean by New World literature? Are
we not doing well enough here already? Are not the United States this
day busily using, working, more printer's type, more presses, than any
other country? uttering and absorbing more publications than any other?
Do not our publishers fatten quicker and deeper? (helping themselves,
under shelter of a delusive and sneaking law, or rather absence of law,
to most of their forage, poetical, pictorial, historical, romantic,
even comic, without money and without price--and fiercely resisting
the timidest proposal to pay for it.) Many will come under this
delusion--but my purpose is to dispel it. I say that a nation may
hold and circulate rivers and oceans of very readable print, journals,
magazines, novels, library-books, "poetry," &c.--such as the States
to-day possess and circulate--of unquestionable aid and value--hundreds
of new volumes annually composed and brought out here, respectable
enough, indeed unsurpass'd in smartness and erudition--with
further hundreds, or rather millions, (as by free forage or theft
aforemention'd,) also thrown into the market--and yet, all the while,
the said nation, land, strictly speaking, may possess no literature at
all.
Repeating our inquiry, what, then, do we mean by real literature?
especially the democratic literature of the future? Hard questions to
meet. The clues are inferential, and turn us to the past. At best, we
can only offer suggestions, comparisons, circuits.
It must still be reiterated, as, for the purpose of these memoranda, the
deep lesson of history and time, that all else in the contributions of
a nation or age, through its politics, materials, heroic personalities,
military eclat, &c., remains crude, and defers, in any close and
thorough-going estimate, until vitalized by national, original
archetypes in literature. They only put the nation in form, finally tell
anything--prove, complete anything--perpetuate anything. Without doubt,
some of the richest and most powerful and populous communities of the
antique world, and some of the grandest personalities and events, have,
to after and present times, left themselves entirely unbequeath'd.
Doubtless, greater than any that have come down to us, were among those
lands, heroisms, persons, that have not come down to us at all, even
by name, date, or location. Others have arrived safely, as from voyages
over wide, century-stretching seas. The little ships, the miracles that
have buoy'd them, and by incredible chances safely convey'd them, (or
the best of them, their meaning and essence,) overlong wastes, darkness,
lethargy, ignorance, &c., have been a few inscriptions--a few immortal
compositions, small in size, yet compassing what measureless values of
reminiscence, contemporary portraitures, manners, idioms and beliefs,
with deepest inference, hint and thought, to tie and touch forever the
old, new body, and the old, new soul! These! and still these! bearing
the freight so dear--dearer than pride--dearer than love. All the best
experience of humanity, folded, saved, freighted to us here. Some of
these tiny ships we call Old and New Testament, Homer, Eschylus, Plato,
Juvenal, &c. Precious minims! I think, if we were forced to choose,
rather than have you, and the likes of you, and what belongs to, and has
grown of you, blotted out and gone, we could better afford, appaling as
that would be, to lose all actual ships, this day fasten'd by wharf,
or floating on wave, and see them, with all their cargoes, scuttled and
sent to the bottom.
Gather'd by geniuses of city, race or age, and put by them in highest
of art's forms, namely, the literary form, the peculiar combinations
and the outshows of that city, age, or race, its particular modes of the
universal attributes and passions, its faiths, heroes, lovers and gods,
wars, traditions, struggles, crimes, emotions, joys, (or the subtle
spirit of these,) having been pass'd on to us to illumine our own
selfhood, and its experiences--what they supply, indispensable and
highest, if taken away, nothing else in all the world's boundless
store-houses could make up to us, or ever again return.
For us, along the great highways of time, those monuments stand--those
forms of majesty and beauty. For us those beacons burn through all the
nights. Unknown Egyptians, graving hieroglyphs; Hindus, with hymn and
apothegm and endless epic; Hebrew prophet, with spirituality, as in
flashes of lightning, conscience like red-hot iron, plaintive songs and
screams of vengeance for tyrannies and enslavement; Christ, with bent
head, brooding love and peace, like a dove; Greek, creating eternal
shapes of physical and esthetic proportion; Roman, lord of satire, the
sword, and the codex;--of the figures, some far off and veil'd, others
nearer and visible; Dante, stalking with lean form, nothing but fibre,
not a grain of superfluous flesh; Angelo, and the great painters,
architects, musicians; rich Shakspere, luxuriant as the sun, artist and
singer of feudalism in its sunset, with all the gorgeous colors, owner
thereof, and using them at will; and so to such as German Kant and
Hegel, where they, though near us, leaping over the ages, sit again,
impassive, imperturbable, like the Egyptian gods. Of these, and the like
of these, is it too much, indeed, to return to our favorite figure,
and view them as orbs and systems of orbs, moving in free paths in the
spaces of that other heaven, the kosmic intellect, the soul?
Ye powerful and resplendent ones! ye were, in your atmospheres, grown
not for America, but rather for her foes, the feudal and the old--while
our genius is democratic and modern. Yet could ye, indeed, but breathe
your breath of life into our New World's nostrils--not to enslave us, as
now, but, for our needs, to breed a spirit like your own--perhaps, (dare
we to say it?) to dominate, even destroy, what you yourselves have left!
On your plane, and no less, but even higher and wider, must we mete
and measure for to-day and here. I demand races of orbic bards, with
unconditional uncompromising sway. Come forth, sweet democratic despots
of the west!
By points like these we, in reflection, token what we mean by any land's
or people's genuine literature. And thus compared and tested, judging
amid the influence of loftiest products only, what do our current
copious fields of print, covering in manifold forms, the United States,
better, for an analogy, present, than, as in certain regions of the sea,
those spreading, undulating masses of squid, through which the whale
swimming, with head half out, feeds?
Not but that doubtless our current so-called literature, (like an
endless supply of small coin,) performs a certain service, and may-be,
too, the service needed for the time, (the preparation-service, as
children learn to spell.) Everybody reads, and truly nearly everybody
writes, either books, or for the magazines or journals. The matter has
magnitude, too, after a sort. But is it really advancing? or, has it
advanced for a long while? There is something impressive about the huge
editions of the dailies and weeklies, the mountain-stacks of white
paper piled in the press-vaults, and the proud, crashing, ten-cylinder
presses, which I can stand and watch any time by the half hour. Then,
(though the States in the field of imagination present not a single
first-class work, not a single great literatus,) the main objects,
to amuse, to titillate, to pass away time, to circulate the news, and
rumors of news, to rhyme and read rhyme, are yet attain'd, and on
a scale of infinity. To-day, in books, in the rivalry of writers,
especially novelists, success, (so-call'd,) is for him or her who
strikes the mean flat average, the sensational appetite for stimulus,
incident, persiflage, &c., and depicts, to the common calibre, sensual,
exterior life. To such, or the luckiest of them, as we see, the
audiences are limitless and profitable; but they cease presently. While
this day, or any day, to workmen portraying interior or spiritual life,
the audiences were limited, and often laggard--but they last forever.
