Strange as it may seem, the topmost proof of a race is its own born
poetry. The presence of that, or the absence, each tells its story. As
the flowering rose or lily, as the ripened fruit to a tree, the apple or
the peach, no matter how fine the trunk, or copious or rich the branches
and foliage, here waits _sine qua non_ at last. The stamp of entire and
finished greatness to any nation, to the American Republic among the
rest, must be sternly withheld till it has put what it stands for in the
blossom of original, first-class poems. No imitations will do.
And though no _esthetik_ worthy the present condition or future
certainties of the New World seems to have been outlined in men's minds,
or has been generally called for, or thought needed, I am clear that
until the United States have just such definite and native expressers
in the highest artistic fields, their mere political, geographical,
wealth-forming, and even intellectual eminence, however astonishing
and predominant, will constitute but a more and more expanded and
well-appointed body, and perhaps brain, with little or no soul.
Sugar-coat the grim truth as we may, and ward off with outward plausible
words, denials, explanations, to the mental inward perception of the
land this blank is plain; a barren void exists. For the meanings and
maturer purposes of these States are not the constructing of a new world
of politics merely, and physical comforts for the million, but even more
determinedly, in range with science and the modern, of a new world of
democratic sociology and imaginative literature. If the latter were not
establish'd for the States, to form their only permanent tie and hold,
the first-named would be of little avail.
With the poems of a first-class land are twined, as weft with warp, its
types of personal character, of individuality, peculiar, native, its
own physiognomy, man's and woman's, its own shapes, forms, and manners,
fully justified under the eternal laws of all forms, all manners, all
times. The hour has come for democracy in America to inaugurate
itself in the two directions specified--autochthonic poems and
personalities--born expressers of itself, its spirit alone, to radiate
in subtle ways, not only in art, but the practical and familiar, in the
transactions between employers and employed persons, in business and
wages, and sternly in the army and navy, and revolutionizing them. I
find nowhere a scope profound enough, and radical and objective enough,
either for aggregates or individuals. The thought and identity of
a poetry in America to fill, and worthily fill, the great void, and
enhance these aims, electrifying all and several, involves the essence
and integral facts, real and spiritual, of the whole land, the whole
body. What the great sympathetic is to the congeries of bones, joints,
heart, fluids, nervous system and vitality, constituting, launching
forth in time and space a human being--aye, an immortal soul--such
relation, and no less, holds true poetry to the single personality, or
to the nation.
Here our thirty-eight States stand to-day, the children of past
precedents, and, young as they are, heirs of a very old estate. One or
two points we will consider, out of the myriads presenting themselves.
The feudalism, of the British Islands, illustrated by Shakspere--and by
his legitimate followers, Walter Scott and Alfred Tennyson--with all its
tyrannies, superstitions, evils, had most superb and heroic permeating
veins, poems, manners; even its errors fascinating. It almost seems as
if only that feudalism in Europe, like slavery in our own South, could
outcrop types of tallest, noblest personal character yet--strength and
devotion and love better than elsewhere--invincible courage, generosity,
aspiration, the spines of all. Here is where Shakspere and the others
I have named perform a service incalculably precious to our America.
Politics, literature, and everything else, centers at last in perfect
_personnel_, (as democracy is to find the same as the rest;) and here
feudalism is unrival'd--here the rich and highest-rising lessons it
bequeaths us--a mass of foreign nutriment, which we are to work over,
and popularize and enlarge, and present again in our own growths.
Still there are pretty grave and anxious drawbacks, jeopardies, fears.
Let us give some reflections on the subject, a little fluctuating, but
starting from one central thought, and returning there again. Two or
three curious results may plow up. As in the astronomical laws, the
very power that would seem most deadly and destructive turns out to be
latently conservative of longest, vastest future births and lives.
We will for once briefly examine the just-named authors solely from a
Western point of view. It may be, indeed, that we shall use the sun
of English literature, and the brightest current stars of his system,
mainly as pegs to hang some cogitations on, for home inspection.
As depicter and dramatist of the passions at their stormiest outstretch,
though ranking high, Shakspere (spanning the arch wide enough) is
equaled by several, and excelled by the best old Greeks, (as Eschylus.)
