Poetry (I am clear) is eligible of something far more ripen'd and ample,
our lands and pending days, than it has yet produced from any utterance
old or new. Modern or new poetry, too, (viewing or challenging it with
severe criticism,) is largely a-void--while the very cognizance, or even
suspicion of that void, and the need of filling it, proves a certainty
of the hidden and waiting supply. Leaving other lands and languages to
speak for themselves, we can abruptly but deeply suggest it best from
our own--going first to oversea illustrations, and standing on them.
Think of Byron, Burns, Shelley, Keats, (even first-raters, "the brothers
of the radiant summit," as William O'Connor calls them,) as having done
only their precursory and 'prentice work, and all their best and real
poems being left yet unwrought, untouch'd. Is it difficult to imagine
ahead of us and them, evolv'd from them, poesy completer far than any
they themselves fulfill'd? One has in his eye and mind some very large,
very old, entirely sound and vital tree or vine, like certain hardy,
ever-fruitful specimens in California and Canada, or down in
Mexico, (and indeed in all lands) beyond the chronological
records--illustrations of growth, continuity, power, amplitude
and _exploitation_, almost beyond statement, but proving fact and
possibility, outside of argument.
Perhaps, indeed, the rarest and most blessed quality of transcendent
noble poetry--as of law, and of the profoundest wisdom and
estheticism--is, (I would suggest,) from sane, completed, vital, capable
old age.
The final proof of song or personality is a sort of matured, accreted,
superb, evoluted, almost divine, impalpable diffuseness and atmosphere
or invisible magnetism, dissolving and embracing all--and not any
special achievement of passion, pride, metrical form, epigram, plot,
thought, or what is call'd beauty. The bud of the rose or the half-blown
flower is beautiful, of course, but only the perfected bloom or apple
or finish'd wheat-head is beyond the rest. Completed fruitage like
this comes (in my opinion) to a grand age, in man or woman, through an
essentially sound continuated physiology and psychology (both important)
and is the culminating glorious aureole of all and several preceding.
Like the tree or vine just mention'd, it stands at last in a beauty,
power and productiveness of its own, above all others, and of a sort and
style uniting all criticisms, proofs and adherences.
Let us diversify the matter a little by portraying some of the American
poets from our own point of view.
Longfellow, reminiscent, polish'd, elegant, with the air of finest
conventional library, picture-gallery or parlor, with ladies and
gentlemen in them, and plush and rosewood, and ground-glass lamps, and
mahogany and ebony furniture, and a silver inkstand and scented satin
paper to write on.
Whittier stands for morality (not in any all-accepting philosophic or
Hegelian sense, but) filter'd through a Puritanical or Quaker filter--is
incalculably valuable as a genuine utterance, (and the finest,)--with
many local and Yankee and _genre_ bits--all hued with anti-slavery
coloring--(the _genre_ and anti-slavery contributions all precious--all
help.) Whittier's is rather a grand figure, but pretty lean and
ascetic--no Greek-not universal and composite enough (don't try--don't
wish to be) for ideal Americanism. Ideal Americanism would take the
Greek spirit and law, and democratize and scientize and (thence) truly
Christianize them for the whole, the globe, all history, all ranks
and lands, all facts, all good and bad. (Ah this _bad_--this
nineteen-twentieths of us all! What a stumbling-block it remains for
poets and metaphysicians--what a chance (the strange, clear-as-ever
inscription on the old dug-up tablet) it offers yet for being
translated--what can be its purpose in the God-scheme of this universe,
and all?)
Then William Cullen Bryant--meditative, serious, from first to last
tending to threnodies--his genius mainly lyrical--when reading his
pieces who could expect or ask for more magnificent ones than such
as "The Battle-Field," and "A Forest Hymn"? Bryant, unrolling,
prairie-like, notwithstanding his mountains and lakes--moral enough
(yet worldly and conventional)--a naturalist, pedestrian, gardener
and fruiter--well aware of books, but mixing to the last in cities and
society. I am not sure but his name ought to lead the list of American
bards. Years ago I thought Emerson pre eminent (and as to the last
polish and intellectual cuteness may-be I think so still)--but, for
reasons, I have been gradually tending to give the file-leading place
for American native poesy to W. C. B.
Of Emerson I have to confirm my already avow'd opinion regarding his
highest bardic and personal attitude. Of the galaxy of the past--of Poe,
Halleck, Mrs. Sigourney, Allston, Willis, Dana,
John Pierpont, W. G. Simms, Robert Sands, Drake, Hillhouse, Theodore
Fay, Margaret Fuller, Epes Sargent, Boker, Paul Hayne, Lanier, and
others, I fitly in essaying such a theme as this, and reverence for
their memories, may at least give a heart-benison on the list of their
names.