Compared with the past, our modern science soars, and our journals
serve--but ideal and even ordinary romantic literature, does not,
I think, substantially advance. Behold the prolific brood of the
contemporary novel, magazine-tale, theatre-play, &c. The same endless
thread of tangled and superlative love-story, inherited, apparently from
the Amadises and Palmerins of the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries over
there in Europe. The costumes and associations brought down to date, the
seasoning hotter and more varied, the dragons and ogres left out--but
the _thing_, I should say, has not advanced--is just as sensational,
just as strain'd--remains about the same, nor more, nor less.
What is the reason our time, our lands, that we see no fresh local
courage, sanity, of our own--the Mississippi, stalwart Western men,
real mental and physical facts, Southerners, &c., in the body of our
literature? especially the poetic part of it. But always, instead, a
parcel of dandies and ennuyees, dapper little gentlemen from abroad, who
flood us with their thin sentiment of parlors, parasols, piano-songs,
tinkling rhymes, the five-hundredth importation--or whimpering and
crying about something, chasing one aborted conceit after another,
and forever occupied in dyspeptic amours with dyspeptic women. While,
current and novel, the grandest events and revolutions and stormiest
passions of history, are crossing to-day with unparallel'd rapidity and
magnificence over the stages of our own and all the continents, offering
new materials, opening new vistas, with largest needs, inviting the
daring launching forth of conceptions in literature, inspired by them,
soaring in highest regions, serving art in its highest (which is only
the other name for serving God, and serving humanity,) where is the man
of letters, where is the book, with any nobler aim than to follow in the
old track, repeat what has been said before--and, as its utmost triumph,
sell well, and be erudite or elegant?
Mark the roads, the processes, through which these States have arrived,
standing easy, henceforth ever-equal, ever-compact in their range
to-day. European adventures? the most antique? Asiatic or African? old
history--miracles--romances? Rather our own unquestion'd facts. They
hasten, incredible, blazing bright as fire. From the deeds and days of
Columbus down to the present, and including the present--and especially
the late secession war--when I con them, I feel, every leaf, like
stopping to see if I have not made a mistake, and fall'n on the splendid
figments of some dream. But it is no dream. We stand, live, move, in
the huge flow of our age s materialism--in its spirituality. We have had
founded for us the most positive of lands. The founders have pass'd to
other spheres--but what are these terrible duties they have left us?
Their politics the United States have, in my opinion, with all their
faults, already substantially establish'd, for good, on their own
native, sound, long-vista'd principles, never to be overturn'd, offering
a sure basis for all the rest. With that, their future religious forms
sociology, literature, teachers, schools, costumes, &c., are of course
to make a compact whole, uniform, on tallying principles. For how can
we remain, divided, contradicting ourselves, this way?[28] I say we can
only attain harmony and stability by consulting ensemble and the ethic
purports, and faithfully building upon them. For the New World, indeed,
after two grand stages of preparation-strata, I perceive that now a
third stage, being ready for, (and without which the other two were
useless,) with unmistakable signs appears. The First stage was the
planning and putting on record the political foundation rights of
immense masses of people--indeed all people--in the organization of
republican National, State, and municipal governments, all constructed
with reference to each, and each to all. This is the American programme,
not for classes, but for universal man, and is embodied in the compacts
of the Declaration of Independence, and, as it began and has now
grown, with its amendments, the Federal Constitution--and in the State
governments, with all their interiors, and with general suffrage; those
having the sense not only of what is in themselves, but that their
certain several things started, planted, hundreds of others in the same
direction duly arise and follow. The Second stage relates to material
prosperity, wealth, produce, labor-saving machines, iron, cotton, local,
State and continental railways, intercommunication and trade with all
lands, steamships, mining, general employment, organization of great
cities, cheap appliances for comfort, numberless technical schools,
books, newspapers, a currency for money circulation, &c. The
Third stage, rising out of the previous ones, to make them and
all illustrious, I, now, for one, promulge, announcing a native
expression-spirit, getting into form, adult, and through mentality, for
these States, self-contain'd, different from others, more expansive,
more rich and free, to be evidenced by original authors and poets
to come, by American personalities, plenty of them, male and female,
traversing the States, none excepted--and by native superber
tableaux and growths of language, songs, operas, orations, lectures,
architecture--and by a sublime and serious Religious Democracy sternly
taking command, dissolving the old, sloughing off surfaces, and from
its own interior and vital principles, reconstructing, democratizing
society.
For America, type of progress, and of essential faith in man, above
all his errors and wickedness--few suspect how deep, how deep it really
strikes. The world evidently supposes, and we have evidently supposed
so too, that the States are merely to achieve the equal franchise, an
elective government--to inaugurate the respectability of labor, and
become a nation of practical operatives, law-abiding, orderly and well
off. Yes, those are indeed parts of the task of America; but they
not only do not exhaust the progressive conception, but rather arise,
teeming with it, as the mediums of deeper, higher progress. Daughter of
a physical revolution--mother of the true revolutions, which are of
the interior life, and of the arts. For so long as the spirit is not
changed, any change of appearance is of no avail.
The old men, I remember as a boy, were always talking of American
independence. What is independence? Freedom from all laws or bonds
except those of one's own being, control'd by the universal ones. To
lands, to man, to woman, what is there at last to each, but the inherent
soul, nativity, idiocrasy, free, highest-poised, soaring its own flight,
following out itself?
At present, these States, in their theology and social standards, (of
greater importance than their political institutions,) are entirely held
possession of by foreign lands. We see the sons and daughters of the
New World, ignorant of its genius, not yet inaugurating the native, the
universal, and the near, still importing the distant, the partial, and
the dead. We see London, Paris, Italy--not original, superb, as where
they belong--but second-hand here, where they do not belong. We see the
shreds of Hebrews, Romans, Greeks; but where, on her own soil, do we
see, in any faithful, highest, proud expression, America herself? I
sometimes question whether she has a corner in her own house.