But in portraying mediaeval European lords and barons, the arrogant
port, so dear to the inmost human heart, (pride! pride! dearest,
perhaps, of all--touching us, too, of the States closest of all--closer
than love,) he stands alone, and I do not wonder he so witches the
world.
From first to last, also, Walter Scott and Tennyson, like Shakspere,
exhale that principle of caste which we Americans have come on earth to
destroy. Jefferson's verdict on the Waverley novels was that they turned
and condensed brilliant but entirely false lights and glamours over the
lords, ladies, and aristocratic institutes of Europe, with all
their measureless infamies, and then left the bulk of the suffering,
down-trodden people contemptuously in the shade. Without stopping to
answer this hornet-stinging criticism, or to repay any part of the
debt of thanks I owe, in common with every American, to the noblest,
healthiest, cheeriest romancer that ever lived, I pass on to Tennyson,
his works.
Poetry here of a very high (perhaps the highest) order of verbal
melody, exquisitely clean and pure, and almost always perfumed, like the
tuberose, to an extreme of sweetness--sometimes not, however, but even
then a camellia of the hot-house, never a common flower--the verse
of inside elegance and high-life; and yet preserving amid all its
super-delicatesse a smack of outdoors and outdoor folk. The old Norman
lordhood quality here, too, crossed with that Saxon fiber from which
twain the best current stock of England springs--poetry that revels
above all things in traditions of knights and chivalry, and deeds of
derring-do. The odor of English social life in its highest range--a
melancholy, affectionate, very manly, but dainty breed--pervading
the pages like an invisible scent; the idleness, the traditions, the
mannerisms, the stately _ennui_; the yearning of love, like a spinal
marrow, inside of all; the costumes brocade and satin; the old
houses and furniture--solid oak, no mere veneering--the moldy secrets
everywhere; the verdure, the ivy on the walls, the moat, the English
landscape outside, the buzzing fly in the sun inside the window pane.
Never one democratic page; nay, not a line, not a word; never free and
_naïve_ poetry, but involved, labored, quite sophisticated--even when
the theme is ever so simple or rustic, (a shell, a bit of sedge, the
commonest love-passage between a lad and lass,) the handling of the
rhyme all showing the scholar and conventional gentleman; showing the
laureate too, the _attaché_ of the throne, and most excellent, too;
nothing better through the volumes than the dedication "to the Queen"
at the beginning, and the other fine dedication, "these to his memory"
(Prince Albert's,) preceding "Idylls of the King."
Such for an off-hand summary of the mighty three that now, by the women,
men, and young folk of the fifty millions given these States by their
late census, have been and are more read than all others put together.
We hear it said, both of Tennyson and another current leading literary
illustrator of Great Britain, Carlyle--as of Victor Hugo in France--that
not one of them is personally friendly or admirant toward America;
indeed, quite the reverse. _N'importe_. That they (and more good minds
than theirs) cannot span the vast revolutionary arch thrown by the
United States over the centuries, fixed in the present, launched to
the endless future; that they cannot stomach the high-life-below-stairs
coloring all our poetic and genteel social status so far--the
measureless viciousness of the great radical Republic, with its
ruffianly nominations and elections; its loud, ill-pitched voice,
utterly regardless whether the verb agrees with the nominative; its
fights, errors, eructations, repulsions, dishonesties, audacities;
those fearful and varied and long-continued storm and stress stages (so
offensive to the well-regulated college-bred mind) wherewith Nature,
history, and time block out nationalities more powerful than the
past, and to upturn it and press on to the future;--that they cannot
understand and fathom all this, I say, is it to be wondered at?
Fortunately, the gestation of our thirty-eight empires (and plenty more
to come) proceeds on its course, on scales of area and velocity immense
and absolute as the globe, and, like the globe itself, quite oblivious
even of great poets and thinkers. But we can by no means afford to be
oblivious of them.
The same of feudalism, its castles, courts, etiquettes, personalities.
However they, or the spirits of them hovering in the air, might scowl
and glower at such removes as current Kansas or Kentucky life and forms,
the latter may by no means repudiate or leave out the former. Allowing
all the evil that it did, we get, here and today, a balance of good out
of its reminiscence almost beyond price.