Time and New World humanity having the venerable resemblances more than
anything else, and being "the same subject continued," just here in
1890, one gets a curious nourishment and lift (I do) from all those
grand old veterans, Bancroft, Kossuth, von Moltke--and such typical
specimen-reminiscences as Sophocles and Goethe, genius, health, beauty
of person, riches, rank, renown and length of days, all combining and
centering in one case.
Above everything, what could humanity and literature do without the
mellow, last-justifying, averaging, bringing-up of many, many years--a
great old age amplified? Every really first-class production has likely
to pass through the crucial tests of a generation, perhaps several
generations. Lord Bacon says the first sight of any work really new
and first-rate in beauty and originality always arouses something
disagreeable and repulsive. Voltaire term'd the Shaksperean works "a
huge dunghill"; Hamlet he described (to the Academy, whose members
listen'd with approbation) as "the dream of a drunken savage, with a
few flashes of beautiful thoughts." And not the Ferney sage alone;
the orthodox judges and law-givers of France, such as La Harpe, J. L.
Geoffrey, and Chateaubriand, either join'd in Voltaire's verdict, or
went further. Indeed the classicists and regulars there still hold to
it. The lesson is very significant in all departments. People resent
anything new as a personal insult. When umbrellas were first used in
England, those who carried them were hooted and pelted so furiously that
their lives were endanger'd. The same rage encounter'd the attempt in
theatricals to perform women's parts by real women, which was publicly
consider'd disgusting and outrageous. Byron thought Pope's verse
incomparably ahead of Homer and Shakspere. One of the prevalent
objections, in the days of Columbus was, the learn'd men boldly asserted
that if a ship should reach India she would never get back again,
because the rotundity of the globe would present a kind of mountain, up
which it would be impossible to sail even with the most favorable wind.
"Modern poets," says a leading Boston journal, "enjoy longevity.
Browning lived to be seventy-seven. Wordsworth, Bryant, Emerson, and
Longfellow were old men. Whittier, Tennyson, and Walt Whitman still
live."
Started out by that item on Old Poets and Poetry for chyle to inner
American sustenance--I have thus gossipp'd about it all, and treated it
from my own point of view, taking the privilege of rambling wherever the
talk carried me. Browning is lately dead; Bryant, Emerson and Longfellow
have not long pass'd away; and yes, Whittier and Tennyson remain, over
eighty years old--the latter having sent out not long since a fresh
volume, which the English-speaking Old and New Worlds are yet reading. I
have already put on record my notions of T. and his effusions: they are
very attractive and flowery to me--but flowers, too, are at least as
profound as anything; and by common consent T. is settled as the poetic
cream-skimmer of our age's melody, _ennui_ and polish--a verdict in
which I agree, and should say that nobody (not even Shakspere)
goes deeper in those exquisitely touch'd and half-hidden hints and
indirections left like faint perfumes in the crevices of his lines. Of
Browning I don't know enough to say much; he must be studied deeply out,
too, and quite certainly repays the trouble--but I am old and indolent,
and cannot study (and never did.)
Grand as to-day's accumulative fund of poetry is, there is certainly
something unborn, not yet come forth, different from anything
now formulated in any verse, or contributed by the past in any
land--something waited for, craved, hitherto non-express'd. What it
will be, and how, no one knows. It will probably have to prove itself by
itself and its readers. One thing, it must run through entire humanity
(this new word and meaning Solidarity has arisen to us moderns) twining
all lands like a divine thread, stringing all beads, pebbles or gold,
from God and the soul, and like God's dynamics and sunshine illustrating
all and having reference to all. From anything like a cosmical point of
view, the entirety of imaginative literature's themes and results as
we get them to-day seems painfully narrow. All that has been put in
statement, tremendous as it is, what is it compared with the vast fields
and values and varieties left unreap'd? Of our own country, the splendid
races North or South, and especially of the Western and Pacific regions,
it sometimes seems to me their myriad noblest Homeric and Biblic
elements are all untouch'd, left as if ashamed of, and only certain very
minor occasional _delirium tremens_ glints studiously sought and put in
print, in short tales, "poetry" or books.
I give these speculations, or notions, in all their audacity, for the
comfort of thousands--perhaps a majority of ardent minds, women's and
young men's--who stand in awe and despair before the immensity of suns
and stars already in the firmament. Even in the Iliad and Shakspere
there is (is there not?) a certain humiliation produced to us by the
absorption of them, unless we sound in equality, or above them,
the songs due our own democratic era and surroundings, and the full
assertion of ourselves. And in vain (such is my opinion) will
America seek successfully to tune any superb national song unless the
heart-strings of the people start it from their own breasts--to be
return'd and echoed there again.