Not but that in one sense, and a very grand one, good theology, good
art, or good literature, has certain features shared in common. The
combination fraternizes, ties the races--is, in many particulars, under
laws applicable indifferently to all, irrespective of climate or
date, and, from whatever source, appeals to emotions, pride, love,
spirituality, common to human kind. Nevertheless, they touch a man
closest, (perhaps only actually touch him,) even in these, in their
expression through autochthonic lights and shades, flavors, fondnesses,
aversions, specific incidents, illustrations, out of his own
nationality, geography, surroundings, antecedents, &c. The spirit and
the form are one, and depend far more on association, identity and
place, than is supposed. Subtly interwoven with the materiality
and personality of a land, a race--Teuton, Turk, Californian, or
what-not--there is always something--I can hardly tell what it
is--history but describes the results of it--it is the same as the
untellable look of some human faces. Nature, too, in her stolid forms,
is full of it--but to most it is there a secret. This something is
rooted in the invisible roots, the profoundest meanings of that place,
race, or nationality; and to absorb and again effuse it, uttering words
and products as from its midst, and carrying it into highest regions,
is the work, or a main part of the work, of any country's true author,
poet, historian, lecturer, and perhaps even priest and philosoph. Here,
and here only, are the foundations for our really valuable and permanent
verse, drama, &c.
But at present, (judged by any higher scale than that which finds the
chief ends of existence to be to feverishly make money during one-half
of it, and by some "amusement," or perhaps foreign travel, flippantly
kill time, the other half,) and consider'd with reference to purposes
of patriotism, health, a noble personality, religion, and the democratic
adjustments, all these swarms of poems, literary magazines, dramatic
plays, resultant so far from American intellect, and the formation of
our best ideas, are useless and a mockery. They strengthen and nourish
no one, express nothing characteristic, give decision and purpose to no
one, and suffice only the lowest level of vacant minds.
Of what is called the drama, or dramatic presentation in the United
States, as now put forth at the theatres, I should say it deserves to
be treated with the same gravity, and on a par with the questions
of ornamental confectionery at public dinners, or the arrangement of
curtains and hangings in a ball-room--nor more, nor less. Of the other,
I will not insult the reader's intelligence, (once really entering into
the atmosphere of these Vistas,) by supposing it necessary to show,
in detail, why the copious dribble, either of our little or well-known
rhymesters, does not fulfil, in any respect, the needs and august
occasions of this land. America demands a poetry that is bold, modern,
and all-surrounding and kosmical, as she is herself. It must in no
respect ignore science or the modern, but inspire itself with science
and the modern. It must bend its vision toward the future, more than
the past. Like America, it must extricate itself from even the greatest
models of the past, and, while courteous to them, must have entire faith
in itself, and the products of its own democratic spirit only. Like her,
it must place in the van, and hold up at all hazards, the banner of
the divine pride of man in himself, (the radical foundation of the new
religion.) Long enough have the People been listening to poems in which
common humanity, deferential, bends low, humiliated, acknowledging
superiors. But America listens to no such poems. Erect, inflated, and
fully self-esteeming be the chant; and then America will listen with
pleased ears.
Nor may the genuine gold, the gems, when brought to light at last, be
probably usher'd forth from any of the quarters currently counted on.
To-day, doubtless, the infant genius of American poetic expression,
(eluding those highly-refined imported and gilt-edged themes,
and sentimental and butterfly flights, pleasant to orthodox
publishers--causing tender spasms in the coteries, and warranted not to
chafe the sensitive cuticle of the most exquisitely artificial gossamer
delicacy,) lies sleeping far away, happily unrecognized and uninjur'd by
the coteries, the art-writers, the talkers and critics of the saloons,
or the lecturers in the colleges--lies sleeping, aside, unrecking
itself, in some western idiom, or native Michigan or Tennessee repartee,
or stumpspeech--or in Kentucky or Georgia, or the Carolinas--or in some
slang or local song or allusion of the Manhattan, Boston, Philadelphia
or Baltimore mechanic--or up in the Maine woods--or off in the hut of
the California miner, or crossing the Rocky mountains, or along
the Pacific railroad--or on the breasts of the young farmers of
the northwest, or Canada, or boatmen of the lakes. Rude and coarse
nursing-beds, these; but only from such beginnings and stocks,
indigenous here, may haply arrive, be grafted, and sprout, in time,
flowers of genuine American aroma, and fruits truly and fully our own.
I say it were a standing disgrace to these States--I say it were a
disgrace to any nation, distinguish'd above others by the variety and
vastness of its territories, its materials, its inventive activity,
and the splendid practicality of its people, not to rise and soar above
others also in its original styles in literature and art, and its
own supply of intellectual and esthetic masterpieces, archetypal, and
consistent with itself. I know not a land except ours that has not, to
some extent, however small, made its title clear. The Scotch have their
born ballads, subtly expressing their past and present, and expressing
character. The Irish have theirs. England, Italy, France, Spain, theirs.
What has America? With exhaustless mines of the richest ore of epic,
lyric, tale, tune, picture, etc., in the Four Years' War; with, indeed,
I sometimes think, the richest masses of material ever afforded a
nation, more variegated, and on a larger scale--the first sign of
proportionate, native, imaginative Soul, and first-class works to match,
is, (I cannot too often repeat,) so far wanting.
Long ere the second centennial arrives, there will be some forty to
fifty great States, among them Canada and Cuba. When the present century
closes, our population will be sixty or seventy millions. The Pacific
will be ours, and the Atlantic mainly ours. There will be daily electric
communication with every part of the globe. What an age! What a land!
Where, elsewhere, one so great? The individuality of one nation must
then, as always, lead the world. Can there be any doubt who the leader
ought to be? Bear in mind, though, that nothing less than the mightiest
original non-subordinated SOUL has ever really, gloriously led, or ever
can lead. (This Soul--its other name, in these Vistas, is LITERATURE.)
In fond fancy leaping those hundred years ahead, let us survey America's
works, poems, philosophies, fulfilling prophecies, and giving form and
decision to best ideals. Much that is now undream'd of, we might then
perhaps see establish'd, luxuriantly cropping forth, richness, vigor of
letters and of artistic expression, in whose products character will be
a main requirement, and not merely erudition or elegance.
Intense and loving comradeship, the personal and passionate attachment
of man to man--which, hard to define, underlies the lessons and ideals
of the profound saviours of every land and age, and which seems to
promise, when thoroughly develop'd, cultivated and recognized in manners
and literature, the most substantial hope and safety of the future of
these States, will then be fully express'd.[29]
A strong fibred joyousness and faith, and the sense of health _al
fresco_, may well enter into the preparation of future noble American
authorship. Part of the test of a great literatus shall be the absence
in him of the idea of the covert, the lurid, the maleficent, the devil,
the grim estimates inherited from the Puritans, hell, natural depravity,
and the like. The great literatus will be known, among the rest, by his
cheerful simplicity, his adherence to natural standards, his limitless
faith in God, his reverence, and by the absence in him of doubt, ennui,
burlesque, persiflage, or any strain'd and temporary fashion.