Am I content, then, that the general interior chyle of our republic
should be supplied and nourish'd by wholesale from foreign and
antagonistic sources such as these? Let me answer that question briefly:
Years ago I thought Americans ought to strike out separate, and have
expressions of their own in highest literature. I think so still,
and more decidedly than ever. But those convictions are now strongly
temper'd by some additional points, (perhaps the results of advancing
age, or the reflection of invalidism.) I see that this world of the
West, as part of all, fuses inseparably with the East, and with all,
as time does--the ever new yet old, old human race--"the same subject
continued," as the novels of our grandfathers had it for chapter-heads.
If we are not to hospitably receive and complete the inaugurations of
the old civilizations, and change their small scale to the largest,
broadest scale, what on earth are we for?
The currents of practical business in America, the rude, coarse,
tussling facts of our lives, and all their daily experiences, need just
the precipitation and tincture of this entirely different fancy world
of lulling, contrasting, even feudalistic, anti-republican poetry and
romance. On the enormous outgrowth of our unloos'd individualities,
and the rank, self-assertion of humanity here, may well fall these
grace-persuading, _recherché_ influences. We first require that
individuals and communities shall be free; then surely comes a time
when it is requisite that they shall not be too free. Although to such
results in the future I look mainly for a great poetry native to us,
these importations till then will have to be accepted, such as they are,
and thankful they are no worse. The inmost spiritual currents of the
present time curiously revenge and check their own compell'd tendency
to democracy, and absorption in it, by mark'd leanings to the past--by
reminiscences in poems, plots, operas, novels, to a far-off, contrary,
deceased world, as if they dreaded the great vulgar gulf-tides of
to-day. Then what has been fifty centuries growing, working in, and
accepted as crowns and apices for our kind, is not going to be pulled
down and discarded in a hurry.
It is, perhaps, time we paid our respects directly to the honorable
party, the real object of these preambles. But we must make
_reconnaissance_ a little further still. Not the least part of our
lesson were to realize the curiosity and interest of friendly foreign
experts,[35] and how our situation looks to them. "American poetry,"
says the London "Times,"[36] is the poetry of apt pupils, but it is
afflicted from first to last with a fatal want of raciness. Bryant has
been long passed as a poet by Professor Longfellow; but in Longfellow,
with all his scholarly grace and tender feeling, the defect is more
apparent than it was in Bryant. Mr. Lowell can overflow with American
humor when politics inspire his muse; but in the realm of pure poetry he
is no more American than a Newdigate prize-man. Joaquin Miller's verse
has fluency and movement and harmony, but as for the thought, his songs
of the sierras might as well have been written in Holland.
Unless in a certain very slight contingency, the "Times" says: "American
verse, from its earliest to its latest stages, seems an exotic, with an
exuberance of gorgeous blossom, but no principle of reproduction. That
is the very note and test of its inherent want. Great poets are tortured
and massacred by having their flowers of fancy gathered and gummed down
in the _hortus siccus_ of an anthology. American poets show better in
an anthology than in the collected volumes of their works. Like their
audience they have been unable to resist the attraction of the vast
orbit of English literature. They may talk of the primeval forest, but
it would generally be very hard from internal evidence to detect that
they were writing on the banks of the Hudson rather than on those of the
Thames. ....In fact, they have caught the English tone and air and mood
only too faithfully, and are accepted by the superficially cultivated
English intelligence as readily as if they were English born. Americans
themselves confess to a certain disappointment that a literary curiosity
and intelligence so diffused [as in the United States] have not taken
up English literature at the point at which America has received it, and
carried it forward and developed it with an independent energy. But like
reader like poet. Both show the effects of having come into an estate
they have not earned. A nation of readers has required of its poets a
diction and symmetry of form equal to that of an old literature like
that of Great Britain, which is also theirs. No ruggedness, however
racy, would be tolerated by circles which, however superficial their
culture, read Byron and Tennyson."
The English critic, though a gentleman and a scholar, and friendly
withal, is evidently not altogether satisfied, (perhaps he is jealous,)
and winds up by saying: "For the English language to have been enriched
with a national poetry which was not English but American, would have
been a treasure beyond price." With which, as whet and foil, we shall
proceed to ventilate more definitely certain no doubt willful opinions.
