To avoid mistake, I would say that I not only commend the study of
this literature, but wish our sources of supply and comparison vastly
enlarged. American students may well derive from all former lands--from
forenoon Greece and Rome, down to the perturb'd mediaeval times,
the Crusades, and so to Italy, the German intellect--all the older
literatures, and all the newer ones--from witty and warlike France,
and markedly, and in many ways, and at many different periods, from the
enterprise and soul of the great Spanish race--bearing ourselves
always courteous, always deferential, indebted beyond measure to the
mother-world, to all its nations dead, as all its nations living--the
offspring, this America of ours, the daughter, not by any means of the
British isles exclusively, but of the continent, and all continents.
Indeed, it is time we should realize and fully fructify those germs we
also hold from Italy, France, Spain, especially in the best imaginative
productions of those lands, which are, in many ways, loftier and subtler
than the English, or British, and indispensable to complete our service,
proportions, education, reminiscences, &c.... The British element
these States hold, and have always held, enormously beyond its fit
proportions. I have already spoken of Shakspere. He seems to me
of astral genius, first class, entirely fit for feudalism. His
contributions, especially to the literature of the passions, are
immense, forever dear to humanity--and his name is always to be
reverenced in America. But there is much in him ever offensive to
democracy. He is not only the tally of feudalism, but I should say
Shakspere is incarnated, uncompromising feudalism, in literature. Then
one seems to detect something in him--I hardly know how to describe
it--even amid the dazzle of his genius; and, in inferior manifestations,
it is found in nearly all leading British authors. (Perhaps we will have
to import the words Snob, Snobbish, &c., after all.) While of the great
poems of Asian antiquity, the Indian epics, the book of Job, the Ionian
Iliad, the unsurpassedly simple, loving, perfect idyls of the life and
death of Christ, in the New Testament, (indeed Homer and the Biblical
utterances intertwine familiarly with us, in the main,) and along down,
of most of the characteristic, imaginative or romantic relics of the
continent, as the Cid, Cervantes' Don Quixote, &c., I should say they
substantially adjust themselves to us, and, far off as they are, accord
curiously with our bed and board to-day, in New York, Washington,
Canada, Ohio, Texas, California--and with our notions, both of
seriousness and of fun, and our standards of heroism, manliness, and
even the democratic requirements--those requirements are not only not
fulfill'd in the Shaksperean productions, but are insulted on every
page.
I add that--while England is among the greatest of lands in political
freedom, or the idea of it, and in stalwart personal character, &c.--the
spirit of English literature is not great, at least is not greatest--and
its products are no models for us. With the exception of Shakspere,
there is no first-class genius in that literature--which, with a truly
vast amount of value, and of artificial beauty, (largely from the
classics,) is almost always material, sensual, not spiritual--almost
always congests, makes plethoric, not frees, expands, dilates--is cold,
anti-democratic, loves to be sluggish and stately, and shows much of
that characteristic of vulgar persons, the dread of saying or doing
something not at all improper in itself, but unconventional, and that
may be laugh'd at. In its best, the sombre pervades it; it is moody,
melancholy, and, to give it its due, expresses, in characters and
plots, those qualities, in an unrival'd manner. Yet not as the black
thunder-storms, and in great normal, crashing passions, of the Greek
dramatists--clearing the air, refreshing afterward, bracing with power;
but as in Hamlet, moping, sick, uncertain, and leaving ever after a
secret taste for the blues, the morbid fascination, the luxury of wo....
I strongly recommend all the young men and young women of the United
States to whom it may be eligible, to overhaul the well-freighted
fleets, the literatures of Italy, Spain, France, Germany, so full of
those elements of freedom, self-possession, gay-heartedness, subtlety,
dilation, needed in preparations for the future of the States. I only
wish we could have really good translations. I rejoice at the feeling
for Oriental researches and poetry, and hope it will go on.