Nor must I fail, again and yet again, to clinch, reiterate more plainly
still, (O that indeed such survey as we fancy, may show in time this
part completed also!) the lofty aim, surely the proudest and the purest,
in whose service the future literatus, of whatever field, may gladly
labor. As we have intimated, offsetting the material civilization of our
race, our nationality, its wealth, territories, factories, population,
products, trade, and military and naval strength, and breathing breath
of life into all these, and more, must be its moral civilization--the
formulation, expression, and aidancy whereof, is the very highest height
of literature. The climax of this loftiest range of civilization, rising
above all the gorgeous shows and results of wealth, intellect, power,
and art, as such--above even theology and religious fervor--is to be its
development, from the eternal bases, and the fit expression, of absolute
Conscience, moral soundness, Justice. Even in religious fervor there
is a touch of animal heat. But moral conscientiousness, crystalline,
without flaw, not Godlike only, entirely human, awes and enchants
forever. Great is emotional love, even in the order of the rational
universe. But, if we must make gradations, I am clear there is something
greater. Power, love, veneration, products, genius, esthetics, tried by
subtlest comparisons, analyses, and in serenest moods, somewhere fail,
somehow become vain. Then noiseless, withflowing steps, the lord,
the sun, the last ideal comes. By the names right, justice, truth, we
suggest, but do not describe it. To the world of men it remains a
dream, an idea as they call it. But no dream is it to the wise--but the
proudest, almost only solid, lasting thing of all. Its analogy in the
material universe is what holds together this world, and every object
upon it, and carries its dynamics on forever sure and safe. Its lack,
and the persistent shirking of it, as in life, sociology, literature,
politics, business, and even sermonizing, these times, or any times,
still leaves the abysm, the mortal flaw and smutch, mocking civilization
to-day, with all its unquestion'd triumphs, and all the civilization so
far known.[30]
Present literature, while magnificently fulfilling certain popular
demands, with plenteous knowledge and verbal smartness, is profoundly
sophisticated, insane, and its very joy is morbid. It needs tally and
express Nature, and the spirit of Nature, and to know and obey the
standards. I say the question of Nature, largely consider'd, involves
the questions of the esthetic, the emotional, and the religious--and
involves happiness. A fitly born and bred race, growing up in right
conditions of out-door as much as in-door harmony, activity and
development, would probably, from and in those conditions, find it
enough merely _to live_--and would, in their relations to the sky, air,
water, trees, &c., and to the countless common shows, and in the fact of
life itself, discover and achieve happiness--with Being suffused night
and day by wholesome extasy, surpassing all the pleasures that wealth,
amusement, and even gratified intellect, erudition, or the sense of art,
can give.
In the prophetic literature of these States, (the reader of my
speculations will miss their principal stress unless he allows well for
the point that a new Literature, perhaps a new Metaphysics, certainly a
new Poetry, are to be, in my opinion, the only sure and worthy supports
and expressions of the American Democracy,) Nature, true Nature, and
the true idea of Nature, long absent, must, above all, become fully
restored, enlarged, and must furnish the pervading atmosphere to poems,
and the test of all high literary and esthetic compositions. I do not
mean the smooth walks, trimm'd hedges, poseys and nightingales of the
English poets, but the whole orb, with its geologic history, the kosmos,
carrying fire and snow, that rolls through the illimitable areas, light
as a feather, though weighing billions of tons. Furthermore, as by
what we now partially call Nature is intended, at most, only what is
entertainable by the physical conscience, the sense of matter, and
of good animal health--on these it must be distinctly accumulated,
incorporated, that man, comprehending these, has, in towering
superaddition, the moral and spiritual consciences, indicating his
destination beyond the ostensible, the mortal.
To the heights of such estimate of Nature indeed ascending, we proceed
to make observations for our Vistas, breathing rarest air. What is
I believe called Idealism seems to me to suggest, (guarding against
extravagance, and ever modified even by its opposite,) the course
of inquiry and desert of favor for our New World metaphysics, their
foundation of and in literature, giving hue to all.[31]
The elevating and etherealizing ideas of the unknown and of unreality
must be brought forward with authority, as they are the legitimate heirs
of the known, and of reality, and at least as great as their parents.
Fearless of scoffing, and of the ostent, let us take our stand,
our ground, and never desert it, to confront the growing excess and
arrogance of realism. To the cry, now victorious--the cry of sense,
science, flesh, incomes, farms, merchandise, logic, intellect,
demonstrations, solid perpetuities, buildings of brick and iron, or
even the facts of the shows of trees, earth, rocks, &c., fear not, my
brethren, my sisters, to sound out with equally determin'd voice,
that conviction brooding within the recesses of every envision'd
soul--illusions! apparitions! figments all! True, we must not condemn
the show, neither absolutely deny it, for the indispensability of its
meanings; but how clearly we see that, migrate in soul to what we can
already conceive of superior and spiritual points of view, and, palpable
as it seems under present relations, it all and several might, nay
certainly would, fall apart and vanish.
I hail with joy the oceanic, variegated, intense practical energy, the
demand for facts, even the business materialism of the current age,
our States. But we to the age or land in which these things, movements,
stopping at themselves, do not tend to ideas. As fuel to flame, and
flame to the heavens, so must wealth, science, materialism--even this
democracy of which we make so much--unerringly feed the highest mind,
the soul. Infinitude the flight: fathomless the mystery. Man, so
diminutive, dilates beyond the sensible universe, competes with,
outcopes space and time, meditating even one great idea. Thus, and
thus only, does a human being, his spirit, ascend above, and justify,
objective Nature, which, probably nothing in itself, is incredibly and
divinely serviceable, indispensable, real, here. And as the purport
of objective Nature is doubtless folded, hidden, somewhere here--as
somewhere here is what this globe and its manifold forms, and the light
of day, and night's darkness, and life itself, with all its experiences,
are for--it is here the great literature, especially verse, must get its
inspiration and throbbing blood. Then may we attain to a poetry worthy
the immortal soul of man, and widen, while absorbing materials, and,
in their own sense, the shows of Nature, will, above all, have, both
directly and indirectly, a freeing, fluidizing, expanding, religious
character, exulting with science, fructifying the moral elements, and
stimulating aspirations, and meditations on the unknown.
The process, so far, is indirect and peculiar, and though it may be
suggested, cannot be defined. Observing, rapport, and with intuition,
the shows and forms presented by Nature, the sensuous luxuriance, the
beautiful in living men and women, the actual play of passions, in
history and life--and, above all, from those developments either in
Nature or human personality in which power, (dearest of all to the sense
of the artist,) transacts itself-out of these, and seizing what is in
them, the poet, the esthetic worker in any field, by the divine magic
of his genius, projects them, their analogies, by curious removes,
indirections, in literature and art. (No useless attempt to repeat
the material creation, by daguerreotyping the exact likeness by mortal
mental means.) This is the image-making faculty, coping with material
creation, and rivaling, almost triumphing over it. This alone, when
all the other parts of a specimen of literature or art are ready and
waiting, can breathe into it the breath of life, and endow it with
identity.