Leaving unnoticed at present the great masterpieces of the antique, or
anything from the middle ages, the prevailing flow of poetry for the
last fifty or eighty years, and now at its height, has been and is (like
the music) an expression of mere surface melody, within narrow limits,
and yet, to give it its due, perfectly satisfying to the demands of the
ear, of wondrous charm, of smooth and easy delivery, and the triumph of
technical art. Above all things it is fractional and select. It shrinks
with aversion from the sturdy, the universal, and the democratic.
The poetry of the future, (a phrase open to sharp criticism, and not
satisfactory to me, but significant, and I will use it)--the poetry of
the future aims at the free expression of emotion, (which means far, far
more than appears at first,) and to arouse and initiate, more than to
define or finish. Like all modern tendencies, it has direct or indirect
reference continually to the reader, to you or me, to the central
identity of everything, the mighty Ego. (Byron's was a vehement dash,
with plenty of impatient democracy, but lurid and introverted amid all
its magnetism; not at all the fitting, lasting song of a grand, secure,
free, sunny race.) It is more akin, likewise, to outside life and
landscape, (returning mainly to the antique feeling,) real sun and gale,
and woods and shores--to the elements themselves--not sitting at ease in
parlor or library listening to a good tale of them, told in good rhyme.
Character, a feature far above style or polish--a feature not absent at
any time, but now first brought to the fore--gives predominant stamp to
advancing poetry. Its born sister, music, already responds to the same
influences. "The music of the present, Wagner's, Gounod's, even the
later Verdi's, all tends toward this free expression of poetic emotion,
and demands a vocalism totally unlike that required for Rossini's
splendid roulades, or Bellini's suave melodies."
Is there not even now, indeed, an evolution, a departure from the
masters? Venerable and unsurpassable after their kind as are the old
works, and always unspeakably precious as studies, (for Americans
more than any other people,) is it too much to say that by the
shifted combinations of the modern mind the whole underlying theory
of first-class verse has changed? "Formerly, during the period term'd
classic," says Sainte-Beuve, "when literature was govern'd by recognized
rules, he was considered the best poet who had composed the most perfect
work, the most beautiful poem, the most intelligible, the most
agreeable to read, the most complete in every respect,--the Aeneid, the
Gerusalemme, a fine tragedy. To-day, something else is wanted. For us
the greatest poet is he who in his works most stimulates the reader's
imagination and reflection, who excites him the most himself to poetize.
The greatest poet is not he who has done the best; it is he who suggests
the most; he, not all of whose meaning is at first obvious, and who
leaves you much to desire, to explain, to study, much to complete in
your turn."
The fatal defects our American singers labor under are subordination of
spirit, an absence of the concrete and of real patriotism, and in excess
that modern esthetic contagion a queer friend of mine calls the _beauty
disease_. "The immoderate taste for beauty and art," says Charles
Baudelaire, "leads men into monstrous excesses. In minds imbued with a
frantic greed for the beautiful, all the balances of truth and justice
disappear. There is a lust, a disease of the art faculties, which eats
up the moral like a cancer."
Of course, by our plentiful verse-writers there is plenty of service
perform'd, of a kind. Nor need we go far for a tally. We see, in
every polite circle, a class of accomplished, good-natured persons,
("society," in fact, could not get on without them,) fully eligible for
certain problems, times, and duties--to mix egg-nog, to mend the broken
spectacles, to decide whether the stewed eels shall precede the sherry
or the sherry the stewed eels, to eke out Mrs. A. B.'s parlor-tableaux
with monk, Jew, lover, Puck, Prospero, Caliban, or what not, and to
generally contribute and gracefully adapt their flexibilities and
talents, in those ranges, to the world's service. But for real crises,
great needs and pulls, moral or physical, they might as well have never
been born.
Or the accepted notion of a poet would appear to be a sort of male
odalisque, singing or piano-playing a kind of spiced ideas, second-hand
reminiscences, or toying late hours at entertainments, in rooms stifling
with fashionable scent. I think I haven't seen a new-published, healthy,
bracing, simple lyric in ten years. Not long ago, there were verses in
each of three fresh monthlies, from leading authors, and in every one
the whole central _motif_ (perfectly serious) was the melancholiness
of a marriageable young woman who didn't get a rich husband, but a poor
one!
Besides its tonic and _al fresco_ physiology, relieving such as this,
the poetry of the future will take on character in a more important
respect. Science, having extirpated the old stock-fables and
superstitions, is clearing a field for verse, for all the arts, and
even for romance, a hundred-fold ampler and more wonderful, with the new
principles behind. Republicanism advances over the whole world. Liberty,
with Law by her side, will one day be paramount--will at any rate be
the central idea. Then only--for all the splendor and beauty of what has
been, or the polish of what is--then only will the true poets appear,
and the true poems. Not the satin and patchouly of today, not the
glorification of the butcheries and wars of the past, nor any fight
between Deity on one side and somebody else on the other--not Milton,
not even Shakspere's plays, grand as they are. Entirely different and
hitherto unknown Classes of men, being authoritatively called for in
imaginative literature, will certainly appear. What is hitherto most
lacking, perhaps most absolutely indicates the future. Democracy has
been hurried on through time by measureless tides and winds, resistless
as the revolution of the globe, and as far-reaching and rapid. But in
the highest walks of art it has not yet had a single representative
worthy of it anywhere upon the earth.
Never had real bard a task more fit for sublime ardor and genius than
to sing worthily the songs these States have already indicated. Their
origin, Washington, '76, the picturesqueness of old times, the war of
1812 and the sea-fights; the incredible rapidity of movement and breadth
of area--to fuse and compact the South and North, the East and West,
to express the native forms, situations, scenes, from Montauk to
California, and from the Saguenay to the Rio Grande--the working out on
such gigantic scales, and with such a swift and mighty play of changing
light and shade, of the great problems of man and freedom,--how far
ahead of the stereotyped plots, or gem-cutting, or tales of love,
or wars of mere ambition! Our history is so full of spinal, modern,
germinal subjects--one above all. What the ancient siege of Illium, and
the puissance of Hector's and Agamemnon's warriors proved to Hellenic
art and literature, and all art and literature since, may prove the
war of attempted secession of 1861-'65 to the future esthetics, drama,
romance, poems of the United States.
Nor could utility itself provide anything more practically serviceable
to the hundred millions who, a couple of generations hence, will inhabit
within the limits just named, than the permeation of a sane, sweet,
autochthonous national poetry--must I say of a kind that does not now
exist? but which, I fully believe, will in time be supplied on scales as
free as Nature's elements. (It is acknowledged that we of the States
are the most materialistic and money-making people ever known. My own
theory, while fully accepting this, is that we are the most emotional,
spiritualistic, and poetry-loving people also.)
Infinite are the new and orbic traits waiting to be launch'd forth in
the firmament that is, and is to be, America. Lately, I have wonder'd
whether the last meaning of this cluster of thirty-eight States is not
only practical fraternity among themselves--the only real union, (much
nearer its accomplishment, too, than appears on the surface)--but for
fraternity over the whole globe--that dazzling, pensive dream of ages!
Indeed, the peculiar glory of our lands, I have come to see, or expect
to see, not in their geographical or republican greatness, nor wealth or
products, nor military or naval power, nor special, eminent names in any
department, to shine with, or outshine, foreign special names in similar
departments,--but more and more in a vaster, saner, more surrounding
Comradeship, uniting closer and closer not only the American States, but
all nations, and all humanity. That, O poets! is not that a theme worth
chanting, striving for? Why not fix your verses henceforth to the
gauge of the round globe? the whole race? Perhaps the most illustrious
culmination of the modern may thus prove to be a signal growth of
joyous, more exalted bards of adhesiveness, identically one in soul, but
contributed by every nation, each after its distinctive kind. Let us,
audacious, start it. Let the diplomats, as ever, still deeply plan,
seeking advantages, proposing treaties between governments, and to bind
them, on paper: what I seek is different, simpler. I would inaugurate
from America, for this purpose, new formulas--international poems. I
have thought that the invisible root out of which the poetry deepest in,
and dearest to, humanity grows, is Friendship. I have thought that both
in patriotism and song (even amid their grandest shows past) we have
adhered too long to petty limits, and that the time has come to enfold
the world.