"The true question to ask," says the librarian of Congress in a paper
read before the Social Science Convention at New York, October, 1869,
"The true question to ask respecting a book, is, _has it help'd any
human soul?_" This is the hint, statement, not only of the great
literatus, his book, but of every great artist. It may be that all works
of art are to be first tried by their art qualities, their image-forming
talent, and their dramatic, pictorial, plot-constructing, euphonious and
other talents. Then, whenever claiming to be first-class works, they are
to be strictly and sternly tried by their foundation in, and radiation,
in the highest sense, and always indirectly, of the ethic principles,
and eligibility to free, arouse, dilate.
As, within the purposes of the Kosmos, and vivifying all meteorology,
and all the congeries of the mineral, vegetable and animal worlds--all
the physical growth and development of man, and all the history of the
race in politics, religions, wars, &c., there is a moral purpose, a
visible or invisible intention, certainly underlying all--its results
and proof needing to be patiently waited for--needing intuition,
faith, idiosyncrasy, to its realization, which many, and especially
the intellectual, do not have--so in the product, or congeries of
the product, of the greatest literatus. This is the last, profoundest
measure and test of a first-class literary or esthetic achievement, and
when understood and put in force must fain, I say, lead to works, books,
nobler than any hitherto known. Lo! Nature, (the only complete, actual
poem,) existing calmly in the divine scheme, containing all, content,
careless of the criticisms of a day, or these endless and wordy
chatterers. And lo! to the consciousness of the soul, the permanent
identity, the thought, the something, before which the magnitude even
of democracy, art, literature, &c., dwindles, becomes partial,
measurable--something that fully satisfies, (which those do not.) That
something is the All, and the idea of All, with the accompanying idea
of eternity, and of itself, the soul, buoyant, indestructible, sailing
space forever, visiting every region, as a ship the sea. And again lo!
the pulsations in all matter, all spirit, throbbing forever--the eternal
beats, eternal systole and diastole of life in things--wherefrom I feel
and know that death is not the ending, as was thought, but rather the
real beginning--and that nothing ever is or can be lost, nor ever die,
nor soul, nor matter.
In the future of these States must arise poets immenser far, and make
great poems of death. The poems of life are great, but there must be the
poems of the purports of life, not only in itself, but beyond itself.
I have eulogized Homer, the sacred bards of Jewry, Eschylus, Juvenal,
Shakspere, &c., and acknowledged their inestimable value. But,
(with perhaps the exception, in some, not all respects, of the
second-mention'd,) I say there must, for future and democratic purposes,
appear poets, (dare I to say so?) of higher class even than any of
those--poets not only possess'd of the religious fire and abandon of
Isaiah, luxuriant in the epic talent of Homer, or for proud characters
as in Shakspere, but consistent with the Hegelian formulas, and
consistent with modern science. America needs, and the world needs, a
class of bards who will, now and ever, so link and tally the rational
physical being of man, with the ensembles of time and space, and with
this vast and multiform show, Nature, surrounding him, ever tantalizing
him, equally a part, and yet not a part of him, as to essentially
harmonize, satisfy, and put at rest. Faith, very old, now scared away
by science, must be restored, brought back by the same power that caused
her departure--restored with new sway, deeper, wider, higher than ever.
Surely, this universal ennui, this coward fear, this shuddering at
death, these low, degrading views, are not always to rule the spirit
pervading future society, as it has the past, and does the present. What
the Roman Lucretius sought most nobly, yet all too blindly, negatively
to do for his age and its successors, must be done positively by some
great coming literatus, especially poet, who, while remaining fully
poet, will absorb whatever science indicates, with spiritualism, and
out of them, and out of his own genius, will compose the great poem
of death. Then will man indeed confront Nature, and confront time and
space, both with science, and _con amore_, and take his right place,
prepared for life, master of fortune and misfortune. And then that which
was long wanted will be supplied, and the ship that had it not before in
all her voyages, will have an anchor.
There are still other standards, suggestions, for products of high
literatuses. That which really balances and conserves the social and
political world is not so much legislation, police, treaties, and dread
of punishment, as the latent eternal intuitional sense, in humanity,
of fairness, manliness, decorum, &c. Indeed, this perennial regulation,
control, and oversight, by self-suppliance, is _sine qua non_ to
democracy; and a highest widest aim of democratic literature may well
be to bring forth, cultivate, brace, and strengthen this sense, in
individuals and society. A strong mastership of the general inferior
self by the superior self, is to be aided, secured, indirectly, but
surely, by the literatus, in his works, shaping, for individual or
aggregate democracy, a great passionate body, in and along with which
goes a great masterful spirit.
And still, providing for contingencies, I fain confront the fact, the
need of powerful native philosophs and orators and bards, these States,
as rallying points to come, in times of danger, and to fend off ruin
and defection. For history is long, long, long. Shift and turn the
combinations of the statement as we may, the problem of the future
of America is in certain respects as dark as it is vast. Pride,
competition, segregation, vicious wilfulness, and license beyond
example, brood already upon us. Unwieldy and immense, who shall hold in
behemoth? who bridle leviathan? Flaunt it as we choose, athwart and
over the roads of our progress loom huge uncertainty, and dreadful,
threatening gloom. It is useless to deny it: Democracy grows rankly up
the thickest, noxious, deadliest plants and fruits of all--brings worse
and worse invaders--needs newer, larger, stronger, keener compensations
and compellers.
Our lands, embracing so much, (embracing indeed the whole, rejecting
none,) hold in their breast that flame also, capable of consuming
themselves, consuming us all. Short as the span of our national life has
been, already have death and downfall crowded close upon us--and will
again crowd close, no doubt, even if warded off. Ages to come may never
know, but I know, how narrowly during the late secession war--and more
than once, and more than twice or thrice--our Nationality, (wherein
bound up, as in a ship in a storm, depended, and yet depend, all our
best life, all hope, all value,) just grazed, just by a hair escaped
destruction. Alas! to think of them! the agony and bloody sweat of
certain of those hours! those cruel, sharp, suspended crises!