Not only is the human and artificial world we have establish'd in the
West a radical departure from anything hitherto known--not only men and
politics, and all that goes with them--but Nature itself, in the main
sense, its construction, is different. The same old font of type, of
course, but set up to a text never composed or issued before. For Nature
consists not only in itself, objectively, but at least just as much in
its subjective reflection from the person, spirit, age, looking at
it, in the midst of it, and absorbing it--faithfully sends back the
characteristic beliefs of the time or individual--takes, and readily
gives again, the physiognomy of any nation or literature--falls like a
great elastic veil on a face, or like the molding plaster on a statue.
What is Nature? What were the elements, the invisible backgrounds and
eidolons of it, to Homer's heroes, voyagers, gods? What all through the
wanderings of Virgil's Aeneas? Then to Shakspere's characters--Hamlet,
Lear, the English-Norman kings, the Romans? What was Nature to Rousseau,
to Voltaire, to the German Goethe in his little classical court gardens?
In those presentments in Tennyson (see the "Idylls of the King"--what
sumptuous, perfumed, arras-and-gold Nature, inimitably described, better
than any, fit for princes and knights and peerless ladies--wrathful or
peaceful, just the same--Vivien and Merlin in their strange dalliance,
or the death-float of Elaine, or Geraint and the long journey of his
disgraced Enid and himself through the wood, and the wife all day
driving the horses,) as in all the great imported art-works, treatises
systems, from Lucretius down, there is a constantly lurking often
pervading something, that will have to be eliminated, as not only
unsuited to modern democracy and science in America, but insulting to
them, and disproved by them.[37]
Still, the rule and demesne of poetry will always be not the exterior,
but interior; not the macrocosm, but microcosm; not Nature, but Man. I
haven't said anything about the imperative need of a race of giant bards
in the future, to hold up high to eyes of land and race the eternal
antiseptic models, and to dauntlessly confront greed, injustice, and all
forms of that wiliness and tyranny whose roots never die--(my opinion
is, that after all the rest is advanced, _that_ is what first-class
poets are for; as, to their days and occasions, the Hebrew lyrists,
Roman Juvenal, and doubtless the old singers of India, and the British
Druids)--to counteract dangers, immensest ones, already looming in
America--measureless corruption in politics--what we call religion,
a mere mask of wax or lace;--for _ensemble_, that most cankerous,
offensive of all earth's shows--a vast and varied community, prosperous
and fat with wealth of money and products and business ventures--plenty
of mere intellectuality too--and then utterly without the sound,
prevailing, moral and esthetic health-action beyond all the money and
mere intellect of the world.
Is it a dream of mine that, in times to come, west, south, east, north,
will silently, surely arise a race of such poets, varied, yet one
in soul--nor only poets, and of the best, but newer, larger
prophets--larger than Judea's, and more passionate--to meet and
penetrate those woes, as shafts of light the darkness?
As I write, the last fifth of the nineteenth century is enter'd upon,
and will soon be waning. Now, and for a long time to come, what the
United States most need, to give purport, definiteness, reason why, to
their unprecedented material wealth, industrial products, education
by rote merely, great populousness and intellectual activity, is the
central, spinal reality, (or even the idea of it,) of such a democratic
band of-native-born-and-bred teachers, artists, _littérateurs_, tolerant
and receptive of importations, but entirely adjusted to the West, to
ourselves, to our own days, combinations, differences, superiorities.
Indeed, I am fond of thinking that the whole series of concrete and
political triumphs of the Republic are mainly as bases and preparations
for half a dozen future poets, ideal personalities, referring not to a
special class, but to the entire people, four or five millions of square
miles.
Long, long are the processes of the development of a nationality Only
to the rapt vision does the seen become the prophecy of the unseen.[38]
Democracy, so far attending only to the real, is not for the real only,
but the grandest ideal--to justify the modern by that, and not only to
equal, but to become by that superior to the past.
On a comprehensive summing up of the processes and present and hitherto
condition of the United States, with reference to their future, and
the indispensable precedents to it, my point, below all surfaces, and
subsoiling them, is, that the bases and prerequisites of a leading
nationality are, first, at all hazards, freedom, worldly wealth and
products on the largest and most varied scale, common education and
intercommunication, and, in general, the passing through of just the
stages and crudities we have passed or are passing through in the United
States.
Then, perhaps, as weightiest factor of the whole business, and of the
main outgrowths of the future, it remains to be definitely avow'd
that the native-born middle-class population of quite all the United
States--the average of farmers and mechanics everywhere--the real,
though latent and silent bulk of America, city or country, presents a
magnificent mass of material, never before equal'd on earth. It is this
material, quite unexpress'd by literature or art, that in every respect
insures the future of the republic. During the secession war I was with
the armies, and saw the rank and file, north and south, and studied them
for four years. I have never had the least doubt about the country in
its essential future since.
Meantime, we can (perhaps) do no better than to saturate ourselves with,
and continue to give imitations, yet awhile, of the esthetic models,
supplies, of that past and of those lands we spring from. Those wondrous
stores, reminiscences, floods, currents! Let them flow on, flow hither
freely. And let the sources be enlarged, to include not only the works
of British origin, as now, but stately and devout Spain, courteous
France, profound Germany, the manly Scandinavian lands, Italy's art
race, and always the mystic Orient. Remembering that at present, and
doubtless long ahead, a certain humility would well become us. The
course through time of highest civilization, does it not wait the
first glimpse of our contribution to its kosmic train of poems,
bibles, first-class structures, perpetuities--Egypt and Palestine and
India--Greece and Rome and mediaeval Europe--and so onward? The shadowy
procession is not a meagre one, and the standard not a low one. All that
is mighty in our kind seems to have already trod the road. Ah, never may
America forget her thanks and reverence for samples, treasures such
as these--that other life-blood, inspiration, sunshine, hourly in use
to-day, all days, forever, through her broad demesne!
All serves our New World progress, even the bafflers, head-winds,
cross-tides. Through many perturbations and squalls, and much backing
and filling, the ship, upon the whole, makes unmistakably for her
destination. Shakspere has served, and serves, may-be, the best of any.
For conclusion, a passing thought, a contrast, of him who, in my
opinion, continues and stands for the Shaksperean cultus at the present
day among all English-writing peoples--of Tennyson, his poetry. I find
it impossible, as I taste the sweetness of those lines, to escape the
flavor, the conviction, the lush-ripening culmination, and last honey of
decay (I dare not call it rottenness) of that feudalism which the
mighty English dramatist painted in all the splendors of its noon and
afternoon. And how they are chanted--both poets! Happy those kings and
nobles to be so sung, so told! To run their course--to get their deeds
and shapes in lasting pigments--the very pomp and dazzle of the sunset!
Meanwhile, democracy waits the coming of its bards in silence and in
twilight--but 'tis the twilight of the dawn.
Notes:
[35] A few years ago I saw the question, "Has America produced any great
poem?" announced as prize-subject for the competition of some university
in Northern Europe. I saw the item in a foreign paper and made a note
of it; but being taken down with paralysis, and prostrated for a long
season, the matter slipp'd away, and I have never been able since to get
hold of any essay presented for the prize, or report of the discussion,
nor to learn for certain whether there was any essay or discussion,
nor can I now remember the place. It may have been Upsala, or possibly
Heidelberg. Perhaps some German or Scandinavian can give particulars. I
think it was in 1872.
[36] In a long and prominent editorial, at the time, on the death of
William Cullen Bryant.
[37] Whatever may be said of the few principal poems--or their best
passages--it is certain that the overwhelming mass of poetic works,
as now absorb'd into human character, exerts a certain constipating,
repressing, indoor, and artificial influence, impossible to
elude--seldom or never that freeing, dilating, joyous one, with which
uncramp'd Nature works on every individual without exception.