Even to-day, amid these whirls, incredible flippancy, and blind fury of
parties, infidelity, entire lack of first-class captains and leaders,
added to the plentiful meanness and vulgarity of the ostensible
masses--that problem, the labor question, beginning to open like a
yawning gulf, rapidly widening every year--what prospect have we? We
sail a dangerous sea of seething currents, cross and under-currents,
vortices--all so dark, untried--and whither shall we turn? It seems
as if the Almighty had spread before this nation charts of imperial
destinies, dazzling as the sun, yet with many a deep intestine
difficulty, and human aggregate of cankerous imperfection-saying, lo!
the roads, the only plans of development, long and varied with all
terrible balks and ebullitions. You said in your soul, I will be empire
of empires, overshadowing all else, past and present, putting
the history of Old-World dynasties, conquests behind me, as of no
account--making a new history, a history of democracy, making old
history a dwarf--I alone inaugurating largeness, culminating time. If
these, O lands of America, are indeed the prizes, the determinations of
your soul, be it so. But behold the cost, and already specimens of the
cost. Thought you greatness was to ripen for you like a pear? If you
would have greatness, know that you must conquer it through ages,
centuries--must pay for it with a proportionate price. For you too, as
for all lands, the struggle, the traitor, the wily person in office,
scrofulous wealth, the surfeit of prosperity, the demonism of greed,
the hell of passion, the decay of faith, the long postponement, the
fossil-like lethargy, the ceaseless need of revolutions, prophets,
thunder-storms, deaths, births, new projections and invigorations of
ideas and men.
Yet I have dream'd, merged in that hidden-tangled problem of our fate,
whose long unraveling stretches mysteriously through time--dream'd out,
portray'd, hinted already--a little or a larger band--a band of brave
and true, unprecedented yet--arm'd and equipt at every point--the
members separated, it may be, by different dates and States, or south,
or north, or east, or west--Pacific, Atlantic, Southern, Canadian--a
year, a century here, and other centuries there--but always one, compact
in soul, conscience-conserving, God-inculcating, inspirid achievers, not
only in literature, the greatest art, but achievers in all art--a new,
undying order, dynasty, from age to age transmitted--a band, a class,
at least as fit to cope with current years, our dangers, needs, as those
who, for their times, so long, so well, in armor or in cowl, upheld
and made illustrious, that far-back feudal, priestly world. To offset
chivalry, indeed, those vanish'd countless knights, old altars, abbeys,
priests, ages and strings of ages, a knightlier and more sacred cause
to-day demands, and shall supply, in a New World, to larger, grander
work, more than the counterpart and tally of them.
Arrived now, definitely, at an apex for these Vistas, I confess that
the promulgation and belief in such a class or institution--a new and
greater literatus order--its possibility, (nay certainty,) underlies
these entire speculations--and that the rest, the other parts, as
superstructures, are all founded upon it. It really seems to me the
condition, not only of our future national and democratic development,
but of our perpetuation. In the highly artificial and materialistic
bases of modern civilization, with the corresponding arrangements and
methods of living, the force-infusion of intellect alone, the depraving
influences of riches just as much as poverty, the absence of all high
ideals in character--with the long series of tendencies, shapings, which
few are strong enough to resist, and which now seem, with steam-engine
speed, to be everywhere turning out the generations of humanity like
uniform iron castings--all of which, as compared with the feudal ages,
we can yet do nothing better than accept, make the best of, and even
welcome, upon the whole, for their oceanic practical grandeur, and their
restless wholesale kneading of the masses--I say of all this tremendous
and dominant play of solely materialistic bearings upon current life in
the United States, with the results as already seen, accumulating, and
reaching far into the future, that they must either be confronted and
met by at least an equally subtle and tremendous force-infusion for
purposes of spiritualization, for the pure conscience, for genuine
esthetics, and for absolute and primal manliness and womanliness--or
else our modern civilization, with all its improvements, is in vain,
and we are on the road to a destiny, a status, equivalent, in its real
world, to that of the fabled damned.
Prospecting thus the coming unsped days, and that new order in
them--marking the endless train of exercise, development, unwind, in
nation as in man, which life is for--we see, fore-indicated, amid these
prospects and hopes, new law-forces of spoken and written language--not
merely the pedagogue-forms, correct, regular, familiar with precedents,
made for matters of outside propriety, fine words, thoughts definitely
told out--but a language fann'd by the breath of Nature, which leaps
overhead, cares mostly for impetus and effects, and for what it plants
and invigorates to grow--tallies life and character, and seldomer tells
a thing than suggests or necessitates it. In fact, a new theory of
literary composition for imaginative works of the very first class, and
especially for highest poems, is the sole course open to these States.
Books are to be call'd for, and supplied, on the assumption that the
process of reading is not a half-sleep, but, in highest sense, an
exercise, a gymnast's struggle; that the reader is to do something for
himself, must be on the alert, must himself or herself construct indeed
the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay--the text furnishing the
hints, the clue, the start or frame-work. Not the book needs so much
to be the complete thing, but the reader of the book does. That were
to make a nation of supple and athletic minds, well-train'd, intuitive,
used to depend on themselves, and not on a few coteries of writers.
Investigating here, we see, not that it is a little thing we have, in
having the bequeath'd libraries, countless shelves of volumes, records,
etc.; yet how serious the danger, depending entirely on them, of the
bloodless vein, the nerveless arm, the false application, at second or
third hand. We see that the real interest of this people of ours in the
theology, history, poetry, politics, and personal models of the past,
(the British islands, for instance, and indeed all the past,) is not
necessarily to mould ourselves or our literature upon them, but to
attain fuller, more definite comparisons, warnings, and the insight to
ourselves, our own present, and our own far grander, different, future
history, religion, social customs, &c. We see that almost everything
that has been written, sung, or stated, of old, with reference to
humanity under the feudal and oriental institutes, religions, and
for other lands, needs to be re-written, re-sung, re-stated, in terms
consistent with the institution of these States, and to come in range
and obedient uniformity with them.
We see, as in the universes of the material kosmos, after
meteorological, vegetable, and animal cycles, man at last arises, born
through them, to prove them, concentrate them, to turn upon them with
wonder and love--to command them, adorn them, and carry them upward
into superior realms--so, out of the series of the preceding social and
political universes, now arise these States. We see that while many were
supposing things establish'd and completed, really the grandest things
always remain; and discover that the work of the New World is not ended,
but only fairly begun.
We see our land, America, her literature, esthetics, &c., as,
substantially, the getting in form, or effusement and statement, of
deepest basic elements and loftiest final meanings, of history and
man--and the portrayal, (under the eternal laws and conditions of
beauty,) of our own physiognomy, the subjective tie and expression of
the objective, as from our own combination, continuation, and points of
view--and the deposit and record of the national mentality, character,
appeals, heroism, wars, and even liberties--where these, and
all, culminate in native literary and artistic formulation, to be
perpetuated; and not having which native, first-class formulation, she
will flounder about, and her other, however imposing, eminent greatness,
prove merely a passing gleam; but truly having which, she will
understand herself, live nobly, nobly contribute, emanate, and,
swinging, poised safely on herself, illumin'd and illuming, become a
full-form'd world, and divine Mother not only of material but spiritual
worlds, in ceaseless succession through time--the main thing being the
average, the bodily, the concrete, the democratic, the popular, on which
all the superstructures of the future are to permanently rest.
Notes:
[20] "From a territorial area of less than nine hundred thousand
square miles, the Union has expanded into over four millions and
a half--fifteen times larger than that of Great Britain and France
combined--with a shore-line, including Alaska, equal to the entire
circumference of the earth, and with a domain within these lines far
wider than that of the Romans in their proudest days of conquest and
renown. With a river, lake, and coastwise commerce estimated at over two
thousand millions of dollars per year; with a railway traffic of four to
six thousand millions per year, and the annual domestic exchanges of the
country running up to nearly ten thousand millions per year; with over
two thousand millions of dollars invested in manufacturing, mechanical,
and mining industry; with over five hundred millions of acres of land
in actual occupancy, valued, with their appurtenances, at over seven
thousand millions of dollars, and producing annually crops valued at
over three thousand millions of dollars; with a realm which, if the
density of Belgium's population were possible, would be vast enough to
include all the present inhabitants of the world; and with equal rights
guaranteed to even the poorest and humblest of our forty millions of
people--we can, with a manly pride akin to that which distinguish'd the
palmiest days of Rome, claim," &c., &c., &c.--_Vice-President Colfax's
Speech, July 4, 1870_.
LATER--_London "Times," (Weekly,) June 23, '82_.
"The wonderful wealth-producing power of the United States defies and
sets at naught the grave drawbacks of a mischievous protective tariff,
and has already obliterated, almost wholly, the traces of the greatest
of modern civil wars. What is especially remarkable in the present
development of American energy and success is its wide and equable
distribution. North and south, east and west, on the shores of the
Atlantic and the Pacific, along the chain of the great lakes, in the
valley of the Mississippi, and on the coasts of the gulf of Mexico,
the creation of wealth and the increase of population are signally
exhibited. It is quite true, as has been shown by the recent
apportionment of population in the House of Representatives, that some
sections of the Union have advanced, relatively to the rest, in an
extraordinary and unexpected degree. But this does not imply that the
States which have gain'd no additional representatives or have actually
lost some have been stationary or have receded. The fact is that the
present tide of prosperity has risen so high that it has overflow' d all
barriers, and has fill'd up the back-waters, and establish'd something
like an approach to uniform success."
[21] See, for hereditaments, specimens, Walter Scott's Border
Minstrelsy, Percy's collection, Ellis's early English Metrical
Romances, the European continental poems of Walter of Aquitania, and the
Nibelungen, of pagan stock, but monkish-feudal redaction; the history of
the Troubadours, by Fauriel; even the far-back cumbrous old Hindu epics,
as indicating the Asian eggs out of which European chivalry was hatch'd;
Ticknor's chapters on the Cid, and on the Spanish poems and poets of
Calderon's time. Then always, and, of course, as the superbest poetic
culmination-expression of feudalism, the Shaksperean dramas, in
the attitudes, dialogue, characters, &c., of the princes, lords and
gentlemen, the pervading atmosphere, the implied and express'd standard
of manners, the high port and proud stomach, the regal embroidery of
style, &c.
[22] Of these rapidly-sketch'd hiatuses, the two which seem to me most
serious are, for one, the condition, absence, or perhaps the singular
abeyance, of moral conscientious fibre all through American society;
and, for another, the appaling depletion of women in their powers of
sane athletic maternity, their crowning attribute, and ever making the
woman, in loftiest spheres, superior to the man.
I have sometimes thought, indeed, that the sole avenue and means of a
reconstructed sociology depended, primarily, on a new birth, elevation,
expansion, invigoration of woman, affording, for races to come, (as the
conditions that antedate birth are indispensable,) a perfect motherhood.
Great, great, indeed, far greater than they know, is the sphere of
women. But doubtless the question of such new sociology all goes
together, includes many varied and complex influences and premises, and
the man as well as the woman, and the woman as well as the man.
[23] The question hinted here is one which time only can answer. Must
not the virtue of modern Individualism, continually enlarging, usurping
all, seriously affect, perhaps keep down entirely, in America, the like
of the ancient virtue of Patriotism, the fervid and absorbing love of
general country? I have no doubt myself that the two will merge, and
will mutually profit and brace each other, and that from them a greater
product, a third, will arise. But I feel that at present they and their
oppositions form a serious problem and paradox in the United States.
[24] "SHOOTING NIAGARA."--I was at first roused to much anger and
abuse by this essay from Mr. Carlyle, so insulting to the theory of
America--but happening to think afterwards how I had more than once been
in the like mood, during which his essay was evidently cast, and seen
persons and things in the same light, (indeed some might say there are
signs of the same feeling in these Vistas)--I have since read it again,
not only as a study, expressing as it does certain judgments from the
highest feudal point of view, but have read it with respect as coming
from an earnest soul, and as contributing certain sharp-cutting metallic
grains, which, if not gold or silver, may be good, hard, honest iron.
[25] For fear of mistake, I may as well distinctly specify, as
cheerfully included in the model and standard of these Vistas,
a practical, stirring, worldly, money-making, even materialistic
character. It is undeniable that our farms, stores, offices, dry-goods,
coal and groceries, enginery, cash-accounts, trades, earnings, markets,
&c., should be attended to in earnest, and actively pursued, just as
if they had a real and permanent existence. I perceive clearly that the
extreme business energy, and this almost maniacal appetite for wealth
prevalent in the United States, are parts of amelioration and progress,
indispensably needed to prepare the very results I demand. My theory
includes riches, and the getting of riches, and the amplest products,
power, activity, inventions, movements, &c. Upon them, as upon
substrata, I raise the edifice design'd in these Vistas.
[26] The whole present system of the officering and personnel of the
army and navy of these States, and the spirit and letter of their
trebly-aristocratic rules and regulations, is a monstrous exotic, a
nuisance and revolt, and belong here just as much as orders of nobility,
or the Pope's council of cardinals. I say if the present theory of
our army and navy is sensible and true, then the rest of America is an
unmitigated fraud.