[38] Is there not such a thing as the philosophy of American history and
politics? And if so, what is it?... Wise men say there are two sets
of wills to nations and to persons--one set that acts and works
from explainable motives--from teaching, intelligence, judgment,
circumstance, caprice, emulation, greed, etc.--and then another set,
perhaps deep, hidden, unsuspected, yet often more potent than the
first, refusing to be argued with, rising as it were out of abysses,
resistlessly urging on speakers, doers, communities, unwitting to
themselves--the poet to his fieriest words--the race to pursue its
loftiest ideal. Indeed, the paradox of a nation's life and career, with
all its wondrous contradictions, can probably only be explain'd from
these two wills, sometimes conflicting, each operating in its sphere,
combining in races or in persons, and producing strangest results.
Let us hope there is (indeed, can there be any doubt there is?) this
great unconscious and abysmic second will also running through the
average nationality and career of America. Let us hope that, amid all
the dangers and defections of the present, and through all the processes
of the conscious will, it alone is the permanent and sovereign force,
destined to carry on the New World to fulfil its destinies in the
future--to resolutely pursue those destinies, age upon age; to build,
far, far beyond its past vision, present thought; to form and fashion,
and for the general type, men and women more noble, more athletic than
the world has yet seen; to gradually, firmly blend, from all the States,
with all varieties, a friendly, happy, free, religious nationality--a
nationality not only the richest, most inventive, most productive and
materialistic the world has yet known, but compacted indissolubly, and
out of whose ample and solid bulk, and giving purpose and finish to it,
conscience, morals, and all the spiritual attributes, shall surely rise,
like spires above some group of edifices, firm-footed on the earth, yet
scaling space and heaven.
Great as they are, and greater far to be, the United States, too, are
but a series of steps in the eternal process of creative thought. And
here is, to my mind, their final justification, and certain perpetuity.
There is in that sublime process, in the laws of the universe--and,
above all, in the moral law--something that would make unsatisfactory,
and even vain and contemptible, all the triumphs of war, the gains of
peace, and the proudest worldly grandeur of all the nations that
have ever existed, or that (ours included) now exist, except that we
constantly see, through all their worldly career, however struggling and
blind and lame, attempts, by all ages, all peoples, according to their
development, to reach, to press, to progress on, and ever farther on, to
more and more advanced ideals.
The glory of the republic of the United States, in my opinion, is to be
that, emerging in the light of the modern and the splendor of science,
and solidly based on the past, it is to cheerfully range itself, and its
politics are henceforth to come, under those universal laws, and embody
them, and carry them out, to serve them. And as only that individual
becomes truly great who understands well that, while complete in himself
in a certain sense, he is but a part of the divine, eternal scheme, and
whose special life and laws are adjusted to move in harmonious relations
with the general laws of Nature, and especially with the moral law, the
deepest and highest of all, and the last vitality of man or state--so
the United States may only become the greatest and the most continuous,
by understanding well their harmonious relations with entire humanity
and history, and all their laws and progress, sublimed with the creative
thought of Deity, through all time, past, present, and future. Thus will
they expand to the amplitude of their destiny, and become illustrations
and culminating parts of the kosmos, and of civilization.
No more considering the States as an incident, or series of incidents,
however vast, coming accidentally along the path of time, and shaped
by casual emergencies as they happen to arise, and the mere result of
modern improvements, vulgar and lucky, ahead of other nations and times,
I would finally plant, as seeds, these thoughts or speculations in the
growth of our republic--that it is the deliberate culmination and result
of all the past--that here, too, as in all departments of the universe,
regular laws (slow and sure in planting, slow and sure in ripening) have
controll'd and govern'd, and will yet control and govern; and that those
laws can no more be baffled or steer'd clear of, or vitiated, by chance,
or any fortune or opposition, than the laws of winter and summer, or
darkness and light.
The summing up of the tremendous moral and military perturbations of
1861-'65, and their results--and indeed of the entire hundred years of
the past of our national experiment, from its inchoate movement down
to the present day (1780-1881)--is, that they all now launch the United
States fairly forth, consistently with the entirety of civilization and
humanity, and in main sort the representative of them, leading the van,
leading the fleet of the modern and democratic, on the seas and voyages
of the future.
And the real history of the United States--starting from that great
convulsive struggle for unity, the secession war, triumphantly
concluded, and _the South_ victorious after all--is only to be written
at the remove of hundreds, perhaps a thousand, years hence.