[27] A: After the rest is satiated, all interest culminates in the field
of persons, and never flags there. Accordingly in this field have the
great poets and literatuses signally toil'd. They too, in all ages, all
lands, have been creators, fashioning, making types of men and women,
as Adam and Eve are made in the divine fable. Behold, shaped, bred by
orientalism, feudalism, through their long growth and culmination, and
breeding back in return--(when shall we have an equal series, typical of
democracy?)--behold, commencing in primal Asia, (apparently formulated,
in what beginning we know, in the gods of the mythologies, and coming
down thence,) a few samples out of the countless product, bequeath'd to
the moderns, bequeath'd to America as studies. For the men, Yudishtura,
Rama, Arjuna, Solomon, most of the Old and New Testament characters;
Achilles, Ulysses, Theseus, Prometheus, Hercules, Aeneas, Plutarch's
heroes; the Merlin of Celtic bards; the Cid, Arthur and his knights,
Siegfried and Hagen in the Nibelungen; Roland and Oliver; Roustam in
the Shah-Nemah; and so on to Milton's Satan, Cervantes' Don Quixote,
Shakspere's Hamlet, Richard II., Lear, Marc Antony, &c., and the modern
Faust. These, I say, are models, combined, adjusted to other standards
than America's, but of priceless value to her and hers.
Among women, the goddesses of the Egyptian, Indian and Greek
mythologies, certain Bible characters, especially the Holy Mother;
Cleopatra, Penelope; the portraits of Brunhelde and Chriemhilde in the
Nibelungen; Oriana, Una, &c.; the modern Consuelo, Walter Scott's Jeanie
and Effie Deans, &c., &c. (Yet woman portray'd or outlin'd at her best,
or as perfect human mother, does not hitherto, it seems to me, fully
appear in literature.)
[28] Note, to-day, an instructive, curious spectacle and conflict.
Science, (twin in its fields, of Democracy in its)--Science, testing
absolutely all thoughts, all works, has already burst well upon the
world--a sun, mounting, most illuminating, most glorious--surely never
again to set. But against it, deeply entrench'd, holding possession, yet
remains, (not only through the churches and schools, but by imaginative
literature, and unregenerate poetry,) the fossil theology of
the mythic-materialistic, superstitious, untaught and credulous,
fable-loving, primitive ages of humanity.
[29] It is to the development, identification, and general prevalence
of that fervid comradeship, (the adhesive love, at least rivaling the
amative love hitherto possessing imaginative literature, if not going
beyond it,) that I look for the counterbalance and offset of
our materialistic and vulgar American democracy, and for the
spiritualization thereof. Many will say it is a dream, and will not
follow my inferences: but I confidently expect a time when there will
be seen, running like a half-hid warp through all the myriad audible and
visible worldly interests of America, threads of manly friendship, fond
and loving, pure and sweet, strong and life-long, carried to degrees
hitherto unknown--not only giving tone to individual character, and
making it unprecedently emotional, muscular, heroic, and refined, but
having the deepest relations to general politics. I say democracy infers
such loving comradeship, as its most inevitable twin or counterpart,
without which it will be incomplete, in vain, and incapable of
perpetuating itself.
[30] I am reminded as I write that out of this very conscience, or idea
of conscience, of intense moral right, and in its name and strain'd
construction, the worst fanaticisms, wars, persecutions, murders, &c.,
have yet, in all lands, in the past, been broach'd, and have come to
their devilish fruition. Much is to be said--but I may say here, and
in response, that side by side with the unflagging stimulation of the
elements of religion and conscience must henceforth move with
equal sway, science, absolute reason, and the general proportionate
development of the whole man. These scientific facts, deductions, are
divine too--precious counted parts of moral civilization, and, with
physical health, indispensable to it, to prevent fanaticism. For
abstract religion, I perceive, is easily led astray, ever credulous, and
is capable of devouring, remorseless, like fire and flame. Conscience,
too, isolated from all else, and from the emotional nature, may but
attain the beauty and purity of glacial, snowy ice. We want, for these
States, for the general character, a cheerful, religious fervor, endued
with the ever-present modifications of the human emotions, friendship,
benevolence, with a fair field for scientific inquiry, the right of
individual judgment, and always the cooling influences of material
Nature.
[31] The culmination and fruit of literary artistic expression, and
its final fields of pleasure for the human soul, are in metaphysics,
including the mysteries of the spiritual world, the soul itself, and the
question of the immortal continuation of our identity. In all ages, the
mind of man has brought up here--and always will. Here, at least, of
whatever race or era, we stand on common ground. Applause, too, is
unanimous, antique or modern. Those authors who work well in this
field--though their reward, instead of a handsome percentage, or
royalty, may be but simply the laurel-crown of the victors in the great
Olympic games--will be dearest to humanity, and their works, however
esthetically defective, will be treasur'd forever. The altitude of
literature and poetry has always been religion--and always will be. The
Indian Vedas, the Naçkas of Zoroaster, the Tal mud of the Jews, the Old
Testament, the Gospel of Christ and his disciples, Plato's works, the
Koran of Mohammed, the Edda of Snorro, and so on toward our own day, to
Swedenborg, and to the invaluable contributions of Leibnitz, Kant and
Hegel--these, with such poems only in which, (while singing well
of persons and events, of the passions of man, and the shows of the
material universe,) the religious tone, the consciousness of mystery,
the recognition of the future, of the unknown, of Deity over and under
all, and of the divine purpose, are never absent, but indirectly give
tone to all--exhibit literature's real heights and elevations, towering
up like the great mountains of the earth.
Standing on this ground--the last, the highest, only permanent
ground--and sternly criticising, from it, all works, either of the
literary, or any art, we have peremptorily to dismiss every pretensive
production, however fine its esthetic or intellectual points, which
violates or ignores, or even does not celebrate, the central divine
idea of All, suffusing universe, of eternal trains of purpose, in
the development, by however slow degrees, of the physical, moral, and
spiritual kosmos. I say he has studied, meditated to no profit,
whatever may be his mere erudition, who has not absorbed this simple
consciousness and faith. It is not entirely new--but it is for Democracy
to elaborate it, and look to build upon and expand from it, with
uncompromising reliance. Above the doors of teaching the inscription is
to appear, Though little or nothing can be absolutely known, perceiv'd,
except from a point of view which is evanescent, yet we know at least
one permanency, that Time and Space, in the will of God, furnish
successive chains, completions of material births and beginnings,
solve all discrepancies, fears and doubts, and eventually fulfil
happiness--and that the prophecy of those births, namely spiritual
results, throws the true arch over all teaching, all science. The local
considerations of sin, disease, deformity, ignorance, death, &c., and
their measurement by the superficial mind, and ordinary legislation and
theology, are to be met by science, boldly accepting, promulging this
faith, and planting the seeds of superber laws--of the explication of
the physical universe through the spiritual--and clearing the way for a
religion, sweet and unimpugnable alike to little child or great savan.